Obama Does Globalistan

This essay is a companion to my own Globalistan, published in early 2007, which I defined as a warped geopolitical travel book. I argued then that in a context of re-medievalization - the world fragmented into "stans" - we are now living an intestinal war, an undeclared global civil war. Borrowing from Zygmunt Bauman's concept of liquid modernity, I called it Liquid War - and not only because of the global scramble for "black gold" oil and "blue gold" gas. Globalistan was essentially a long reportage crisscrossing the world. This text reflects the fact that I spent most of 2008 in the U.S. following the presidential campaign. As far as New Rome is concerned I'm usually outside looking in - the point of view of my dying profession, the foreign correspondent. In this text I'm most of the time inside looking out. Globalistan can be read as an on the ground - and underground - report on the Bush administration wasteland. This text could be something of a last chapter - out of the belly of the beast. 2009 is the Mother of all celebratory years. The 20 years of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The 30 years of the Iranian Islamic revolution. The 50 years of the Cuban revolution. The 60 years of NATO. The 70 years of World War II. The 80 years of the Great Depression. The 90 years of the Versailles Treaty. It's as if the world was turning on its gyre as in a psychedelic kaleidoscope reviving modern history in high-speed. And which figure comes out of the kaleidoscope, grinning his cool, calm and collected best to deal with a 1929-style crisis, the new Cold War or perhaps to conduct Versailles-style diplomacy? Barack Hussein Obama.

The Global Obama examines the president’s image in five continents and more than twenty countries. It is the first book to look at Barack Obama’s presidency and analyze how Obama and America are viewed by publics, governments, and political commentators around world. The author of Barack Obama in Hawaii and Indonesia: The Making of a Global President (Top 10 Black History Book) scaled the globe to gather opinions – cultural, historical, and political analyses – about Obama’s leadership style. Writers, journalists, psychologists, consultants, and social scientists present their views on Obama’s leadership, popularity, and many of the global challenges that still remain unresolved. As a progress report, this is the first book that tries to grasp ‘the Obama phenomenon’ in totality, as perceived by populations around the world with special focus on America’s leadership in the 21st Century.

Today, American sovereignty is more challenged than ever before, not from enemies that threaten us militarily but from “friends” who urge us to share or reduce our sovereignty for larger global objectives. How Barack Obama is Endangering our National Sovereignty reveals what sovereignty means to Americans, not as an abstraction but as a vibrant component of self government. Former Ambassador to the U.N. John R. Bolton looks at specific threats to U.S. sovereignty, from “global governance” to the White House, and recommends what Americans can do to defend their sovereignty and resist encroachments from the wide array of challenges we face, internationally and in our own domestic politics.

Barack Obama's foreign policy has failed but the American strategic mind has not yet closed. In After Obama, Robert Singh examines how and why US influence has weakened and contributed to the erosion of the world America made, endangering international order and liberal values. A well-intentioned but naive strategy of engagement has encouraged US adversaries such as Russia, China and Iran to assert themselves while allowing Western alliances to fray. But, challenging claims of an inevitable American decline, Singh argues that US leadership is a matter of will as much as wallet. Despite partisan polarization at home and the rise of the rest abroad, Washington can renew American leadership and, through a New American Internationalism, pave a path to the restoration of global order. Timely and provocative, the book offers a powerful critique of the Obama Doctrine and a call for strategic resolution in place of 'leading from behind'.

This book argues that critical international and domestic crises, such as the U.S. war in Iraq and the Great Recession, forced President Barack Obama to readjust U.S. foreign policy after over 70 years of American hegemony and defending the global status quo. It examines the range of external pressures and challenges brought on by an increasingly multipolar international system, shifting domestic political forces, and limited foreign policy choices. The book provides an overview of the extent of foreign policy change and continuity in Obama’s foreign policy toward Europe, Asia and the Pacific, and the Middle East. The book assesses domestic and international pressure points in the wake of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and the Great Recession that shaped and defined Obama’s foreign policy preferences. The war in Iraq and the Great Recession, in addition to rising economic inequality and hyper-partisanship at home, emerging markets in Asia and the rise of China, and Russian resurgence in Europe and the Middle East, would determine and constrain the extent to which Obama was able to lead U.S. foreign policy and the foreign policymaking process. These ultimately contributed to a more scaled-back and limited U.S. role in the world during Obama’s presidency, culminating in the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump who promised to turn the U.S. away from globalization and questioned longstanding U.S. alliances. In the end, the theme of “nation-building here at home” under Obama gave way to “America First” under Trump.

This book presents selected non-US views of the Barack Obama administration. Each chapter investigates eight years of the Obama presidency from a different national perspective. By bringing together fourteen country studies from all regions of the world, this volume offers an accumulative global view of the Obama White House’s foreign policies and bilateral affairs. It provides an outside perspective on a presidency that was initially greeted with much enthusiasm world-wide, but seemed to fall out of favor over time in most countries. The overwhelming hope that was associated with the election of Obama in 2008 turned to disillusionment world-wide; the changes in US external affairs he promised were only partially fulfilled and the world was reminded that America’s place and role in the world would not change dramatically, not even under the inspirational Obama.

This edited volume is an innovative analysis of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy, security and counter-terrorism policy, specifically within the context of ending the now infamous War on Terror. The book adopts a comparative approach, analysing change and continuity in US foreign policy during Obama’s first term in office vis-à-vis the foreign policy of the War on Terror, initiated by George W. Bush following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Despite being heralded as an agent of change, since his election in 2008 Obama has faced criticism that his foreign policy is effectively the same as what went before and that the War on Terror is still alive and well. Far from delivering wholesale change, Obama has been accused of replicating and even reinforcing the approach, language and policies that many anticipated he would reject. With contributions from a range of US foreign policy experts, this volume analyses the extent to which these criticisms of continuity are correct, identifying how the failure to end the War on Terror is manifest and explaining the reasons that have made enacting change in foreign policy so difficult. In addressing these issues, contributions to this volume will discuss continuity and change from a range of perspectives in International Relations and Foreign Policy Analysis. This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of US foreign policy, security studies and American politics.

After one of the most controversial and divisive periods in the history of American foreign policy under President George W. Bush, the Obama administration was expected to make changes for the better in US relations with the wider world. Now, international problems confronting Obama appear more intractable, and there seems to be a marked continuity in policies between Obama and his predecessor. Robert Singh argues that Obama's approach of 'strategic engagement' was appropriate for a new era of constrained internationalism, but it has yielded modest results. Obama's search for the pragmatic middle has cost him political support at home and abroad, whilst failing to make decisive gains. Singh suggests by calibrating his foreign policies to the emergence of a 'post-American'world, the president has yet to preside over a renaissance of US global leadership. Ironically,Obama's policies have instead hastened the arrival of a post-American world.

An informed impartial review of the changes in US Foreign and Strategic Policy during the Obama Presidency, their impact on US image abroad, strengthening of some alliances while weakening of others, with the hindsight of US foreign policy history. A review of the implications of Obamas Pacific focus and its implications for US relations with Europe, China and Russia. A look at Afghanistan, Pakistan and US policy in the Middle East.

As Obama nears the middle of his first-term as president Paul Street assesses his performance against the expectations of his supporters. While mainstream journalists have noted discrepancies between Obama's original vision and reality, Paul Street uniquely measures Obama's record against the expectations of the truly progressive agenda many of his supporters expected him to follow. Taken together, the list of Obama's weakened policies is startling: his business-friendly measures with the economy, the lack of support for the growing mass of unemployed and poor, the dilution of his health reform agenda, the passage of a record-setting Pentagon budget, and escalation of US military violence in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Street's account reveals these and many other indications of how deeply beholden Obama is to existing dominant domestic and global hierarchies and doctrines.