President Obama and a Political Embarrassment

President Obama has damaged the prestige of the office of President of the United States.  He never meant to but he allowed it to happen.  And now he is having the greatest difficulty in gaining his principal policy  objectives either domestically or  strategically and globally.   In both these sets of failures he damages the people of the United States.

The setting up of global governance institutions has long been an over-arching American policy.  Global governance institutions, that is, dominated and led by the United States.  And in this the support of the governments and political elites of other regions and nations has been sought.  It is one thing to have the New American Century and world dominance by a single super power and quite another to seek to embody the delivery of that power via institutional arrangements other than brute force.  President Obama was elected with such enthusiasm because he stood for the delivery of American-led global governance through progressive institutional arrangements (though the employment of brute force was a necessary part of the policy where 'failed' states and/or 'humanitarian' offences demanded it). All of this was enthusiastically supported by the New Labour Project in the United Kingdom. And resisted, discreetly but with profound determination by the European Union core,  by the Russian Federation and its political policies towards its Near Abroad,  by China and its SCO. 

For the American Republicans it was in American interests to control Iraq, and they set about doing that.  Blair started the pressure for 'going the UN route', seeking global and institutional approval which seriously interfered with the efficacy of US planning for war and put the US into a wholly unnecessary - from a US Republican viewpoint -   questionable moral stance, but Blair had the common sense to offer support to  the US no matter what, while pointing out that the global governance agenda using the shell UN institution could be given a boost on the way.  The US took 40,000 UK troops in exchange for some gesture politics and a bonus swipe at the EU, and did what they meant to do anyway. But they had been dragged into a politics of inferiors that ate into their autonomous decision-taking.

Once started the impetus of the Project's global governance programme was difficult to halt.   Afghanistan transformed from an American assault after 9/11 into a UN sanctioned occupation attempting to hold down insurgency.  Most of the 40 odd nation states with troops in Afghanistan regard them as peace-keepers and rebuilders of a shattered and poverty-stricken country, not occupation forces - so much so that irritated America has replaced entire military areas held by diverse  forces with US zones with separate administrations and much larger forces.  And in the meantime the UK has replaced a US satrap Blair with a global governance and its institutions Brown.  A Brown who impudently and disloyally sees a leading role for himself in the New Order.

The new American President was simply not ready for the breath-taking hubris of Brown.  Facing his country's concern about the naked use of American power unmediated by reference to 'allies',  and with the ignoring of dead-in-the-water 'global' international institutions; faced by the cruelties of war shocking his people; faced by the loss of US grip on Afghanistan; faced by a major financial crisis; faced by the obvious requirement that response to the financial crisis needed international co-ordination, he was ambushed by a poisonous opportunist who chance had made the G20 host nation for the next meeting. 

Mr Obama should have been seen to be consulting as the President of America, and then acting with leadership and decision, not giving photo-opportunities to London opportunists.  He gave priority to a 'global governance' agenda that reduced recognition of the power and status of the United States.  President Obama did it again in Copenhagen, enticed by a dubiously arranged Nobel Prize, and bi-laterals with Russian Federation leaders that should have been organised and conducted elsewhere.

By the time the United States had undermined Brown's London Afghanistan Conference with decisions and arrangements properly taken beforehand and in bi-lateral consultation with other governments, it was too late.  And the image of an American President being hounded through the UN kitchens by a political beggar, coupled now with the image of a naked, obscenely-phrased, rant in a Washington hotel bedroom sticks in the public mind.

It is no wonder that President Obama's authority is under extreme test at home and abroad.  But he doesn't need this.  He needs Brown and Brown's self-aggrandising globalist agenda off the international stage as early as can be arranged.