But Obama’s stance also recognizes the salience of the war on terrorism in American public opinion, which would mean that any policy other than the harshest against such acts, would be perceived by American citizens as being soft on terrorism. Analysts of American foreign policy will quickly recognize that this is not dissimilar to the manner in which any stance of what was perceived as timidity in dealing with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, was to be avoided by American presidents. And this approach came to define a degree of ideological and policy consensus, and therefore stability, in American foreign policy irrespective of the party in office.
Candidate Obama’s approach in foreign relations during the elections, particularly in relation to Iraq, might have led some to believe that he would proceed to undertake what has been referred to as a policy of engagement, rather than persistent threats of war – the way in which Bush’s approach was perceived. In fact, however, close observers noticed that General Petraeus’s strategy, accepted by the Bush administration as it came to an end, was largely accepted by Obama during the election campaign. This allowed him to stave off any pressure from Republicans who might have wished to position him as a cut-and-run candidate on the Iraq issue, and therefore on other issues and areas in which the US considered itself to be involved in the war on terrorism. The main difference that arose on Iraq during the campaign was that involving the Guantanamo detainees. But the practical difficulties involved in removing them from that military base, has now narrowed the differences between the Republican supporters of the Bush policy and Obama.
Obama’s electoral policy on Afghanistan emphasized the Petraeus strategy of consolidating strategic areas with measured, but not dramatic, increases of American military forces, while concentrating on securing the significant population centres and subsequently reducing the number of troops required. Obama’s presidential policy has differed from this only in allowing Petraeus not to have as many troops as he desired. But commentators suggest that it is unlikely, given the prestige of both Petraeus, and the active general in the field, McChrystal, that Obama’s figure is fixed in stone. For these commentators are noticing the increasing prestige and influence of the generals in American foreign policy making in this period of ‘war.’ And they wonder whether the President, in period of a certain wobbliness in his Democratic majority support, will feel constrained to continually look for a middle ground which, they fear, will come to be defined by Republican rigidity.
As we had suggested in an earlier editorial, the Afghanistan war has really come now to be defined as ‘Obama’s war.’ We are encouraged by the President’s stance on the Yemen-Nigerian terror alert, to suspect that as time goes on, what will be seen by Americans as their country’s now global war on terrorism will come to be seen as Obama’s war as well. It is not that the Yemen is a new issue for American foreign policy. This country, an amalgam of two Yemeni republics, each with a record of persistent instability since its independence, and not made any less unstable since their merger, is well known to Americans as the location from which attacks on a US navy destroyer were made in 2000, as well as a subsequent attack on the US Embassy in 2008. But Yemen has now been fixed within the context of the use of its territory by al Qaeda, and therefore gains a reinforced prominence in American foreign policy and military strategy.
The question arising in the minds of Obama supporters is the extent to which these new trends influencing his policymaking will permit him to hold on to his original electoral stance, elaborated during his presidential visits to Egypt and China, and in his withdrawal of the Bush strategy of missile defence in ex-communist Eastern European countries. His Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech went a little beyond what was perceived to be his general line. It sought to define the American justification for “just war” conducted within the context of the contemporary approaches to war by the enemies of the United States – statist or terrorist groups using other people’s states. Thus his advocacy of the use of large numbers of troops for the stabilization of countries affected by terrorism (al Qaeda), and the recent revival of a previous strategy (originally drawn largely from the British experience in Malaya in the 1950s) of joining active military engagement to efforts at economic and political stabilization.
But Obama’s more liberal supporters fear that they are seeing the ghost of President Johnson’s strategy in Vietnam, which led to the demise of a once supremely popular President, known for his ability to manipulate the Congress to his will. They wonder at the prospect of President Obama, corralled on all sides by a Republican party apparently regaining its confidence after November 2008, being constrained to follow traditional approaches to dealing with ‘shadow enemies’ whether the Vietcong, Bin Laden or al Qaeda. And their fear really is that the President will become embroiled in defending his external war policies to such an extent, that his domestic policies will become hostage to them. Not to talk of the task of redefining the global balance of power and economic relations, as China and indeed the Asian continent assert their insistence that they must have their fair place in the determination of global economic and political policies in this decade and the following.
