Obama's High Hopes

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The United States recently celebrated its 234^th birthday.

In the 19^th and 20^th centuries, much of American politics revolved around gender, racial and religious issues.

Today, however, the country’s difficulties to a large extent are found in the realm of the economy and international relations.

The main foreign policy problem remains the Afghanistan conflict including, increasingly, relations with Kabul’s neighbour Pakistan, an ostensible yet unreliable ally.

These are the sorts of troubles that face an overstretched empire.

U.S. administrations since 2001 have spoken about fighting two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan. But America hasn’t admitted to itself that these are colonial conflicts. Every empire fights these, and they pop up all over the place. Ask any 19th century Briton or Frenchman.

During the long period of European dominance of the “third world,” the various imperial countries were constantly engaged in low-grade colonial wars, often with mercenary troops, against so-called “troublemakers” – though the racist discourse of the time of course used words far worse than that.

But no one “at home” considered these campaigns to mean the country was “at war” – that meant fighting “real” wars against other major states.

Maybe the U. S. had become too cocky in the 1990s, when it was temporarily the world’s only major power. Russia was then a pitiful laughingstock run by a drunken Boris Yeltsin.

NATO and America, full of hubris, had laughed at the Soviet failure in Afghanistan and grabbed Kosovo from Serbia in 1999, knowing Russia was too weak to do anything about it.

But who’s laughing now? Bill Clinton’s economic boom gave way to George W. Bush’s meltdown, as the post-2001 hostilities in Iraq and Afghanistan drove the U.S. ever further into debt, partly because Bush had instituted a tax cut which left the country vulnerable to a financial crisis -- which indeed occurred in 2008.

The Afghan mujahadeen of yesterday are today’s Taliban and nobody is going to expand NATO into places like Georgia (which lost South Ossetia and Abkhazia to the Russians in 2008) or Ukraine.

On a visit to Georgia in early July, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to reassure its leaders that they will not be abandoned as the Obama administration improves relations with Russia. But they have cause to worry.

In fact NATO itself is increasingly obsolete in this post-Cold War era of financial austerity. Of its 28 members only four besides the U.S. spend the required two per cent of their national budgets on defence.

Barack Obama came into office with high hopes. It would be truly tragic if his domestic initiatives got shelved due to a costly overseas war -- as happened to Lyndon Johnson with Vietnam in the 1960s.