Dr N. Janardhan :
When Barack Obama won the presidential bid in 2008, it was tough to be even remotely critical of the first African-American to occupy the White House. More than five years later, it is tough to highlight anything remotely positive.
Despite a comfortable re-election in 2012, Obama has moved from one predicament to another on domestic and international issues, receiving flak for the way his administration has handled or mishandled them.
The latest round of criticism revolves around the recent State of the Union address. While Obama concentrated mostly on domestic issues in light of the mid-term polls in November, the gist of his foreign and defence policy in the annual address was that Washington would limit US military intervention in conflicts around the world, without neglecting global terrorism.
The criticism must be seen in the context of two US decisions related to the Gulf and Middle East – retreating on the chemical weapons ‘red line’ that he emphasised as a condition for military intervention in Syria, and the negotiations on Iran’s nuclear programme and rapprochement with the Islamic republic. These policies reflect either or both the following sentiments: Washington’s decline as an unchallenged superpower due to its economic woes and the desire to focus on domestic issues at the expense of its international role.
With less than three years remaining in his second term, the US president has failed to turn around the American economy in the manner he had claimed he would during his first campaign trails. Since his domestic legacy hinges more on stabilising the economy, Obama’s recent external policies clearly stress the mantra that “it’s the economy, stupid”.
Obama recognises a major reason that triggered the US economic slump – the George W. Bush administration’s misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, which is estimated to finally cost the United States up to $6 trillion, mostly borrowed from international lenders at high interest. According to a 2013 report by Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, these “will be the most expensive wars in US history” and the decisions revolving around them would impact federal budgets for decades.
Apart from the lives lost, the financial costs include “long-term medical care and disability compensation for (American) service members, veterans and families, military replenishment and social and economic costs… paying off trillions of dollars in debt incurred as the US government failed to include them in annual budgets… (and) huge expenditures to replace military equipment used in the two wars”.
This has made Americans favour a diminished US security role abroad, which has been recognised by Washington. According to a Council on Foreign Relations and Pew Research Center survey last December, 53 percent of those polled opined that Washington was less important and powerful in global affairs than it was a decade earlier. More importantly, 52 percent felt that Washington should “mind its own business internationally and let other nations get along the best they can on their own”. It is the most emphatic response on this issue since about five decades.
This was qualified by a record 80 percent wishing that Washington would “concentrate more on national” than international problems.
In the past, while most of Washington’s foreign policies have been good for America, even if they had disastrous consequences for other countries, some may have beneficial to the world at large, even if they had undesired consequences for the United States. Obama’s latest ‘defensive’ strategy, however, could be categorised as falling somewhere in between – a win-win scenario for the United States and the world.
‘No offence, mostly defence’ is a good economic and diplomatic policy, especially since the United States has earned more enemies than friends during the last few decades of its aggressive foreign policy. It is this understanding – maximum economic growth as the ‘end’ through minimum external military engagement as the ‘means’ – that could have conditioned Obama’s recent strategies. The point is, why tread the road of military conflict when good results can be achieved through diplomacy. More seems to have been achieved through negotiations with Iran than has been seemingly achieved through the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
Thus, if Bill Clinton’s presidency could be termed as ‘economic highs and Lewinsky lows’, George W. Bush’s as ‘military highs and economic lows’, Obama’s term – going by his five-year reign – could still end up being ‘economic and military lows’.
Not doing much or anything at all is a great risk for anyone, let alone a politician. But Obama seems to have mastered this by doing very little and still appearing to be attempting radical change, irrespective of the results. While the jury is still out on what his final legacy at home would be, his external policies so far mean that Obama could still be the first US president in recent memory to finish, not one, but two terms without waging direct wars against any country in the world.
Just on this count, he deserves a better international approval rating than the prevailing 43 percent among Americans. And for those displeased in the Gulf and Middle East about US policies, it is time to ponder alternative strategies, boldly experiment and intensify regional solutions to tackle regional problems.
(Dr N. Janardhan is a UAE-based political analyst)
