Dan Drezner sees a way that the hawkish attacks on administration policies could work to Obama’s advantage:

The great thing about this is that the 2016 candidates will be making Obama’s case for him. The one thing the 2016 campaign will produce in ample quantities is hawkish rhetoric. All Obama’s team has to do is point to these statements to make the case to the other side of the negotiating table about the need to deal now.

To be clear, this gambit won’t necessarily produce deals. They might nudge counterparts in Iran, the Pacific Rim, and so forth in a productive direction, however.

It’s possible that this could “nudge” other governments to be more willing to reach agreements with the U.S. before Obama leaves office, but it seems more likely that the prospect of a more hawkish and intransigent administration taking over in 2017 would make those deals seem much less attractive. Since other governments will assume that Washington is going to undo or reverse commitments made by this administration, they will have fewer incentives to take political risks for a deal that could be repudiated in less than two years.

Take the negotiations with Iran for a start. Other than Clinton and Paul, all of the would-be presidential candidates will oppose whatever deal the administration reaches. It’s not a given that any new administration would be ready to defend and follow through on a deal later on. Iranian hard-liners would be content to see the negotiations fail before a deal, and they would also be pleased if the U.S. later reneges on its part of the deal because a new administration wants to pursue an unrealistic zero-enrichment goal. Jeb Bush is just the most recent would-be 2016 candidate to insist on this unreasonable goal. Clinton has also expressed her preference for this in the past. The possibility that the U.S. will have new leadership that loathes diplomacy with Iran seems likely to encourage hard-liners in the Iranian government to avoid making additional concessions. The prospect of a more hawkish administration coming in soon is more likely to make the Iranians see negotiations as useless than it is to persuade them to offer more as part of a deal.

As for trade deals, governments in Asia and Europe may conclude that they would be better off waiting for a new president and possibly one from the same party as the one that controls both houses of Congress. Reaching agreement on either the TPP or TTIP will require politically painful commitments from Japan and the EU, and their respective leaders are likely to want to put off making those commitments for as long as possible. Obama’s lame-duck status and the GOP’s control of Congress make for convenient excuses for avoiding negotiations that these other political leaders would probably just as soon skip.