It's hard to imagine how President Obama and his team could have done more damage to the world if they'd tried -- short of starting a nuclear war. In their effort to avoid conflict, Obama's foreign policy team left a trail of ruined countries, refugees, and corpses.
So The Final Year is about the Obama Doctrine, also known as hashtag diplomacy, also known as leading from behind, also known as voting "present" -- also known as hands-off. That a lot of people can get killed while you're wringing them is the movie's unintended lesson. Summing up, I give you none other than Samantha "Soft" Power herself, who near the end of the doc says in a moment of sudden clarity: "My world is a world where you have 65 million displaced. Yemen and Syria and Iraq, Nigeria, Cameroon and Chad, Central African Republic, Burundi, South Sudan, Darfur, you know, the list, Afghanistan, of course, Venezuela imploding . . . There are concerns about terrorism and there is a fear of the other and . . . all the trendlines -- on democracy, right now, at least -- are going in the wrong direction."If only she or her friends had held positions of authority, maybe they could have done something about some of that.
Foreign policy is hard, and Obama's team never had any respect for the legacy that had been bequeathed to them.
