Every American president has his victories and his defeats. Because America is the superpower, many peoples, not Americans alone, are caught up in the reckoning of gains and losses. The irony is that the consequences of what an American president does often become clear only years after he leaves the White House.
President Nixon resigned in the wake of a scandal, but his legacy endures. He made the famous reconciliation with China and opened the door to its rapprochement with the United States, before it became the giant we know today. Nixon is still attacked and humiliated in the American media and in Hollywood over the Watergate scandal and his secret tapes, often out of partisan vendettas. But whatever is said, he changed history forever.
President Carter succeeded in brokering the Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel, but he failed in dealing with the Khomeinist revolution and the seizure of the American embassy staff in Tehran. The Soviet Union collapsed after Reagan's term ended, but he is given the credit for it.
President Bush senior curbed Saddam Hussein's predation after his occupation of Kuwait and protected the Gulf from sweeping chaos. President Clinton went through a shameful sex scandal, but through American intervention within NATO he helped end the war in Bosnia.
As for Bush junior, he weakened an evil organization like al-Qaeda and toppled the Baath regime, but handed Iraq to the Iranians.
Supporters of the "Arab Spring" see President Obama's sympathy for those uprisings as a credit to his record, while his critics see that spring as having turned into a bitter winter.
In truth, we do not know exactly what President Trump's political legacy will be, and it is too early to judge it.
The knives are out for him today over the painful electoral defeat his party has suffered, and often over the war on Iran. The war's results could go in more than one direction. It could lead to a more hardline Iranian regime run by the Revolutionary Guard. Or the days may prove that Trump was the only president who confronted the bullying Iranian regime and pushed it to the edge of the abyss. The killing of Qasem Soleimani was the beginning of the weakening of Iranian influence and of the "resistance" axis in the region.
We do not know what the future holds. But the legacies of American presidents are complex, mixing good and bad, and they become clear years after they leave office, sometimes after they have left this life. Amid the defeat, Trump believes the war's positive results will be known later, and that history will judge him by them. Let us hope he is right.
