President Obama's National Security Legacy After Paris

President Obama, like most if not all presidents, has been thinking about his legacy from the beginning of his presidency. In the 2012 book Kill or Capture, Daniel Klaidman reports, somewhat unflatteringly, that Obama’s “preoccupation with his legacy included an element of vanity— he’d sometimes tell advisers, ‘I don’t want my name’ on a policy that might be judged harshly in the future.”

One legacy preoccupation has been to distinguish his administration’s approach to counterterrorism from his predecessor's. (Klaidman’s book is about the President’s struggles in that regard, as is my most recent book and Charlie Savage’s Power Wars.) A second legacy preoccupation been to end the “Bush wars.”

I have a piece at Time on how both legacy aims are looking after Paris. Here is a flavor:

Obama’s aim to end “Bush’s wars” is in shambles. The more pressing legacy question now is whether he will be seen to have contributed to, and done too little to redress, the threats from the Islamic State. The president faces a related legacy conundrum with his desire to fulfill his early pledge to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. A strict congressional ban stands in his way. The only way Obama can succeed in his legacy quest is to exercise presidential powers to override the ban—powers that are very much like those that the Bush administration claimed in order to disregard the torture statute, and powers that candidate Obama harshly criticized and promised not to replicate. Whether he closes the detention facility or not, the president’s legacy will take a hit.

I also discuss, among other things, the significance in this regard of John F. Kennedy's claim that “[i]t is much easier to make the speeches than it is to finally make the judgments.”