The great undoing has started.   President Obama’s most defining achievements — from healthcare reform and economic recovery to the drawdown of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — divided the country to the extent that our new President and Congress are hell bent on undoing anything that might be considered an enduring legacy.

Of the many arenas for expected change, perhaps the most consequential will be the departure from Obama’s approach to advancing and protecting U.S. interests in the world.  Obama consistently prioritized diplomacy.  His two major international accomplishments came through diplomacy: securing an agreement to prevent Iran’s development of nuclear weapons and the international climate change agreement.  Unfortunately, both are high on the list of the great undoing of the Trump administration, regardless of the possible costs.

Donald Trump and his team cite a presumed loss of international prestige and influence around the world as a result of Obama’s reluctance to use military force without exhausting diplomatic solutions.  As their case in point, they have advanced a narrative about the no-good options case in a prolonged Syrian civil war.  Such a narrative has taken on a conventional wisdom that ignores the events that actually transpired.

The narrative has its own short-hand nomenclature: the red line.  In Syria, Obama laid down a “red line” in August 2012 that, once crossed by Syria’s President Bashar Assad, would draw the U.S. into military engagement in Syria.  Obama’s exact words were “a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.  That would change my calculus,” referring to a decision on military involvement in Syria.

Within a year, video footage out of Syria began to seep out of Syria forcing such a “change of calculus.”  An August 21, 2013 attack against a suburb of Assad’s own capital revealed use of chemical weapons, and UN inspectors arrived in Syria to investigate.  Obama began preparing the groundwork for a military response, first by consulting with allies and then exploring options of limited strikes to cripple Assad’s ability to use chemical weapons.  Planners assessed the risks of military strikes against caches of chemical weapons.  While the U.S. had a stated policy of regime change in Syria, Obama focused his planning for military option on one achievable goal – the removal of chemical weapons.

A timeline of events over the next few weeks reveals how quickly events on the ground shifted to disrupt Obama’s plans.

On August 29, the British Parliament voted against Prime Minister Cameron’s motion condemning Assad for the attack, the first step for British participation in military intervention.  Weighing heavily on that vote was the still fresh memory of the consequences of British involvement in the Iraq war.

Faced with the loss of his closest ally, Obama made two announcements two days later.  First was his decision to “take military action against Syrian regime targets.”  The second was more consequential.  He also decided to “seek authorization for the use of force from the American people’s representatives in Congress.”

At the time, Obama sounded confident that he would be able to convince Congress on the appropriateness of military action, despite his awareness of the public’s weariness with war after Iraq and Afghanistan.

After just one week, it had become clear that Congress would not back Obama’s request to use military force in Syria.  Public opinion polls also opposed U.S intervention, and Obama was running into the same brick wall that a Republican Congress imposed on any proposals emanating from the White House.  On September 8, five Republican Senators announced their opposition and a sixth, Lindsey Graham, said “It’d be great if the Russians could convince Assad to turn over his chemical weapons to the international community. That’d be a terrific outcome.”

Faced with a near certain defeat in Congress, Obama’s room to maneuver was limited.  In what has been portrayed as an off-the-cuff remark, Secretary of State John Kerry opened up a potential avenue to achieve the same outcome as a military strike of eliminating the chemical weapons that Assad could use on his own people.  In response to a reporter’s question on September 9, Kerry said Assad could avert military action by the U.S. if he would “turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week.”  The Russians moved quickly to propose just such an outcome.  Obama responded tentatively, holding out the use of military action if such a plan was merely cause for delay.

The next day, Obama asked Congress to postpone a vote to allow for diplomacy to play out the diplomacy set in motion by Kerry’s remarks.

After an intense, accelerated negotiations, Kerry and his Russian counterpart announced on September 14 the framework of an agreement that would start a process to remove the chemical weapons in Syria under the supervision of the international community.

British destroyer escorting shipment of chemicals out of Syria in February 2014; photo courtesy of British Ministry of Defence

Less than a year later, on June 23, 2014, the UN certified that the last of Syria’s chemical weapons had been removed.  That included over 1300 metric tons at over 45 different sites in Syria.  The size alone of that stockpile makes it hard to conceive that military intervention would have had the same outcome.

Obama’s detractors, especially those in Congress who worked to thwart approval of military engagement in Syria in September 2013, suffer from amnesia.  Not content with this erroneous story line, some have connected the red line statement to the continued suffering in Syria, to the military involvement of Russia to bolster Assad, to a mass migration to escape what looks to be genocide in Aleppo and Syria’s other war-torn regions.  This is misplaced; Assad and Putin hold full responsibility for those crimes against humanity.

The red line narrative that ought to be taking hold as the nation prepares for the transfer of power reveals a leader who laid out a concrete goal and achieved it, through a diplomacy that involved the UN, friends and allies, and even adversaries.  We will come to appreciate such strategic deliberation.  My thread of hope is that we as a nation do not pay too high a price for the untethered, transactional bullying that lies ahead.

This article first appeared in the Berkshire Eagle and History News Network.

When wondering how to make America great again, encouraging a foreign government to influence our election, does not come to mind.  Neither does denying that it happened, let alone refusing to even receive the intelligence reports that indicate the extent of that foreign involvement.

The tables have been turned.  For decades, the U.S. did meddle in foreign elections.  The cases are well known, whether it was CIA financing a propaganda campaign to ensure victory for Italy’s Christian Democrats in 1948, Edward Lansdale of the CIA running the campaign for Philippines President Ramon Magsaysay in 1953 or even spending millions of dollars to prevent Salvador Allende from winning the Chilean election in 1964.

The U.S. did not stop at trying to influence elections, but actively sought to overturn elections that had put into power leaders inimical to our interests.  Declassified documents spell out efforts in Iran, Congo, Chile and Guatemala to destabilize the countries in order to lead to the overthrow of the elected leaders.

Perhaps, this is the era of greatness that Donald Trump had in mind when he adopted the slogan for his campaign.  However, these activities did not make the U.S. great, but in the long term harmed our reputation around the world.  More recently, overt attempts by the U.S. to weigh in on foreign elections have backfired.  In 2002, U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia Manuel Rocha warned that the election of Evo Morales as President might result in the cutoff of aid to the country.  Morales lost that election but rode to victory in the next elections, riding on resentment against the U.S.

Foreign media seek out U.S. statements on their elections, but most Ambassadors are careful to avoid becoming part of the electoral debate.  In the Philippines elections this year Ambassador Philip Goldberg resisted the temptation to criticize the authoritarian candidate Rodrigo Duterte and echoed the refrain taken by the U.S. in foreign elections, “Our job and my job and also the job of the people in the U.S. is to stay out of your politics and to let the Filipino people decide who is going to be your President.”

Montage by Donkey Hotey, Flickr, Wikimedia Commons

Now, however, we are faced with the likelihood that the U.S. has been on the receiving end of foreign election meddling.  In considering this turnaround on the sanctity of democratic elections, it is important to note a series of troubling aspects:

— this is the electronic equivalent of the Watergate burglary, where operatives physically broke into the offices to seek physical files from the Democratic campaign.  This time, files were copied electronically.

— the release of the files did influence the outcome of the election.  The e-mails did not break news of illegal activities, but did highlight embarrassing statements from Democratic party officials on a recurring basis over the course of the final weeks of the campaign.  Further, they provided enough material for a candidate who is so cavalier with the truth to repeat his “Crooked Hillary” theme to audiences primed to chant for her arrest.

— Donald Trump denying that this happened is a little like Donald Trump repeating for years that President Obama was not born in the U.S.  Just because he says it, does not make it so.  And even knowing it is false doesn’t mean he will stop saying it.

— it is not out of character that the man who is famous for not having even a short attention span would reject intelligence briefings.  Those analysts preparing the briefings were not the people behind the lead up to the Iraq War in 2003.  That was George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and George Tenant who politicized the process and got the intelligence they wanted, even if they had to make it up.

— the connection to Russia and to Vladimir Putin that Donald Trump, his campaign and now several of his Cabinet selections should raise questions about the motivation of the Russians and of the Trumps.  There are many ways to reset relations with Russia, and perhaps good reasons to do so.  But, denying their involvement in our elections?  Next, he might deny they have taken over Crimea.  No, he actually already did say that.

Most alarming, though, is contemplating what should be done as a result of this electoral meddling, and further what could be done.  The constitutional crisis borders on the unthinkable and the unprecedented.  The courage to investigate this fully, first by President Obama and then by members of both parties in Congress, is the best example of a democracy still intact.

This post originally appeared in History News Network.