Obama’s European Legacy: The Continent’s still recovering from the mistakes that he made - Main contents

Tens of thousands of Germans cheered at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate last week when Barack Obama appeared at an open-air event sponsored by an association of protestant churches.

For a faraway television viewer, this thought came to mind: Could Mr. Obama (or the beatific crowd, or Angela Merkel, his beaming co-star) have read what Joschka Fischer, with remarkable fierceness, said about the failure of the Obama presidency? Not likely.

According to Germany’s former foreign minister, the White House was responsible for “a tragic moment in early 21st-century American history when there had not only been a bad U.S. Iraqi intervention, but a bad U.S, nonintervention in Syria.”

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This past weekend, Han ten Broeke, president of the Dutch Parliament’s armed-services commission—and no admirer of Mr. Trump—observed that the new president’s realignment with the Saudis and other Sunnis in the Middle East put an end to the Obama period’s “strategic ambivalence.” This ambivalence, he said, “was not a good idea for many in the world looking for American leadership and clarity.”

Unfair to Mr. Obama, considering the lurching foreign-policy influence of his successor? Contrast the former president’s Russia strategy, described in a 2014 New York Times article as isolating President Vladimir Putin while turning his country into a pariah state, with Monday’s reality of the strongman’s visit to the sunny splendor of the Palace of Versailles for a conversation with Mr. Macron. For someone condemned to ignominy by Barack Obama, Mr. Putin looked in relaxed, good cheer.

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