generalspeaking

The Retiring President

"One wonders whether Americans, including their representatives and their presidents, quite understand what is at stake."
Robert Kagan: Superpowers Don't Get to Retire essayist

The United States, famously the sole remaining world superpower whose opinions, actions, steerage and interventions on the world stage has earned it both praise and condemnation but whose robust responses to world crises the world has nonetheless learned to depend upon since the 1940s, has suddenly slumped into isolationist mode. And that appears to be a state of being that is popularly supported by a majority of Americans.

Who, at the very same time, censor their president, considering him to be the least popular president in a very, very long time. His fall from the grace of high public and international acclaim due in part to the high expectations that resulted from his campaign verbal skills in promising, enthusing and infusing the American electorate with the assurance that by electing him as president of the United States of America, they would, with him at the helm, achieve peace, order and prosperity.

More latterly, his lacklustre responses to external events impacting the world at large have revealed his indecision where expectations were high that he would be resolute in facing such challenges. He relied instead on the power of words, perhaps not quite understanding, from his academic philosophic provenance that words are only powerful when they're backed up by action that gives meaning to the promise of the words; that once a statement of intent is issued, it becomes null and void without support of action and elicits derision.

Europe has waited with bated breath for President Obama to lead and guide them by his own example in responding appropriately to the threats emanating from Moscow, challenging the sovereignty of Ukraine by undermining its authority, inciting to violence, exporting its Russian intelligence agents to pose as rebels, and completely subverting Ukrainian order. Now that the violence which has exploded in eastern Ukraine following on Vladimir Putin's annexation of Crimea has created an atrocity of international mass murder, American response has been less than admirable.

Despite Britain and the United States calling for tougher sanctions to avoid a deterioration of the situation in Ukraine in the face of Russia's providing ethnic Russian separatists with heavy weapons, they appear to have been unable to convince themselves to impose that call for tougher sanctions on a Russian economy that is already reeling from its own economic downturn along with milder sanctions in name only.

The visionary dream of a united Europe that sought to prevent any single member-state from bankruptcy, and whose combined cooperation would result in greater, more even prosperity across the continent appears to have had its day. More appealing to some countries appears to have been their joining NATO, to ensure security from belligerence emanating from Russia. But it is not a physical confrontation that the world envisions now to solve such irredentist problems as Russia is now presenting.

The Obama administration has succeeded in mis-filing so many issues on the world stage, from exiting Iraq and Afghanistan, its relations with Pakistan, its response to Syria's chemical weapons attacks on its own Sunni population, the unwillingness to engage in Libya, in Syria, hastening the incursion of violent Islamists into the fray and enabling ISIS to its propaganda extravaganza of an Islamic Caliphate drawing in ever greater number of psychopaths to embroil the Middle East in a mass bloodbath, speaks of a failure to engage by the United States.

The threat posed by a nuclear-possessing Iran determined to amass weaponry reflective of a nuclear nightmare has particularly revealed the lack of responsibility now evidenced on every file facing the United States, including its more latterly focus alongside Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines facing off against a spreading encroachment entitlement in the East and South China Seas by the growing colossus of China.

China's fondness for North Korea as its guide steering it to provoke the West by proxy is redolent of its contempt for the power and influence and promise to action that the United States has now permitted to limply lapse. The recent cooperation between Russia and China on the world stage does not auger well for the balance the world has seen recently teeter on the edge of disorder.

Labels: Conflict, Iran, Iraq, Russia, Syria, Ukraine, United States

posted by Pieface @ Sunday, July 20, 2014