Day: December 15, 2015

The issue of Obama’s legacy will come into sharper focus in the months and years to come, but The Atlantic’s James Fallows noted over the weekend “three big things that have happened during his presidency that in all probability would not have happened without him”:

* The climate deal itself, as explained in a NYT piece just now, and in unbelievable contrast to the utter collapse of the Copenhagen negotiations early in Obama’s term; * The rapprochement with Cuba, marking the beginning of the end of the single stupidest (but hardest to change) aberration in modern U.S. foreign policy; and * The international agreement with Iran, which in the short term offers (as I have argued at length) the best prospects for keeping Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, and in the long run has the potential of beginning to end Iran’s destructive estrangement from the international order.