Outgoing US President Barack Obama’s farewell speech had a significant quote — “A great nation need not necessarily be a bully”. This must sum up his term of presidency. As the printer of the dollar, the US, while steadily boosting its military might and economic prominence, waged wars — big and small — for decades across the globe as an extension of its outward looking realpolitic.
Obama was one President who ended all ongoing conflicts that were bleeding America fiscally. He was an advocate of inclusiveness, both within and without. For this, his stature as a universal statesman is on a high pedestal.
On the other hand, incoming President Donald Trump, with a politico-economic elbow room in legacy, can afford to look inward to the domestic economy. But he appears to have retreated too much into a shell. Trade and defence pacts and liberal views on immigration, are to him, an anathema. Hopefully, Trump will mellow down as he discovers that in today’s global economic environs, isolation per se causes long-term harm for some transient good.