Category Archives: History

Government, History, Politics, Society, United States

Barack Obama and foreign policy

UNITED STATES

barack-obama

President Obama gave his valedictory speech on Tuesday 10 January, 2017. Despite critics, he has achieved much on foreign policy.

Intro: Critics of Mr Obama’s foreign policy also often fail to acknowledge some of the significant accomplishments the President has achieved

Barack Obama has given his farewell address as US president from McCormick Place in Chicago, the venue for his election victory speech in 2008. This is the first time in US history that a president has returned to his hometown to deliver a valedictory speech to the nation, and Mr Obama vacates office on a seven-year high approval rating of 56 per cent (according to a poll conducted by Gallup).

Traditionally, farewell addresses have represented a legacy-defining opportunity for presidents to set out their accomplishments and by articulating a vision for the future. In many cases, the outgoing head of state has focused in large part upon foreign affairs, especially in the post-war period of US international leadership. This, too, became a central point of Mr Obama’s speech.

Harry Truman, for example, used his address in 1953 to talk about the emergence of the Cold War on his watch. On his departure from presidential office he said not a day had passed which had not been dominated by the conflict between those who love freedom and those who would have us return to the days of slavery and darkness. President Truman also outlined his rationale for using atomic weapons in Japan.

George W Bush defended his foreign policy and wider national security legacy in 2009. Despite approval ratings of just 34 per cent on leaving the White House, Mr Bush included in his triumphs that Afghanistan was no longer ruled by the Taliban. He also cited changes to the US security apparatus that he said contributed to the homeland avoiding attack in the seven years after 9/11.

Referring to some of his controversial calls, including the highly contentious decision to invade Iraq, Mr Bush said that he hoped people would understand that he was willing to take tough decisions.

Mr Obama’s farewell speech has been given at a time when there is rising criticism of his administration after Russia’s successful intervention in Syria to shore up the Assad regime, and the unravelling of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) which has caused angst with allies in the Asian Pacific. Critics have asserted that Washington has become significantly diminished on the world stage with weak presidential leadership responsible for the collapse of the TPP.

Others, however, will argue that this is too simplistic. For instance, while Mr Obama has not advanced his Asian “pivot” as fully as he would have hoped, it is actually President-Elect Donald Trump’s opposition to TPP that looks to have consigned the trade deal to history, not the Obama team (which has tried to cultivate it for years).

While Mr Obama has made multiple mistakes in the Middle East, his strategically political decision to downsize the US presence in the region was taken in the context of the mandate he perceived himself to have won after his election victory in 2008 – when a war-weary nation seemed to endorse his call that the Iraq conflict had been a costly mistake, and that the United States was militarily overstretched during the Bush presidency.

Critiques of the Obama doctrine on foreign policy also tend to omit that, whilst the United States is still regarded as the most powerful country in the world – certainly in a military sense – it is not by any means an all-powerful hegemonic power. This core fact has been demonstrated recently in Ukraine and Libya, but was also true of America following Somalia in 1993 and of Iraq and Afghanistan post 9/11.

Current geopolitical fault lines – where there are no easy, quick fix ways for the U.S. to enforce its policy preferences – are wide and varied. They include tensions with China over territorial claims in the South China Sea; the nuclear stand-off in the Korean peninsula that may yet intensify following impeachment proceedings of South Korea’s president; continuing instability in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya; the bleak prospects facing the Israeli-Palestinian peace process; and terrorism remaining a significant international concern a decade and a half after 9/11.

Critics of Mr Obama’s foreign policy also often fail to acknowledge some of the significant accomplishments the President has achieved, particularly given the backdrop of the high-risk political and economic landscape in which he has operated. One big positive, for instance, was the leadership taken by the United States in tackling global warming. Mr Obama’s efforts led to the climate change deal agreed in Paris in 2015 which was signed by more than 170 countries. Crucially, the deal will form the basis of a new post-Kyoto framework, essential if global warming is to be properly tackled. The Paris agreement was ratified and came into effect last November.

Another example is the 2014 nuclear deal with Iran and six other powers. The agreement, which Mr Trump has criticised, could enhance global nuclear security, as well as constituting an important win for longstanding efforts to combat nuclear non-proliferation.

Despite the incoming president’s rhetoric, there are many senior Republicans on Capitol Hill, including the Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who openly recognise the benefits the nuclear deal with Iran will bring. They are calling for it to be more strictly enforced, rather than being scrapped.

The resetting of relations with Cuba was also instigated on Mr Obama’s watch. In December 2014, the two countries announced they would restore diplomatic relations, and Mr Obama became the first US president to visit the country in 90 years. He announced a new suite of measures that further eroded the bilateral sanctions regime introduced during the Cold War era. The President-Elect has threatened to reverse all progress that has been made with Cuba.

In his speech on exiting the White House, Mr Obama robustly defended his foreign policy record at a time of growing unease and criticism. The outgoing president has achieved significant accomplishments, but, he knows much of his legacy now risks being rolled back. Mr Trump will have a very different vision and agenda to how he sees America shaping the world order.

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History, Japan, United States

Barack Obama and his work to heal the divisions with Japan

THE UNITED STATES & JAPAN

Intro: It has taken some considerable time with a lot of delicate negotiations, but it looks as if Barack Obama has cemented for his country a much better relationship with Japan. That legacy must be held in tack.

More than seventy years have passed since the infamous and devastating aerial attack on Pearl Harbor by Japanese forces. The attack imperilled more than 2,000 Americans and drew the United States directly into the Second World War.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has now become the first Japanese leader to make a public visit to the memorial for those killed in the bombing, and the first to the visit the Hawaiian naval base since 1951.

This momentous visit comes seven months after President Obama’s historic trip to Hiroshima, when he became the first sitting American president to visit the site where his predecessors authorised the dropping of a nuclear bomb in 1945. During the intervening years, the world has changed dramatically since the Pearl Harbor raid and it may seem inconceivable that we would ever again be at war with Japan. Two countries who are now close allies lies in stark contrast to the bitterest of enemies they once were. The significance of these recent gestures, however, cannot be underestimated.

Mr Obama’s presidency which will shortly come to an end will be largely remembered for his impressive skills within international diplomacy. Yet, it has taken his full eight years in office to create and cement this new understanding and heal the wounds that have been festering for many decades.

Of concern for many now is what may happen when he departs the White House next month and is replaced by Donald Trump. Mr Trump will be sworn in as the 45th president of the United States on January 20, 2017. Let’s all hope it doesn’t take him any more than a few minutes to undermine and unravel an important bilateral relationship – one that has taken a good part of a century of careful work and stewardship to piece together.

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Arts, Books, Britain, History

Book Review: ‘The History Thieves’…

BOOK REVIEW

the-history-thieves

In this important new book, Ian Cobain offers a fresh appraisal of some of the key moments in British history since the end of WWII.

THIS carefully written and well-researched book takes deadly aim at the official version of modern British history. During our school years, we are taught that we are a decent and tolerant nation, and that the state does not assassinate its opponents, use torture or commit atrocities. Ian Cobain argues that this picture is both complacent and untrue, and he provides chilling evidence and testimony that the British state has routinely committed appalling crimes. Many of them, he argues, have been fought in wars well away from the public eye.

How many people know, for instance, that it was Britain – not the French or Americans – who launched the Vietnam conflict, airlifting the entire 20th Infantry Division of the British Indian Army to Indo-China in 1945 with orders to suppress a Vietnamese attempt to form their own government?

Who knows, too, about the four-year-long war fought by the British in Indonesia in the Sixties, or the decade-long counter-insurgency campaign in Oman on the Arabian Peninsula?

Cobain methodically calculates that British forces have been engaged somewhere in the world every year since at least 1914. Between 1949 and 1970, Britain initiated 34 foreign interventions. No other country, not even Russia or the United States, has such a record.

Yet, for the most part, British people are blithely unaware of any of this. Cobain argues that the reason for their ignorance is a culture of national secrecy more thoroughgoing than that of France or the U.S. He shows that the brutal Oman war went unreported for many years. And when wars did get reported, it was by tame journalists passing on doctored version of events.

Many of these events and wars also remain a mystery to historians. Cobain proves the British authorities have arranged the suppression – or destruction – of documents that portray Britain in a bad light. Thousands of incriminating files have been incinerated or dumped at sea, while others remain hidden in secret archives.

Cobain calls this “an extraordinary ambitious act of history theft”. He maintains “the British state of the late 20th and early 21st century was attempting to protect the reputation of the British state of generations earlier, concealing and manipulating history – sculpting an official narrative – in a manner more associated with a dictatorship than a mature and confident democracy”.

The author explains that the problem is getting worse because of recent legislation pushed through by the Coalition enabling suspects to be tried in secret courts, meaning that defendants do not even know the charges being made against them. The real reason for much of this secrecy, suggests Cobain, is not to ensure justice, but rather to protect the reputation of intelligence officers complicit in crimes such as torture and rendition.

Cobain is an honest and accurate reporter, but there is one serious criticism of the book. It does not give enough voice to the Whitehall figures whose job it is to fight terrorism and make sensitive decisions about British foreign policy.

They have the grave and very difficult task of ensuring atrocities are not carried out on the streets of Britain – and, in recent years, they have been successful in this vital and largely thankless task. Their need to work in secret is all too understandable.

Whilst we have nothing in our recent history comparable to the appalling atrocities committed by the French in Algeria, or the Belgians in the Congo – let alone the mass murders of Stalin, Mao or Hitler – most Britons should continue to believe that we live in a fair and honest country.

Nevertheless, Ian Cobain has written an important book which deserves to change the way we see our recent past. It warns us against complacency, and exposes why we should challenge what we have been taught from a young age.

–     The History Thieves by Ian Cobain is published by Portobello for £20.

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