Since the victory of Barack Obama in the presidential election of 2008 by an overwhelming landslide over his opponent Sen. John McCain (more than 9 million votes difference overall, more than 150 electoral votes), we have witnessed one of the most unique, and the strangest, sights in history.  I am referring here not to the fact of the first African-American to lead an administration--a fact worth noting, if only for how it helps to contain the political and economic disaffection, and potential radicalization, of a crucial population inside the U.S. during a deep economic crisis--but rather to the surprising way in which this administration, with all its early progressive rhetoric, has turned out to be virtually a mirror image of the previous one.  Note I say "a mirror image," for the important point to make about Obama's betrayal of almost every progressive proposal on which he was elected is not that he has been hemmed in by outside forces.  This is the critical narrative spun out by many liberal, and even some progressive and leftist, commentators, such as the remote-control vox populi over at MSNBC.

It's not that Obama has been reined in by certain political forces (the Republicans), or limited in scope of action by economic power (the big investment banks, and the global investment class), or even that he has been given the wrong advice on economic and political matters (here the culprits are supposedly various dark forces of lobbying interests, along with Geithner, Summers and other leftovers from before the banking crash).  The point to make is rather a much more simple one, namely that Obama is, always was, and always will be a member of the ruling class.  Some of these liberal and progressive critics who still stick up for some kind of fantasy "progressive Obama," with all evidence pointing firmly to the contrary, have begun to get more serious.  They have begun to whine and complain that they, too, have been betrayed, despite the fact that most of them knew perfectly well what they were doing by supporting this disastrous fantasy.  But they believed that the economic crisis would "correct itself," and so they're having to make a tactical reversal, for now--until they reverse again at some later date, and head back in the direction of power.

Still, even with pretty widespread awareness of all this, the popular myth that Obama is somehow restrained in what he can do--this despite the fact that he occupies the single most powerful position in the world at a time when that office has even more power than it has been invested with at any other time in history except for during World War II--has stubborningly refused to give way to the much more obvious, common sense conclusion: what we are watching is basically a rerun.  The point to make, then, is that this pseudo-progressive adminstration has used the exact opposite means to accomplish approximately the same policy goals as the neoconservative administration of George W. Bush.  Where Bush claimed special privileges and powers (not necessarily embodied in the U.S. Constitution, but perhaps implied there), in order to accomplish his aims of pure power and global U.S. hegemony, Obama has claimed repeatedly that he is without power.  And, being without the necessary power to act, he has had to go along with continuing the policies of his predecessor, with some very minor adjustments.  This is the twisted line of reasoning used on such varied subjects as the obscenity of keeping Guantanamo Bay open; the propping up of the banks; and the administration's rather open supporting of punishing economic policy on entitlements, education, and a host of domestic spending issues. 

But nowhere has this logic of strategic inaction been more evident, or had more profound consequences, than in the administration's continuing of the project of the establishment of U.S. hegemony through threat, death, and destruction in dozens of countries around the world.  In each instance the administration has claimed either that the way in which previous policies were constructed prevents them from acting, or that the necessity of certain objective conditions (mostly the economic crisis) has forced their hand.  Where the Bush administration acted, at first, after 9/11, through general popular consensus, and then increasingly through a combination of Congressional submissiveness, executive fiat, "special legal means" such as the infamous signing statements, and then finally sheer assertion, the Obama administration has searched high and low for excuses not to act.  And this despite the fact of an unprecedented voter mandate for "Change," Obama's official '08 campaign slogan, a healthy post-election political war chest, and the contact information of millions of supporters.  None of these resources were mobilized during any of the major policy battles that Obama has faced.  Instead the president and his men have spent most of their time coming up with new reasons for their absence even from the usual day-to-day battles on Capitol Hill.

In this sense, nothing was more surprising to Obama's progressive supporters than the administration's taking a pass on using their enormous power to alter the course of U.S. foregin policy.  What these people expected was an end to wars of foreign intervention.  What was done was rather a shifting of priorities and resources from Iraq to Afghanistan, with very little reduction in troop levels, and an intensification of covert violence against a largely civilian population.  And just when it began to look like the deadline for major withdrawals in Afghanistan was on the horizon, the Libyan invasion began in earnest.  Here, again, the road promises to be long and bloody, as an insurgency will almost certainly emerge, if not from Ghaddafi's many remaining loyalists, then from the infighting that is sure to erupt between various rebel factions--not to mention the millions who have been plunged into a desperate existence by the war. 

No doubt the president's most intrepid supporters are already preparing their excuses and their arguments about how he was duped by bad advice yet again.  After all, they've learned from the masters in the Bush administration, who had already paved the way for the "inaction defense" by doing everything they could to encourage (and certainly nothing to discourage) portrayals of Bush as a hapless victim of a corrupt inner council.  Even the usually astute Oliver Stone fell into this trap in his hyperbolic biopic of the former president, "W," where a cartoon Bush, hounded by dreams of his overbearing father, is led astray by a bevy of evil geniuses.  Who was president again?

The political class protects its own--and this includes the political media and associated commentariat.  There is nothing new in this.  (And certainly Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld relish every opportunity to play the role of diabolical masterminds, even if they have never been much more than high-placed apparatchiks of the military-industrial complex--or as one leftist critic put it, "the most obvious types in history.")  But this doesn't make the enthusiasm with which the present administration has embraced the policies of the former any less surprising.  This is especially true because as independent journalist Paul Street notes in his study of the candidate Barack Obama, The Empire's New Clothes, it was the "Obamamists" out on the campaign trail in '08 who helped to spread the impression that their candidate was the most "militantly antiwar."  This idea came largely from Obama's refusal to support several key votes on funding for the conflict, and the (rather vague) impression that Obama had opposed the war in Iraq from the start.  As Street rightly points out: "Obama's record as president has not jibed very well with Brand Obama's antiwar gloss...."

Not only has Obama approved large increases in troops in the unwinnable and endless conflict in Afghanistan, along with a massive surge in the number of cross-border attacks inside neighboring Pakistan, he also pressured the new Iraqi government to block a popular referendum in that country on permanent and complete withdrawal of all U.S. troops.  This was something that was stipulated under previous agreements between Washington and Baghdad.  But the administration thought better of it once it became clear what the results would be: "America, get the hell out."  It seems that democracy has its limits in the Middle East when it comes to Obama the president.  Still, it has been Obama's unflagging support of the war in Afghanistan, the so called "good war," that has defined his tenure so far.

Here Obama has resurrected several cold war theories not even promulgated by the neoconservatives during the Bush years.  As Street points out, quoting Mideast historian Juan Cole, "Obama bought into a recycled version of the crackpot cold war conspiracy and domino theory.  In Obama's updated, al-Qaida version of the domino thesis, Cole noted, 'the Taliban might take Kunar Province [in far eastern Afghanistan] and then all of Afghanistan, and might again host al-Qaida, and [in a leap only possible in the imaginations of 21st century politicians] might then threaten the shores of the United States."  Street says, with some deserved acid, of this domino theory on steroids: "The new president added Pakistan onto Afghanistan just as Richard Nixon had added Cambodia to Vietnam."  The rollout of this new-old paradigm coincided with a massive reinvestment in the American military machine by the Obama White House, or what the president described in a sentiment-drenched ceremony at the Pentagon memorial in 2009 as "21st century military and intelligence capabilities that will allow us to stay one step ahead of our enemies, including increasing the size of the Army and Marine Corps."  Obama couldn't have declared allegiance to the idea of U.S. imperialist hegemony for the next hundred years any better if  he had added his name, alongside those of Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and Francis Fukuyama, to the now infamous document "Project for the New American Century," the blueprint for the Bush administration's entire foreign policy edifice.

Street goes on to enumerate the policies of the administration, from "bullying Russia" over access to natural resources in the Caucasus region, to "cozying up" to right-wing governments in Colombia and Peru even as they engaged in violence, suppression and thievery of land against their own people, to the ambivalent responses to a military coup in Honduras and brutal attacks by the government against dissenters in Thailand.  All these positions come straight out of the 1970s and 1980s cold war handbook.  But worst of all was the administration's wrenchingly ambiguous initial stance, and very public series of twists and reversals, on the revolution in Egypt: "we're cautious but Mubarak appears to be in control" (standard imperialist line of support for an allied dictator); "all parties need to show restraint" (what???); "we're working toward a compromise" (a littel glimmer); "Suleiman should take control" (what??? this from the Egyptian people--who still think that he should hang second only after Mubarak); and finally, "we welcome the departure of Hosni Mubarak, let a million flowers bloom along the Nile" (as long as the military remains firmly in control).  It seems that this White House, like a half dozen previous ones at least, is content to put things on automatic pilot at the State Department, at least until a "situation" arises.  Meanwhile policy decisions are run by think-tank experts whose essential understanding of the world we live in has not changed or advanced much in 65 years.  Territorialism, regionalism, the domino theory, game theory, and other doubtful perspectives remain their guiding lights, along with the more recent addition of the overriding concern with global trade and "economic security."  These last two categories really are just more transparent statements of ideas that were always implied by the ruthless logic of imperialism--and their normalization by Obama hardly signals a progressive change for the better.           

It's always good to end with some perspective "from the ground," as the rather smarmy, cynical U.S. media like to say.  And nothing better illustrates how Obama has increasingly come to be viewed by the rest of the world than the judgment offered by a young Pashtun tribesman to al-Jazeera at the end of 2009, when he was asked what he thought of Obama being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.  This was right after an attack by U.S. Special Forces on the village of Armal, which killed twelve civilians.  "Peace prize?" the man said.  "He's a killer."

Clarity is not quite dead yet.

Next: the economic crisis, and Obama's domestic policy. 

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Sources:

Paul Street, The Empire's New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power. London, Paradigm: 2010.

Obama quotation from Street; source: White House Press Office.