There are, nevertheless, those who see Obama as very much ahead of his time. Noted University of Wisconsin history professor Alfred W. McCoy has called Obama the “Grandmaster of the Great Game” — quite the superlative coming from a peer of the original architects of America’s rise to global power, Elihu Root and Zbigniew Brzezinski. “Moving from repair to revival, from past to future, President Obama has been using America’s status as the planet’s number one consumer nation to create a new version of dollar diplomacy,” wrote McCoy in a September 2015 analysis. “His strategy is aimed at drawing China’s Eurasian trading partners back into Washington’s orbit. While Beijing has been moving to bring parts of Africa, Asia, and Europe into a unified ‘world island’ with China at its epicenter, Obama has countered with a bold geopolitics that would trisect that vast land mass by redirecting its trade towards the United States.” McCoy's notion is that there's a grand unified theory behind the Obama foreign policy. Obama’s orderly plan within a disorderly world? Integration of the global economy, with the United States as its epicenter. For McCoy, it's the lodestar that has guided much of the president's foreign policy — even the process of normalizing relations with Iran and Cuba fall neatly into this framework.

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And what of Obama’s military restraint? His grand strategy seems to favor a shift from geopolitics to geoeconomics. Amid massive migration-inducing “nation-building” crises and other instabilities across the global south, there is a discernible shift toward strategic devolution: the notion that regional powers and stakeholders must themselves address the challenges these disorders are throwing up. The logic of multipolarity leads to what is, essentially, a loosely federalist world order. While there is considerable resistance to this idea among America's liberals and conservatives, the nation-building vehicle of last resort must take the form of a reinvigorated, perhaps regionally reconfigured, United Nations — not the United States.

Again, this seems to be the logic of Obama’s foreign policy: transitioning America from an era when it is the sole global hegemon into a new era with several great competing powers, where America maintains its centrality by leading global integration.This strategy demands a transition in U.S. foreign policy thinking, wherein the country shifts away from the “Pax Americana” model, and towards a more UN-centric power-sharing order within which Washington’s global leadership is embedded.. . .

In what amounts to an evolution toward global economic federalism, the outlines of such an era, depending on how America’s domestic politics unfold, could mean an America-centric global economic order, accompanied by American strategic leadership embedded in a reformed and regionalized United Nations.. . . In the aftermath of Obama’s presidency, the legacy of the Obamas will continue as a “work in progress” against the backdrop of a nation and world in transition. Both from a domestic and international standpoint, the possible outcomes seem endless. This could well be the Obama Century. America and the world would be the better for it.