Barak Obama’s visit to Europe took place with much fanfare. In Britain the ConDem government pulled out all stops to ensure Obama felt the Emperor. Obama on the other hand is a rejuvenated man. Since the capture of Osama bin Laden America has attempted to reinvigorate its superpower status. Obama said in his speech to the UK parliament: “And yet, as this rapid change has taken place, it has become fashionable in some quarters to question whether the rise of these nations will accompany the decline of American and European influence around the world. Perhaps, the argument goes, these nations represent the future, and the time for our leadership has passed.” That argument is wrong. The time for our leadership is now. It was the United States and the United Kingdom, and our democratic allies, that shaped a world in which new nations could emerge and individuals could thrive. And even as more nations take on the responsibilities of global leadership, our alliance will remain indispensable to the goal of a century that is more peaceful, more prosperous and more just.”
In the recent past America’s global leadership has been consistently undermined and questions have arisen about the possible end of the American century, Obama’s visit takes place with the US in a position of weakness rather then strength.
US military power which has long been a symbol of American strength has been bleeding to death with the Afghan and Iraq wars. In Afghanistan America has been unable to defeat a band of fighters using weapons from 1960’s. Abu Gharib and Guantanamo Bay have undermined the US cause permanently. In Iraq with the help of Iran various factions were co-opted through bribes and positions of power in constructing a post Saddam regime. An insurgency has been replaced with a polarized government based on ethno-sectarian lines that can implode at anytime. In Afghanistan Hamid Karzai, at most, remains the mayor of Kabul with Southern Afghanistan firmly in the hands of the Taliban. The Afghan war has now lasted longer then WW1 and WW2 combined.
America’s preoccupation with such wars has been in parallel to Russia’s resurgence. Russia in the last decade has managed to gain control over its mineral resources and utilities and banished many oligarchs who benefited from the break-up of the Soviet Union. With some of the worlds largest energy reserves it is now developing a state of the art military and competing directly with the US in regions where the US for nearly over a decade had uncontested hegemony. Russia has reversed most of the US backed colour revolutions that brought pro-Western leaders to power. Russia has now firmly ousted most of America’s influence in its periphery.
The Asia Pacific has for long been dominated by the US, not anymore. China’s economic prowess has continued to grow as it replaced Japan as the world’s 2nd largest economy in 2010. This fact underscores China’s emergence as an economic power, which is changing everything from the global balance of military and financial power to producing most of the world’s goods. China is rapidly modernizing and expanding its arsenal of missiles, ships and aircraft. This has led Beijing to enforce its claim to almost the entire South China Sea as its ‘historical waters,’ identifying this as a ‘core interest’ on a par with Taiwan and Tibet.
In Latin America, which for long has been America’s sphere of control independent rulers such as Hugo Chavez have worked to deconstruct America’s hold on the continent. Through the Bank of the South – Latinas Americas IMF and World Bank, without the US has been established to cater for the continents needs outside US influence. At the same time countries such as Mexico and Brazil have worked to repay all their debts in one ago, understanding that debts from such institutes entail US interference.
The Arab spring challenges US interference in the Muslim world. The US inherited a system of client and puppet rulers in the Middle East with the decline of Britain Empire after WW2. The US like Britain and France funded and armed such puppets as long as they protected US interests in their respective countries. In the Arab regions of the Muslim world dictators utilized brutal methods of repression through their secret service to cripple any momentum for change. This architecture is now falling apart as indigenously driven popular uprisings are calling for the removal of such agent rulers.
These are some of the challenges the US and Barak Obama face and will have to deal with in the foreseeable future. In Strategic Estimate 2011, Khilafah.com’s annual assessment of the global trends, we concluded:
“With the Iowa Caucus beginning in January 2012, this leaves only 2011 for Obama to make good the promises made in his election campaign. All of this means the US is not in the best position to curtail nations who are taking advantage of it’s preoccupation with more pressing matters at home. However the US Constitution forces the American president to share domestic power with Congress, so a split government leads to domestic policy gridlock. However, the Constitution also expressly reserves all foreign policy – particularly military policy – for the presidency. A weak president often has no options before him except foreign policy.”
Currently there appears to be three areas Obama is pursuing in protecting US interests around the world.
Arab Spring
The US, at first was confused by the loss of key allies, it is now determined to dictate the course and outcome of the ongoing revolution in the Middle East. The US has already started to work with a new set of docile, domesticated and US-friendly elites. This involves co-opting old friends from the pre-revolutionary era and seeking to contain the new forces produced by the revolution, long marginalised by the US. As Obama put it in his UK speech: “We must … reach the people who will shape the future – particularly young people … [and] provide assistance to civil society, including those that may not be officially sanctioned.” To this end he has doubled the budget for “protecting civil society groups” from $1.5m to $3.4m.
The recipients are not only the usual neoliberal contingents, but also activists who spearheaded the protest movements. Programmes aimed at youth leaders include the Leaders for Democracy Arabic project, sponsored by the US state department’s Middle East partnership initiative. A number of Arab activists, including the Egyptian democracy and human rights activist Esraa Abdel Fattah, were invited to an event hosted by the Project on Middle East Democracy in Washington last month – one of many recent conferences and seminars. Meetings between high-ranking US officials – such as the House majority leader, Steny Hoyer – and the Muslim Brotherhood took place in Cairo last month, while the deputy chairman of Tunisia’s Islamist Ennahda party has recently returned from a visit to Washington to “discuss democratic transition”.
Washington hopes that these rising forces can be stripped of their opposition to US hegemony and turned into pragmatists, fully integrated into the existing US constructed global order. Islamists are also not an issue, as long as the players agree to operate within parameters delineated for them, and play the power game without questioning its rules. It remains to be seen, however, if they risk losing their popular base in return for US favors.
Libya
The US has viewed the instability in Libya as an opportunity to gain influence in the country. It has made use of Europe’s inability to go it alone in removing Gaddafi to steal Libya from Europe and Britain. However the US has played a weak hand in Libya due to having little influence in Libya as it has traditionally been European territory. The US strategy appears to be to delay matters which make Europe ever more reliant on US fire power, this stalling then allows the US to cultivate contact with the rebels. America has worked to contact the protestors and rebels as announced by Clinton just as she announced in her other communications before her visit to Cairo. The US delayed the launch of the initial invasion and by passing over the operation to NATO it has further delayed matters. A senior European official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to the Washington Post and to avoid antagonizing the Americans, said that Obama’s eagerness to turn over command of the Libyan air operation to NATO in late February and the withdrawal of US fighter planes from ground-strike missions, had undermined the strength of their united front against Gaddafi. The longer the war continues the more likely the Benghazi rebels will turn to the US.
Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD)
For the last decade the US has been aggressively pushing for a missile defence shield in Eurasia due to apparent missile threats from rogue states such as Iran and North Korea. Obama has continued with this strategy. The use of sophisticated powerful radar in a missile defence programme also acts as a surveillance tool and this is what makes this type of technology very useful as it gives its owner a major strategic advantage over its adversaries. It is no wonder the US continues in its quest to aggressively expand its missile defence shield. The US plans through the missile shield to spread its costs amongst participant nations, but would also place a large chunk of European security in the hands of the US, weakening Europe against it. In April 2010’s nuclear security summit the US argued for France to give up its nuclear weapons when the missile shield is expanded. The US has used the divisions in Europe to play various nations against each other. Germany supports the missile defence shield and has gone beyond the USA in arguing all nuclear armed nations should replace their nuclear deterrence with the missile shield. If the US is eventually successful in constructing this missile defence shield it will prevent Europe from being independent. This means the US will provide Europe’s security, which will make them reliant and dependent on US.
Conclusions
Obama has shown that he is in reality no different to Bush. Pursuing US interests around the world and moving aside all obstacles. In Pakistan Obama has increased drone attacks against villages killing thousands of civilians. In the last decade US superiority has taken a hit, America’s dependency on Pakistan in Afghanistan and Iran in Iraq shows that without such surrogate leaders America would actually be in a much worse position. Whilst Obama in his speeches spoke of values and no doubt will continue such lies as the US gears up for elections, no one should be in doubt that it is colonialism under the guise of values such as democracy, human rights and freedom that Obama and his cronies espouse.