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FrameBenignly comments on Open Thread, January 11-17, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I think Obama's greatest accomplishment was the overhaul of military spending he worked with Secretary Robert Gates on at the start of his administration. I'm also highly supportive of his executive actions on immigration reform.
I find the Affordable Care Act to be difficult to evaluate. They made so many changes at once that it's hard to ascertain their net effect on health care overall. Yes, increases in health care costs have gone down. Yes, younger people are spending more on insurance that they probably don't need. Yes, there are multiple ways to improve the system which are not politically feasible.
I think Obama's biggest failure was Libya. The US should stop supporting rebellions, or invading countries. It's never clear what's going to happen when the revolutionaries take over, or the new regime is in place, and the war itself is always bad.
The issue I find most perplexing is wiretapping. It seems like Obama didn't do anything about it, and nobody really seems to have cared. Other failures can be explained away as the fault of Congress such as his failure to close Guatanamo Bay, but I don't think the wiretapping issue can.
One thing people don't talk about enough is the unprecedented slowdown in the growth of government spending these past few years. Look at what happened with nominal government spending. I think this is principally due to the Tea Party because it coincides with their rise and fall almost exactly, but I still think Obama's role in this brief change is an important one. Alex Tabarrok's views on the subject from 2008 come across to me as prescient.
That only postpones the problem for a few years, unless you establish a permanent military presence.
The US can keep 100,000+ soldiers on the ground for 7 years, have all of its top military brass focus on that conflict, fight cleverly and aggressively against the opposition, lead the country through the process of drafting a constitution and holding elections, train the new military and police forces, spend tens of billions of dollars helping to build the country's infrastructure (in addition to hundreds of billions of dollars of military spending), gradually remove its troops in an orderly fashion as negotiated with the country's new government, and still have everything go horribly within a couple years of leaving.
I agree with your implied point that putting boots on the ground for a few years (and then removing them) is less likely to lead to horrible outcomes if it's done in a stable region, where law-and-order is well-established in the neighboring countries and there are unlikely to be any major disruptive events in the region during the military engagement or the decade after it has ended.
I am unsure which part of this graph you are referring to, but if the policy of temporarily sending troops into a country is fragile enough to risk disaster if that sort of detail isn't handled properly then that is not a good sign.
IIRC, that was Nicolas Sarkozy's idea. Obama's fault is that he joined him.
Back in mid 1990s USA and the whole Western World was heavily criticized for not intervening in Rwanda conflict and many people in the US and Europe took that criticism to their hearts and now they tend to err in an opposite direction.
That's not a bug, that's a feature, working as designed.