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Surely you are not suggesting a run-of-the-mill president or "uniparty interventionist stooge" would have had Middle Eastern adventures on the scale of Trump?
Iran happening and going how it has gone was not in my worst-case Trump scenario either so I don't blame you for rolling those dice, but you very much lost a lot more money than you would have lost betting on a "uniparty" candidate.
Trump 1 had very few Middle East adventures and started putting the kibosh on Afghanistan.
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Biden helped Al Qaeda take over Syria.
Obama bombed Libya to the stone age, surged troops in Afghanistan, started the first Ukraine war and helped jihadists take half of Syria.
George Bush invaded Iraq and Afghanistan.
Trump's first term was relatively peaceful and Trump was the first candidate in a long time to be outspoken in his criticism of previous wars.
Alright, I'll bite: you can criticize him for inaction concerning Crimea, but how did he start it?
John McCain and Victoria Nuland were on Maidan square together and the US was actively funding groups in Ukraine and pushing for regime change. There was clear Ambition to expand NATO east and to cross Russia's red lines even though they were fully aware this would lead to a major war.
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He paid hundreds of thousands of crisis actors to fake colossal pro-EU protests in Ukraine, forcing Russia to invade eastern Ukraine to... do something.
"Obama/the US caused the Russo-Ukrainian War" rests on the claim that the Maidan protests were an American op.
I think the paid opposition narrative needs to end. It seems very genuine at this point Ukraine has a lot of pro-EU people. They have spilt a lot of blood for it so it seems reasonable to believe they are genuinely pro-EU. And I despise the EU but it’s still a better path for them.
They like the EU because they have watched Poland go from poor to rich. When you see Polish people returning from London as maids and now Ukrainians are the polish maids.
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"Caused" is a bit strong, but "failed to deter" is a plausible view if you point to non-reactions to Georgia (in fact, pulling out a "reset" button accepting it) and that "The 1980s called and want their foreign policy back" line at the debate when Romney claimed Russia was a potential adversary merely 2 years before Crimea. Frankly, the flip from that to Russia-gate makes me take the left's positions on international relations as deeply un-serious.
Although the other side seems to have never met a proposed intervention they didn't like, which is its own failure mode.
The problem I have with failure-to-deter and other sins of inaction is that unless you're withdrawing some active intervention they're overdetermined. Obama could have done more to oppose Russia post-2013/4, but so could most of Europe. The sheer indifference of most European allies colored the US' own response.
Specifically regarding failures of deterrence, it is not clear to me what critics of Obama expected him to have done other than something really outside like cooperate in suppressing the Maidan protests.
I don't think this follows. Obama's dismissiveness of Russia as a source of problems in 2012 has certainly aged poorly, but at the time the US was trying to switch focus from Europe and the Middle East to Asia-Pacific and China (it is still trying to do this) and the broad consensus was that Russia was a gas station with nukes. The flip on Russia was a direct response to Russia doing things. You should expect people to update
The reason why right-wing anti-interventionism will never have any legs is that the right-wing elite is full of people who fundamentally believe in the crude application of force to achieve positive results and the right-wing base is full of people who think you have a moral obligation to support the team no matter what. The result is that right-wing elites constantly try to fix problems with violence and their supporters always back them because it is practically unthinkable not to.
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