Obama: A retrospect

S P.SETH

When Barack Obama was elected President of the United States in 2008, he made history. In a country built on the back of slavery, where racial difference and superiority is ingrained, the election of a black man to America’s highest office was no mean achievement. And not surprisingly, many Americans felt that the US had entered into a post-racial era and, in doing so, they had redeemed themselves. At the time I was in a liberal university town in California where many people felt a sense of pride and jubilation over what had been achieved, with more to come in a new America. However, it was not how it panned out, which I will take up in a separate article. Here, I would deal with its international dimension.

Internationally, there was great relief when Obama was elected because this also meant the end of George Bush as the US president. Bush’s eight year as president  was marked by turmoil and war in the Middle East; following the 9/11 al Qaeda inspired terrorist attacks in the US. His ‘global war on terrorism’ led the US to invade Iraq, as Saddam Hussein was believed to have links with al Qaeda and possessed ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (WMD), that didn’t exist. And thus the world was plunged into a seemingly unending war in the Middle East, with horrendous consequences still being played out. It was, therefore, with considerable relief that Obama’s election as president was internationally received, as he was seen as the peace candidate compared to Bush. He had opposed Iraq war and was committed to end it, and soon made a pitch for a new relationship with the Islamic world.

The world was expecting so much from him that he was awarded the Noble Prize for Peace mainly, it would seem, because he was not Bush. But that was not enough, as we found out during his presidency. He sensed that an opening with the Muslim world should help in lowering the temperature in that sensitive region. To this end, his administration sought to facilitate a settlement of the Palestinian question on the basis of a two state solution with both Israel and Palestine living in peaceful coexistence. But that required a commitment on both sides, particularly Israel, to believe in that, which was not forthcoming. Indeed, Israel was already unhappy at Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech reaching out to the Muslim world, as it had not been consulted prior to it. This kind of unilateral Obama initiative, without Israeli input, didn’t endear Obama to the Netanyahu’s government, thus setting the stage for his government’s obstruction of any US initiative to promote a peaceful settlement of the Palestinian issue.

About the same time, the Arab Spring rocked the Middle East with Hosni Mubarak regime as its main casualty, affecting seriously regional strategic stability. The Obama administration found itself in a difficult situation, finally deciding against bailing out Mubarak in the face of a popular upsurge against a corrupt and brutal system. Which angered US’ two major strategic partners, Israel and Saudi Arabia, basically because Mubarak’s Egypt had been the instrument of keeping the lid on any eruption of the Arab street, which was feared both by Tel Aviv and Riyadh for their own respective reasons. But the Arab Spring bloom turned into a withering winter when the old order, more or less, returned after Abdel Fattah el-Sisi staged a military coup and became Egypt’s new ruler. The US quietly sanctified the new order.

The US played a decisive role in overthrowing the Gaddafi regime in Libya, but this has thrown the country into perpetual turmoil, and it has become the staging post for refugees from Africa and Middle East heading towards Europe, creating all sorts of problems there. And in Syria, where the Arab Spring manifested itself in a rebellion against the Bashar al-Assad regime, the country was plunged into a bloody civil war, which is still playing itself out with even greater stakes from multiple jihadi/terrorist groups aided and abetted by regional powers and those from outside the region. The US and its allies could have brought down the Assad regime early on, but the Obama administration was unwilling to commit troops on the ground.

With the sad experience of Afghanistan and Iraq in mind, President Obama was prepared to use all the lethal power except putting American troops on the ground. His administration wanted regional powers, like Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies, to do real fighting on the ground with all the backing of US aerial power. Russia’s direct intervention on behalf the Assad regime has put the rebels on the defensive. At the same time, a new power equation between Russia and Turkey has created further complications. And out of all this power play, and failure to stabilize Middle East, emerged IS which, despite its setbacks here and there in Iraq and Syria, continues to be a major threat regionally and elsewhere in the world with ‘lone wolf attacks’ like the ones in Paris, Belgium, Turkey and elsewhere.  

Obama’s record in the Middle East’s has been marked by ambivalence because he seemed to have recognized the limits of US power, unable to extinguish bushfires anywhere and everywhere. And that was inherent in the situation when he took over from the Bush administration. His one important achievement was the agreement with Iran to freeze its nuclear program for many years in return for lifting sanctions on that country, even though it has created tensions in US relations with Israel and Iran.

During Obama’s presidency, US-China relations were marked by growing tensions, particularly on the South China Sea issue, where China has claimed virtual control with the US seeking to assert, mostly unsuccessfully so far, the right to freedom of navigation. And it has also failed so far to create an effective regional coalition to contain/balance Beijing’s projection of power. At the same time, North Korea continued to defy much of the world by building its nuclear arsenal.

At the same time, the Obama administration and its allies failed to successfully push forward the process of Ukraine’s integration into European Union and eventually North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), when Russia hit back with the annexation of Crimea and encouraging/aiding separatism in eastern Ukraine. And with the Obama administration, in its last days, sending troops and heavy armor, like tanks, into Poland and its rotation through NATO’s Baltic states, it has further increased volatility in Europe. In other words, the Obama administration hasn’t been successful in defusing or resolving some of the world’s most intractable issues, partly because of the limits of US power, as it no longer can impose solutions.

Note: This article was first published in  the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au

US and Trump phenomenon

S P SETH

Considering Donald’s Trump’s impromptu twitter pronouncements during and after presidential election in the US, it is not surprising that many in and outside the United States are in a state of shock. And among most shocked probably are the country’s intelligence agencies he has been openly contemptuous of, notwithstanding the fact that he is now changing his tune after his inauguration as the US President. At one time he reportedly said that, “I won’t use them, because they’ve made such bad decisions.” And their conclusion that Russian hacking might have helped Trump get elected is casting his election as unsavory, if not downright illegitimate. And this is going to haunt Trump all through his time as President and he is going to cast doubt on their competence. Even without the findings of the intelligence community about Russia’s cyber hacking role to help Trump’s election, he hasn’t been comfortable that his rival, Hillary Clinton, got nearly 3 million more votes than him.

Though his election as President through the country’s Electoral College system, which finally decides the winner, is legal, but to have lost by way of popular votes does diminish his standing. And on top of it to be told that he won due to Putin’s involvement on his behalf makes Trump look like Putin’s American agent. Trump’s response to this has been two fold. First, as earlier pointed out, he sought to rubbish the country’s intelligence agencies. And the most telling argument he has used to highlight this was their comprehensive failure on Saddam Hussein’s supposed ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (WMD), which formed the basis for the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. As we know that Saddam didn’t have any such arsenal, but the US invasion of Iraq is now regarded by many as one of the worse foreign policy disasters in the country’s history.

Secondly, he is seeking to change the perception that Putin and Russia are somehow the US’ natural enemy, even after reluctantly conceding that Russia did interfere in the electoral process through hacking of Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) emails as based on intelligence presented to him. But he blamed the DNC for failing to protect their system. In any case, according to Trump’s interpretation, it was not a bad thing that Putin and the new US President would able to chart a new course for US-Russia relations. At the same time, he viciously criticized US intelligence agencies for ‘leaking’ unverified intelligence, likening it to Nazi Germany, suggesting that Trump might be prone to Russian blackmail as they have salacious material on him during his romp in a Moscow hotel in 2013. The US intelligence agencies have denied the leak but not certified that it is fake and/or planted. Therefore, there is going to be a stand off, of sorts, between Trump and much of the intelligence community, requiring his administration to overhaul the system or to subvert it. Hence, his initial overtures to CIA reportedly saying that, “I love you, I respect you, and there’s nobody I respect more.”

The argument that Russia could even be a natural ally in some ways will be difficult to sell when many people in the US grew up believing the worst about it during the long Cold War period. And this has since been reinforced with the crisis in Ukraine, where Russia’s annexation of Crimea and support for separatists in eastern Ukraine is seen as a serious threat. Indeed, the Obama administration, just before the transition to power with Trump as new President, saw fit to send troops and heavy armor to Poland as deterrence to a perceived Russian threat to that country. But Trump is keen to change that perception and not dwell on the negative. His advise to reporters at one point was that, “I think we ought to get on with our lives.”

He also approvingly quoted Julian Assange’s denial that the material WikiLeaks put up on the Internet was sourced from Russian sources. It might be worth noting that Julian Assange has been regarded by the US establishment as one of their most hated foreign traitor from an allied country, being an Australian citizen now sheltering in Ecuador embassy in London. In seeking to fend off charges of Russian involvement to facilitate his election victory, Trump, at times, finds himself in circular arguments. For instance, he praised Putin for not reacting to the US expulsion of Russian intelligence operatives following the accusation of cyber hacking. He tweeted, “Great move on delay [by Putin]. I always knew he was very smart!”

He was thus suggesting that Putin cleverly helped Trump administration from having to react to any Russian expulsion, if carried out, of US operatives from that country. In this way he further reinforced his favorable view of Putin, having told reporters in December 2015 that, “He [Putin] is a really brilliant and talented person.” He has said that the US and Russia do not need to be on opposite sides as they have common interests, like defeating IS.

While Trump has been rubbishing US intelligence, highlighting its classical failure about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, some Russian commentators mocked the findings of the US intelligence community accusing their country of hacking its computer systems. One commentator, pointing to the lack of any concrete evidence, compared it with the intelligence about Iraq, which set out the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Alexey Pushkov, a member of the defence and security of the Russian parliament’s upper house, tweeted that, “Mountain gave birth to a mouse: all accusations against Russia are based on ‘confidence’ and assumptions. US was [also] sure about Hussein possessing WMD in the same way.”

The amazing thing is that at the public level, despite Trump’s open embrace of Putin and reports of Russian interference in the US presidential election, he doesn’t seem to be suffering any serious popular backlash. Which brings us again to the factors that contributed to the Trump phenomenon. Interestingly, such upheaval was foreseen by Richard Rorty, a left-leaning American philosopher, as far back as 1998 in his book, “Achieving Our Country”. He predicted that the neglected working class would not tolerate its marginalization for long and that: “Something will crack.” He wrote (as quoted in The New Yorker), “The non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for---someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots…”

And he added that, “One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion… All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.” Rorty might not have Trump in mind, but his prescient analysis of a storm brewing couldn’t have been more right as seen now. What remains to be seen now is how this wrecking ball, called Trump, will go about doing the demolition job.  

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au