2016: Obama's year of living dangerously

NO one doubts that even if President Barack Obama had failed to achieve any policy success during his two terms in office, the election of the first African-American president would still be dubbed "historic". But President Obama's presidency would not only be recalled for the fact that a black man had occupied the White House for eight years.

As he enters his last year in office and considers the legacy that he would live behind, President Obama can list a series of achievements that could be regarded by some as historic: presiding over the economic recovery that followed the Great Recession; the withdrawal of the last US troops from Iraq and the start of the military disengagement from Afghanistan; the passage of a national healthcare insurance programme aka "Obamacare"; signing the nuclear deal with Iran and concluding the negotiations over the Tran-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement.

The problem is that some of these policy successes such as Obamacare and the deal with Iran remain very controversial and enjoy limited support among Americans, with the Republican presidential candidates pledging to revoke them on their first day in office. A Republican president will repeal some of the executive orders President Obama has signed in recent years in order to overcome Republican congressional opposition, including the new gun control rules that he announced in an emotional ceremony in the White House last week.