Obama abroad LEVEL PLAYING FIELD The Hindu 29 May) When it came to foreign affairs, Barack Obamas first

presidential task was a simp le one. He had to be better than his predecessor. For this alone, it seems, he w as awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. But those who hoped Obamas promise of change would apply to the USs relations to the rest of the world have been bitterly disappointed. His recent State Department speech and ensuing overseas tour are supposed to mark a new phase in US foreign policy, but its continuity, not change, that prevails. Obama spoke at length about self-determination as a driving force of both the Arab Spring and US policy. He also declared the US will not tolerate aggression acros s borders.Yet on a weekly basis his administration launches murder sorties agains t human targets in northern Pakistan. The great majority of the victims are guil tless civilians. Whats more, these flagrant violations of Pakistani sovereignty, carried on in defiance of direct appeals from Pakistans elected parliament, under mine the countrys vulnerable democracy and spur violent extremism. But they are d efined by Obama as essential to US security, and he accepts no check on that prero gative. The killing of Bin Laden was an extension of this policy of extra-territorial, e xtra-judicial assassination, with accompanying indifference to collateral damage. Instead of arrest and trial, Obamas team preferred a no-questions-asked execution and rapid disposal of the body. His subsequent insistence that he would do the same again, wherever the security of the US warranted it, is a re-statement of a u nique US prerogative: the right to conduct global search-and-destroy missions. T he US would not accept a similar claim from any other country, though it gives a pass to Israel. Obamas two years in office have seen an escalation of the Afghanistan war in US t roop numbers, in resistance to their presence, in civilian casualties. Obama now says there wont be a military solution, but its his regime that continues to try to implement one, at great cost to the welfare of Afghanis and their capacity for self-determination. Obama lectured the Arab world about taking responsibility and accused leaders in the region of blaming the west and Israel for all their ills. He spoke as if the US and its allies had not been instrumental in maintaining many of the regimes aga inst which people have rebelled, as if the US had nothing to do with Mubarak or Ben Ali, as if the US had not funded and did not continue to fund the Egyptian s ecurity services who may yet derail the revolution. Which leaders was Obama talkin g about? Mubarak or Sadat, Hussein and Abdullah in Jordan, Hassan II and Mohamme d VI in Morocco? The Gulf sheikhs or the Saudi royals? All promoted and thrived on strong ties with the US. This was one of several passages in Obamas speech that galled people who actually participated in the Arab Spring, as did its patronising tone and evasion of rec ent history. A serious departure from the past would have involved, at the least , some kind of acknowledgement of the role played in supporting regional despoti sms by the US and other western powers. Despite talk of humility the heart of Obam as policy, and his speech, is the opposite: a throbbing imperial presumption. It is of course when it comes to Israel that continuity in US policy is most mar ked. Under Obama, the billions in military and economic aid have increased; Isra el has enjoyed the protection of the US veto at the Security Council; mild objec

tions to Israels settlement expansion were easily rebuffed, while the ongoing wal l building, ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem, blockade of Gaza have been effectivel y endorsed. Obama has backed the Israeli rejection of the PLO-Hamas accord brokered by the n ew Egyptian government though to the rest of the world it is uncontroversially a step forward. In his speech he blamed the Palestinians for refusing to talk wit hout acknowledging that it is the settlement programme and Israeli attempts to e stablish facts on the ground that are making meaningful talks impossible. Althou gh Obama received some flack from the Israel lobby for talking about a return to pre-67 borders, he made it clear that his idea of a two state solution a non-mil itarised state on perhaps 60% of the occupied territories falls well short of any thing Palestinians could accept. Te current Libyan imbroglio was pushed by Britain and France, but it would not h ave got off the ground without Obamas support. In the end, the obvious perils of this adventure were outweighed by the opportunities it represented: to insert a friendly (dependent) government in an oil producing nation and resuscitate the d iscredited doctrine of liberal interventionism. The NATO attack may well have pr otected civilians in Benghazi, but it has now developed into an air war against the Gaddafi regime, a messy and prolonged exercise in regime change that may end in partition. US allies in Yemen and Bahrain were gently criticised in the Obama speech, but b oth showed just how seriously they took this slap on the wrist by escalating the ir violence against protesters in the following days. They know that under Obama the flow of US aid will not dry up. Even as Obama spoke, his representatives we re negotiating a major new military agreement with Saudi Arabia, the regions most repressive regime, whose counter-democratic intervention in Bahrain was supplie d and supported by the US. Crucially, Obama insists that democracy must be accompanied by what he calls econ omic reform, the neo-liberal prescriptions that have already exacerbated poverty, inequality and corruption in many west Asian and north African states and again st which the Arab Spring was in part a revolt. He wants the new democracies to p rove their credentials by opening their doors to predatory multi-nationals and e xposing themselves to destructive international competition. All of his proposal s for debt relief and aid are tied to this model, which Obama identified with th e free-booting capitalism that wrought havoc in Russia and Eastern Europe. In Latin America and the Caribbean, long seen by the US as its proprietary backy ard, the social and political forces which have ushered in egalitarian and in ma ny cases remarkably effective economic reform have been met with unremitting hos tility from Obamas administration. Here change is not welcome, even when it comes t hrough the ballot box or the moral force of non-violence that Obama praised in his speech. His administration sought to establish a new chain of US military bases in Colombia, a clear threat to neighbouring Venezuela and to regional stability which was stymied in the end by a new Venezuelan-Colombian treaty of cooperatio n, agreed against the State Departments wishes. In Honduras, a military coup against an elected left-leaning president was at fi rst condemned, then sanctioned and supported by Obamas people. In Haiti, they opp osed the return of former president Aristide, a social reformer who was democrat ically elected but ousted in a US-backed coup, and insisted on the exclusion of his popular party from the recent elections. Meanwhile, the US trade embargo on Cuba annually condemned by the United Nations has nearly completed its fifth dec ade. Unlike Bush, Obama is highly skilled in deploying the language of universality o n behalf of the expediencies of US power. But his credibility, globally, is in d

ecline, and his speech was met with derision by many of the ordinary people of the region it was supposed to address. This is not about Obamas personality or style or even his ideology. Nor is it abo ut the Israel lobby or domestic electoral considerations. US foreign policy is d eeply rooted in American Exceptionalism, of which Obama is a declared adherent, connected to a sense of western civilisational superiority, and overwhelmingly s haped by the needs and ambitions of US-based capital. Any real change will requi re a major rupture in US politics, and that will only emerge to the degree that the US and its allies meet resistance globally political, economic, cultural res istance. In this respect, Indias UN abstention on the Libya resolution (along wit h Russia, China and Germany) was an inadequate gesture.