The Boston Globe repeats a piece of conventional wisdom about lame-duck presidents:

Nearly all presidents suffer losses in midterm elections, but they still find ways to make their mark on foreign policy in their final years in office [bold mine-DL].

Lame-duck presidents have more leeway on foreign policy than on domestic issues, but all this tells us is why presidents are often compelled to devote their last two years to this area: they usually don’t have a choice. It doesn’t give us any reason to assume that lame-duck foreign policy initiatives will be successful or wise. In fact, much of what second-term presidents have sought to do in the waning years of their tenures usually doesn’t succeed, and in their attempts at securing “legacy” achievements they frequently come away empty-handed. These presidents can start wars (e.g., Kosovo) or pursue elusive peace deals between Israel and Palestine, but it’s rare that they achieve anything lasting in the time they have left. Occasionally they can come away with a significant achievement, as Reagan did with the INF Treaty, or lay the groundwork for their successors to build on. One hopes that this is what Obama will be able to do with Iran in spite of the concerted opposition that any deal will now certainly face. On the other hand, lame-duck presidents can burden their successors with a terrible policy, so that the successor ends up implementing a foolish plan that was already being prepared before he came to power (see the Bay of Pigs). Obama’s war against ISIS seems to be designed so that a misguided and unnecessary military intervention will be bequeathed to the person unfortunate enough to be elected after him.

Hawks like to cite Bush’s support for the “surge” as an example of how a president can and should respond to political repudiation at home, but then they are ideologically committed to the false belief that the “surge” was successful. The “surge” was at best a belated effort to salvage something from a disastrous and unnecessary war, and at worst a deliberate effort to ignore the reality that most Americans wanted the Iraq war to end rather than escalate. While the second part of Bush’s second term is usually considered to have had a better or at least less disastrous foreign policy record than his first, no one outside of a very small partisan bubble would pretend that it achieved anything worth applauding. By the end of his second term, Bush’s enthusiasm for NATO expansion had blown up in his face, and his risible “freedom agenda” had empowered sectarians and thugs almost everywhere it was tried. Needless to say, Bush’s activity overseas didn’t make him any more popular at home, either.

Lame-duck presidents have more of a chance to achieve something in foreign policy than they do at home, but that isn’t all that impressive when you consider how little lame-duck presidents actually can achieve on the domestic front in their final years. That’s not an accident. A second-term president at the end of his tenure has usually exhausted his political strength long ago and ends up marking time until he can go into retirement. It will be most unfortunate if a deal with Iran falls apart because Obama is now too weak politically at home, but that should be a lesson to future administrations that presidents shouldn’t put off potentially very significant foreign policy initiatives until after they have secured re-election.