Abstract
This article reviews the foreign policy of the Obama administration with a special focus on the Middle East. It shows the gap between the lofty rhetoric of the President, a great orator, and the decisions taken by the Administration. This gap is the inevitable result of the normal play of forces in the decision-making process involving many actors and the interplay of domestic policies and foreign policy. The author argues that if Obama’s foreign policy is analyzed in electoral and domestic terms then it is quite wrong to argue, as some have done, that it is dumb. Smart in electoral terms, however, does not necessarily mean smart on the international stage.
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Notes
John Feffer, Foreign Policy in Focus, September 6, 2012. http://www.fpif.org/articles/dumb_and_dumber_obamas_smart_power_foreign_policy
March-April 2004, Vol 83, Number 2.
“Get Smart, Combining Hard and Soft Power,” Foreign Affairs, July-August 2009. “’Smart power’ is a term I developed in 2003 to counter the misperception that soft power alone can produce effective foreign policy.” The whole article is a rejoinder to Leslie Gelb.
Found on http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/ and reported by The Guardian, 13 January 2009.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/13/hillary-clinton-confirmation-hearing-senate
The full text can be found at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/us/politics/04obama.text.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
See: Pierre Guerlain, “The United States and the World,” Huffington Post, November 2, 2012 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/pierre-guerlain/the-united-states-and-the_b_2066736.html
“The New Israel and the Old,” Foreign Affairs, July-August 2008, p. 28–46. Meade adds: “In the United States, a pro-Israel foreign policy does not represent the triumph of a small lobby over the public will. It represents the power of public opinion to shape foreign policy in the face of concerns by foreign policy professionals.” This is an important aspect which however begs the question of how public opinion is shaped. Further down the writer adds: “THE UNITED STATES’ sense of its own identity and mission in the world has been shaped by readings of Hebrew history and thought. The writer Herman Melville expressed this view: ‘We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people--the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.’”
American support for Israel is confirmed in a Pew Research Center poll: http://www.people-press.org/2012/03/15/little-support-for-u-s-intervention-in-syrian-conflict/?src=prc-headline
see also: http://www.gallup.com/poll/161387/americans-sympathies-israel-match-time-high.aspx
Peter Beinart, The Crisis of Zionism, New York, Henry Holt, 2012, p. 154.
Trita Parsi, A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran, 2012, New Haven, Yale University Press.
See : Josh Ruebner, Shattered Hopes: Obama’s Failure to Broker Israeli-Palestinian Peace, 2013, London, Verso.
“If there’s no two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict soon, Israel risks becoming “an apartheid state” The Daily Beast, April 4, 2014 available at: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/27/exclusive-kerry-warns-israel-could-become-an-apartheid-state.html This was in a closed-door meeting. Kerry used a term former President Carter had used in relation to the occupied territories but that Obama has always rejected.
“Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?pagewanted=all
“Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding ‘kill list,’ poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre ‘baseball cards’ of an unconventional war. When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises — but his family is with him — it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.”
Lawrence Lessig, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It, New York, Hachette Books, 2011.
Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby and U.S Foreign Policy, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007
Trita Parsi (op cit p. 167) quotes an article by Barak Ravid in the Israeli paper Haaretz March 10, 2010 reporting the words of Netanyahu’s brother-in-law about Obama: “When there is an anti-Semitic president in the United States, it is a test for us and we have to say: we will not concede.” He added: “We are a nation dating back 4 000 years, and you in a year or two will be long forgotten. Who will remember you? But Jerusalem will dwell on forever.”
Pappé makes this point in “Clusters of history: US involvement in the Palestine question”, Race & Class, January 2007 48: 1-28
The Guardian, “Israeli attack on Iran ’would not stop nuclear programme’”, August 31, 2012 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/30/israeli-attack-iran-not-stop-nuclear?newsfeed=true
“In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it, ”The New York Times, “Warning Against Wars Like Iraq and Afghanistan”, Feb 25, 2011
The phrase “the manufacture of consent” was coined by Walter Lippmann in his 1922 book Public Opinion but became widely used after the book by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, New York, Pantheon Books, 1988.
op cit. p. 211-212
See Seymour Hersh, “Our Men In Iran”, The New Yorker, April 6, 2012. Hersh writes: “The M.E.K. had its beginnings as a Marxist-Islamist student-led group and, in the nineteen-seventies, it was linked to the assassination of six American citizens.”
The political site Pro-publica has a special section devoted to drones. http://www.propublica.org/series/drones
“When Israelis degrade Israel by humiliating Joe Biden”, Haaretz, March 10, 2010 http://www.haaretz.com/news/when-israelis-degrade-israel-by-humiliating-joe-biden-1.264406
Pierre Guerlain, “La politique étrangère de l’administration Obama: continuités et contraintes”, Recherches Internationales, N° 91, Juillet-Septembre 2011, pp. 121-150
Reported by the New York Times, “Obama Lays Out Case for Israel to Revive Peace Talks”, March 21, 2013. Obama repeated his support for a Palestinian state. He also repeated some of the points he had made in Cairo four years earlier though he was not proposing peace negotiations. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/22/world/middleeast/obama-lays-out-case-for-israel-to-revive-peace-talks.html?hp&_r=0
In an article critical of Obama but full of praise for Richard Holbrooke, his boss, and Hillary Clinton the former Secretary of State, Vali Nasr writes about the President: “His actions from start to finish were guided by politics, and they played well at home.” Nasr’s views differ significantly from those expressed here but he highlights the key bifurcation in the evaluation of foreign policy. “The Inside Story of How the White House Let Diplomacy Fail in Afghanistan”, Foreign Policy, March-April 2013. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/03/04/the_inside_story_of_how_the_white_house_let_diplomacy_fail_in_afghanistan?page=full
The whole document can be downloaded at: http://openchannel.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/04/16843014-justice-department-memo-reveals-legal-case-for-drone-strikes-on-americans?lite&preview=true
“Drones, Kill Lists and Machiavelli”, February 12, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/13/opinion/drones-kill-lists-and-machiavelli.html
Glenn Greenwald’s columns in The Guardian deal with the link between foreign policy and the violation of civil liberties in the US. For instance: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/10/paul-filibuster-drones-progressives
See Pierre Guerlain, “Kerry, Drones and Cultural Diplomacy”, Huffington Post, January 30, 2013 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/pierre-guerlain/us-drone-strikes_b_2576829.html
“How We Made Killing Easy”, February 6, 2013, http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/feb/06/drones-killing-made-easy/
David Cole edited The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable, Oxford, Oneworld, 2009.
See: “An Inconvenient Truth, Finally proof that the United States has lied in the drone wars”, Foreign Policy, April 10, 2013
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/04/10/an_inconvenient_truth_drones
And the report which prompted this article:
Jonothan Landay “Obama’s drone war kills ‘others,’ not just al Qaida leaders”,
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/04/09/188062/obamas-drone-war-kills-others.html
New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
This is the topic of the book by the renowned French international relations scholar, Bertrand Badie, Le Temps des humiliés ; Pathologie des relations internationales, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2014.
On the rise of opposition to the US caused by US policies see: Mark Danner, « Cheney : ‘The More Ruthless the Better », New York Review of Books, May 8, 2014.
“No Accountability for Torturers”, The Huffington Post, 9/4/ 2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marjorie-cohn/no-accountability-for-tor_b_1851826.html
Marjorie Cohn edited the book The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration and Abuse, New York, NY University Press, 2011.
Typical of this approach two books written by French specialists of US foreign policy:
Justin Vaïsse, Barack Obama et sa politique étrangère, Paris Odile Jacob, 2012.
Zaiki Laïdi, Le Monde selon Obama : la politique étrangère des Etats-Unis, Paris, Flammarion, 2012.
An American book that focuses on hard power on Robert Lieber, Power and Willpower in the American Future: Why the US is not Destined to Decline, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Arendt, Hannah. “Lying in Politics: Reflections on The Pentagon Papers”, New York Review of Books, 18 November 1971.
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Guerlain, P. Obama’s Foreign Policy: “Smart Power,” Realism and Cynicism. Soc 51, 482–491 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-014-9814-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-014-9814-x