Obama Re-Defines Democracy as a Country That Supports U.S. Policy
In his Orwellian September 28, 2015 speech to the United Nations, President Obama said that if democracy had existed in Syria, there never would have been a revolt against Assad. By that, he meant ISIL. Where there is democracy, he said, there is no violence or revolution. This was his threat to promote revolution, coups...
Read MoreFresh out of his latest Congressional election shellacking delivered by the minority who bothered to vote in the United States, the formerly most powerful leader in the world, US President Barack Obama, will star in a thriller this weekend, appearing in the same room with China’s Xi Jinping, Japan’s Shinzo Abe and – fasten your...
Read MoreA new administration only gave interventionism a confused, humanitarian face-lift
President Barack Obama presents something of a dilemma. I voted for him twice in the belief that he was basically a cautious operator who would not rush into a new war in Asia, unlike his Republican opponents who virtually promised to attack Iran upon assuming office. Unfortunately, Obama’s second term has revealed that his instinct...
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It's the Man and also the System
There are obviously people who voted for President Obama and think he's done a great job -- but there are just a lot fewer of them than there used to be. I was reminded of this when I got an email the other day commenting on my column last week on US policy in the...
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The Golden Age of Newspeak
Harvard Professor Stephen Walt has described the current contretemps over Ukraine as “geostrategic incompetence of the highest order” on the part of the White House. Seconding that I would add that the central problem with the Obama foreign policy, guided as it is by a bundle of poorly defined principles, is that it has no...
Read MoreThink of us as having two presidents. One, a fellow named Barack Obama, cuts a distinctly Clark Kent-ish figure. In presiding over domestic policy, he is regularly thwarted in his desires by the Republicans in Congress and couldn’t until recently get his most basic choices for government positions or the judiciary through the Senate. For...
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How “Thou Shalt Not” Became “Thou Shalt”
In January 2009, Barack Obama entered the Oval Office projecting idealism and proud to be the constitutional law professor devoted to turning democratic principles into action. In his first weeks in office, in a series of executive orders and public statements, the new president broadcast for all to hear the five commandments by which life...
Read More[This piece may be reposted if Asia Times Online is credited and a link provided.] In other words, it’s time for the United States to engage in a full-throated celebration of the pivot to Asia with what I think is going to be President Obama’s America F*ck Yeah tour of Asian democracies in April 2014....
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Revisiting Exceptionalism
The pictures of President Obama and President Hollande of France, the country which is our oldest friend, touring Thomas Jefferson's Monticello screamed at us, "The Age of Mediocrity." The contrast, between today's two living presidents and that earlier epoch of French-US relations, when our first president and the Marquis de Lafayette were close friends, when...
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The White House is pushing hard to keep a significant number of American soldiers in Afghanistan contrary to President Barack Obama’s earlier pledge to have then all out by the end of 2014. As the United States President has demonstrated himself to be a habitual liar that failure to connect promises made in 2008 with...
Read MoreThe stage is set. By now it's established Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has given full authority to the new administration of President Hassan Rouhani to talk directly to Washington about Iran's nuclear program. This happened only a few days after US President Barack Obama leaked that letters had been exchanged between himself and Rouhani....
Read MoreThere is nothing tragic about the Obama presidency, capable of drawing the analytical talents of a neo-Plutarch or a neo-Gibbon. This is more like a Pirandello farce, a sort of Character in Search of An Author. Candidates to Author are well documented – from the Israel lobby to the House of Saud, from a select...
Read MoreMake a plan; then make another plan. Both won't work. - Bertolt Brecht This is getting ridiculous. The President of the United States (POTUS) screamed and shouted because he wanted his spy (Edward Snowden) back. Snowden, following Russian laws, was granted temporary asylum. The White House was "disappointed". Then POTUS snubbed the bilateral summit with...
Read MoreWhen the going gets tough, count on the Ministry of Truth to get going. The end of Ramadan was imminent. The jihadi chattering classes of that fuzzy entity, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), went on overdrive. It was jailbreak galore from Libya to Pakistan via Iraq. And all this in perfect synch with two...
Read MoreSo what is the "extremely disappointed" Obama administration, the Orwellian/Panopticon complex and the discredited US Congress to do? Send a Navy Seal Team 6 to snatch him or to target assassinate him - turning Moscow into Abbottabad 2.0? Drone him? Poison his borscht? Shower his new house with depleted uranium? Install a no-fly zone over...
Read MoreThey looked like two dejected schoolboys in front of the headmaster by the end of the two-hour Putin-Obama summit at the sidelines of the Group of Eight meeting in Northern Ireland. But as astonishing as the sound of silence was the fact that, on Syria, the former KGB guy was trying to save the "leading...
Read MoreNah. Just clickbaiting you. Despite the dim prospects for concrete results, the Sunnylands summit between Xi Jinping and Barack Obama has provoked a disproportionate frenzy of chinstroking among serious pundits. Much of it is along the lines of “the United States must not make nice with the PRC, thereby validating Xi’s ‘New Type of Great...
Read More[This piece originally appeared at Asia Times Online on June 6, 2013. It can be reposted if ATOl is credited and a link provided.] The expert consensus is that the Barack Obama-Xi Jinping summit at Sunnylands, California is something of a relationship-building nothingburger. The summit was arranged on short notice, there is no detailed agenda,...
Read MoreJust when the red line charade was reaching fever pitch - but still buried in the sand - and he had to choose between the US "exercising restraint" or "directly involving itself" in the Syrian war, (see The Syria-Iran red line show, Asia Times Online, May 2, 2013) President Obama was saved by Bibi Netanyahu's...
Read MoreBarack Obama would never be so crass as to use a State of the Union (SOTU) address to announce an "axis of evil". No. Double O Bama, equipped with his exclusive license to kill (list), is way slicker. As much as he self-confidently pitched a blueprint for a "smart" - not bigger - US government,...
Read MoreWashington’s Iranian Future
Imagine, for a moment, a world in which the United States is a regional power, not a superpower. A world in which the globe’s mightiest nation, China, invades Mexico and Canada, deposing the leaders of both countries. A world in which China has also ringed the Americas, from Canada to Central America, with military bases....
Read MoreChinese Condom-Maker Sizes Up Obama and Romney
The caption on this post on the China Weibo blog of the Durex condom company reads “The difference between Obama and Romney is…” Actually, I think the PRC regime-meisters might have a slight preference for President Obama as “the devil you know.” Mitt Romney, on the other hand, is a protean shape-shifter and it was...
Read MoreWhat's that unheard-of political specimen spreading its wings over the geopolitical spectrum? It is aggressive as a hawk, compromising as a dove; it dances like a butterfly and stings like a bee. What kind of plumed composite is that? A hawdovebutterbee (HDBB)? Get used to it. The HDBB happens to be no other than the...
Read MoreMENA (Middle East/North Africa) is on fire. The diffuse rage - even if manifested by a tiny minority - is distinctly anti-American. Protests in Cairo have reached Sanaa in Yemen and even Bangladesh. The administration of US President Barack Obama is perplexed beyond belief. There will be revenge. What's really going on? It does not...
Read MoreNEW YORK - Don't … stop … thinking about tomorrow. Fleetwood Mac is back. The roaring 1990s are back. Bubba is in da house. The American dream is back with a bang. The nightmare is over. Or is it? How can any living politician anywhere in the world even pretend to rival former US president...
Read MoreWeapons of mass destruction (WMDs) are back. It's like we never left Dubya's glory days. No, they didn't find the non-existent Saddam stash on eBay. This is about the existent Bashar al-Assad's. And it's not WMDs as the pretext for an invasion and occupation, but WMDs as a pretext for whatever euphemism the Obama administration...
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