How fast time goes by! I can remember, as if it were yesterday — but in fact it was in October 2008 — as we, participants in the traditional 9th Ukrainian-American Roundtable, sat in an imposing hall of the US Congress Library, listening to passionate speeches of the emissaries sent by the two US presidential candidates — John McCain and Barack Obama. The new Afro-American political star was introduced by Celeste Wallander, a longtime associate of Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had accompanied her boss on his earlier trips to Kyiv and knows Ukrainian realities very well.
Wallander was inspiringly describing Obama’s program for Ukraine, while I was taking down her speech almost in shorthand. In spite of a skillfully-structured text with the already familiar promises “to support the sovereignty, democratic values, and territorial integrity of Ukraine” and develop “strategic partnership,” this raised serious doubts about the ability of the Democratic candidate (by contrast with McCain) to deal with Ukraine’s problems and worries, given the situation in which the US found itself after George Bush’s disastrous failures in the domestic and foreign policy.
And here is again a warm (+24C) multicolored American autumn. Again Washington and the 10th roundtable “Compelling Bilateral Ties/US&Canada–Ukraine.” Again the US Congress Library and a not-so-imposing hall this time. Again we are listening to Wallander who speaks in a different, far more important than a year ago, capacity of Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasian policy.
Yet, before speaking about the US-Ukraine roundtable (this will come at the end of the article), I would like to share my observations about the US situation one year after the 44th president, Barack Hussein Obama, was elected. Although Obama did not get real power until January 2009, his political philosophy and vision of the world’s current problems and his plans for the future have had an essential impact on the global political environment since he won a triumphal victory in the Nov. 4, 2008, elections.
1. OBAMA’S MISSION: PROMISES AND REALITY
Obama became a unique phenomenon even for the US history, which is rich in unexpected things: an obscure political outsider, a black, an introverted intellectual with a cool analytical style of thinking, he made mincemeat of the topmost Democrats in the primaries and — without making even one executive decision, without yet having any presidential powers — immediately turned into a charismatic leader of the nation, a hope for Europe, and a figure of global importance. If the popular wisdom that every new leader (of an agency, ministry, or country) will radically differ from their predecessor is right, you won’t find a better example than Obama after Bush. The early-21st-century global tectonic dislocations hurled a fierce challenge to US stability and its leading position in the world.
The candidate Obama had two super-tasks to fulfill:
— Saving the US economy from the financial crisis it provoked;
— Changing the image of a brutal and bellicose US in the world (above all, in Europe), the Bush-created image of a country that relies, first of all, on hard military force and makes one-sided decisions (unilateralism), without taking into account the viewpoint of its allies.
The presidential candidate also harbored other secret dreams, quite “socialist” from the viewpoint of US conservatives, such as carrying out a comprehensive reform of the healthcare and education systems.
Once elected, Obama got down to implementing his election program with unstoppable energy and consistency. Here is the result: he has solved none of the problems in the 10 months of being actually in power. As was the case in the Bush era, US society still remains split — perhaps even deeper than Ukrainian society in a sense. While a year ago 54 percent of the polled Americans believed that Obama would overcome US party-line divisions, now only 29 percent hold this belief. Although the wave of “Obamamania” continues to spread throughout the US (suffice it to see souvenir shops full of Barack and Michelle figurines, their pictures on T-shirts, magnets, saucers, and other baubles), there have already been tough anti-Obama comments — not only on the Republican side. The thorniest question now being asked on TV and in influential newspapers is: “Mr. President, are you going to finish your election campaign and begin to address this country’s urgent problems?”
In a Wall Street Journal article, Victor Davis Hanson, a professor at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute (incidentally, the Hoover Institute keeps the best collection of Ukrainian items from UNR times to this day), compares Obama with such US Democrat presidents as Harry Truman and Jimmy Carter: when the two were assuming the president’s office, they had no foreign-policy experience and were naive liberal idealists. Yet Truman managed to muster courage and skills to oppose the Red “empire of evil” in various regions of the world and has justly gone down in US history as a great president (along with John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan). Conversely, Carter has remained in the memory of his generation as a weak loser who tried to appease enemies instead of defending US interests.
Hanson mentions Obama’s foreign-policy initiatives: he has cancelled plans to deploy antimissile defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic and paid less attention to such time-tested partners as the UK, France, Israel, Columbia, and Japan — “giddy that we might appease the Russians into abrogating their patronage of Iran’s nuclear ambitions.” “We appear unreliable to friends, compliant to rivals, and weak to enemies,” Hansom asserts.
According to some analysts, Obama is painting an extremely schematic, idealized, and rational picture of the world instead of admitting that the world is chaotic and unstable, where the balance of forces is more important than the artless liberal ideas of “peace doves.” The brilliant speech in Egypt, which Obama addressed to the entire Muslim world as a clarion call for reconciliation, failed to produce the desired effect: Islamist radicals ignored it, while US conservatives branded the message’s peaceful spirit as inadmissible weakness towards enemies of the Euro-Atlantic civilization.
Stretching out the hand of reconciliation in all directions, Obama achieved an undesirable result: in October 2009, the popularity of the black eloquent president plummeted from the dizzy heights of the first days in the White House to a level that none of the US presidents has ever dropped to over a similar period since 1953: only 52.3 percent of those polled rated Obama’s performance as positive and 43.4 percent disapproved it.
The performance of the US Congress (where Democrats prevail) received a far worse rating: 25 and 66 percent of the respondents took a positive and negative attitude, respectively. The overall US course was rated as positive by 39.6 percent and as negative by 56.3 percent.
The new president’s adversaries have stuck an insulting label of “campaigner-in-chief” to him, a travesty of the official title “commander-in-chief.” Obama, who promised to cease hostilities in Iraq, pull out the US troops from there before 2012, and focus on Afghanistan instead, is now facing a difficult choice: US General Stanley McChrystal, the NATO commander in Afghanistan, insists on transferring an additional 40,000 troops to that country, which experiences an increasing influence of the Taliban and Al-Qaida.
The United States has again split into two: 47 percent of the polled believe that Obama must take this dramatic step, while 49 percent oppose sending additional military contingents to Afghanistan.
Obama, who is holding the word’s most important office, stays surprisingly calm in spite of everything, including a loutish escapade by Congressman Joe Wilson (R) who publicly said “You lie!” to the president during a joint session of the US Congress on Sept. 9, 2009, when Obama was making his health care speech. Hence is the nickname “cool” which Obama’s adversaries have attached to him as a sign of respect. The credo of the “cool president” is to rely on a highly-efficient team that can be trusted with decisions based on information, rather than on emotions, and to try to hear all the voices in the ongoing White House debate.
On this approach, Obama stands every chance of at least limited success, no matter what his rivals and enemies say.
2. OBAMA’S WAR
On a hot summer night, Pakistan’s Taliban leader Baitullah Mahsud came out onto the roof of his father-in-law’s house in South Waziristan. Reclining in a lounge chair, Mahsud stretched his arm for an intravenous injection: suffering from diabetes and renal insufficiency, he needed to be on a drip.
In Langley, near Washington, CIA operatives were looking attentively at the screen, which clearly showed the face of one of Pakistan’s most dangerous terrorists. The picture from this remote country was beamed by the MQ-1 Predator unmanned aerial vehicle that was flying two miles away from Mahsud’s house. The operatives ordered the drone to fire two Hellfire missiles. When the explosion smoke had cleared, the screen showed Mahsud’s maimed remains. Also killed were his wife, father-in-law, mother-in-law, assistant, and seven bodyguards.
Between July 2008 and July 2009, 11 out of 20 most wanted Al-Qaida leaders in Pakistan were either killed — many of them by means of a drone — or captured. President Obama’s chief headache is the Afghanistan war (as it once was for Mikhail Gorbachev), this sinister and hopeless copy of the Vietnam war, extremely unpopular both in the US and in Europe, among NATO member states.
Obama visited the National Counterterrorism Center in October 2009. He saw the so-called Bat Cave, a supersecret dark room, where operatives, glued to computer displays, monitor the operational and tactical situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This region is called AfPak on the military jargon, and Obama knows only too well that his political destiny depends to a great extent on the situation that will emerge here: the collapse of Pakistan and the establishment of full Taliban and Al-Qaida control over Afghanistan will mean that terrorists will take hold of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and a new geopolitical entity of Islamist radicals and drug barons will emerge in an alarming vicinity of post-Soviet Central Asian countries, in Russia’s underbelly, near Iran, India, and China. This will be a catastrophe, a new and formidable phenomenon of the 21st century.
So Obama faces the dilemma:
— US generals are demanding more and more US troops in Afghanistan;
— Democrats are demanding fewer and fewer US soldiers;
— Vice-President Joseph Biden suggests that drones, rather than servicemen, fight in AfPak.
Taking his vice-president’s advice, Obama has sanctioned many more drone missile strikes in the 10 months of being in office than Bush did in the previous three years. The CIA estimates that 326 to 538 people were killed, including not only terrorists but also their innocent neighbors and children. Pressure is mounting on Obama, for the Afghanistan war has been dragging on for eight years. The US is becoming more pessimistic about being able to win this war: a third of the population is sure that the US troops must be withdrawn within a year.
US ex-Vice President Dick Cheney and other Republican leaders are harshly criticizing Obama, the US Armed Forces’ supreme commander-in-chief, for irresoluteness and decision-making delays in an ever-worsening situation. While 63 percent of the polled Americans (and 51 percent of the Republicans) supported Obama’s actions in Afghanistan in April, the overall support had dropped to 45 percent (22 percent among the Republicans) by October. Over 60 percent of Americans are convinced that the Obama administration has no clear-cut strategy towards Afghanistan.
The popular columnist Thomas Friedman (author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree and The World Is Flat) notes in the liberal New York Times that the US has no partners in Afghanistan, because NATO offers insufficient support, the Afghan war is not popular in the US itself, and the country does not have enough financial resources or national interests to build a democratic state in Afghanistan. Friedman writes bitterly that “China, Russia, and Al-Qaida all love the idea of America doing a long, slow bleed in Afghanistan.” He is worried about this, for “a weak America would be a disaster for us and the world.”
The question of whether Obama is the president of peace or of a lost war is still open.
3. OBAMA’S SMALL JOYS
Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama was unexpected not only for the entire world but also for the laureate. Now he ought to urgently work off the laureateship given him in advance. And although Russia has hardly become a close friend of the Afro-American dreamer in the course of “resetting” the US–Russia relations, Moscow diplomats are hectically working with their US colleagues (including the above-mentioned Wallander) on a revised START so that it can be signed before December 10, The Day Obama will receive the prize in Norway. The architect of the “resetting” must be satisfied: reducing the nuclear arsenals and the number of strategic missiles of the world’s two largest nuclear powers should be considered a major achievement of the ambitious US president and will be a good supplement to the Nobel Peace Prize.
Another good (and perhaps the most important) piece of news for Obama is the 3.5-percent GDP growth in the US in the third quarter of 2009. While the GDP dropped by 6 percent in the first quarter and rose by 0.7 percent in the second quarter, the growth in the fall is interpreted in the US as the end of the recession.
The Obama administration’s resolute actions to bail out the financial system and the automobile industry (a total of USD 787 billion were pumped in as governmental aid, and over 100 problem banks were liquidated) produced a positive result and helped raise consumer expenditures. The Federal Reserve System reduced the banking credit interest rate practically to zero and resuscitated the mortgage system: every buyer of the first house in their lifetime received USD 8,000 as first housing installment. Owners who sent their old cars to the scrap heap received USD 4,500 to buy a new one. These programs were immensely popular and helped pep up the economy.
Also received as positive were the administration’s tough measures to cut the superprofits of local “oligarchs” — top executives of seven largest US companies — in some cases by 90 percent (from multimillion fringe benefits to “a mere” $500,000 p.a.). The socialist idea of “leveling off” profits is quite popular in the United States, which stands close to third-world countries (including Ukraine) as far as glaring wage disparity is concerned.
Is it possible to imagine something of the sort in Ukraine, when the president or the prime minister cuts an oligarch’s pay by 90 percent?
Despite the mounting resistance of insurance companies, as well as medical and pharmaceutical circles, there is so far some progress in the medical insurance reform: it boils down to a considerable increase (in millions) in the number of US citizens eligible for mandatory medical insurance, with employers paying the insurance bills.
According to Harvard Medical School academics, about 45,000 Americans die every year due to lack of medical insurance. Should this project be a success, the United States will be considerably “socialized” — to the level of the UK or Canada, which runs counter to the liberal traditions the US established in the 18th and the 19th centuries.
This is why the label of a “socialist” is being stubbornly slapped on Obama (as is the case with “nationalist” and certain persons in Ukraine). But even his sworn enemies, who call Obama “a man of empty promises,” “a mediocrity,” “the most unknown stranger ever to achieve the presidency,” “a young Hamlet,” etc., still admit that he has chances to be reelected for a second term if the cycle of US economic recovery and new prosperity falls on 2010–2012.
4. OBAMA AND THE UKRAINIAN QUESTION
This is in fact the least understandable area of Obama’s policies, which I think is now ranking 40th to 50th on the current US agenda.
As was to be expected, the 10th Roundtable in Washington failed to answer the ticklish question of whether Ukraine has really become a bargaining chip as Obama and Medvedev/Putin are “resetting” their relations.
The official speeches of US delegates sounded pacifying. For example, Daniel Russel, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, traditionally praised Ukraine for renouncing its nuclear weapons in 1994 and showered compliments about the European looks of present-day Kyiv. Russel stressed that they are pursuing a straightforward policy: President Obama will not refuse to support Ukraine, which Vice President Biden emphasized during his visit to Kyiv. At the same time, the official said that the people of Ukraine “should themselves decide on their destiny” (Who opposes this? If only this holy people does not have somebody else’s will imposed on it!), while the US will support Ukraine’s choice.
Speaking of the new relations with Russia, the State Department representative noted that “a new page has been opened, which will also allow us to positively influence the relations between Russia and Ukraine.” Recalling the US–Ukraine strategic partnership (the joint partnership commission is expected to meet later this year), Mr. Russel particularly emphasized that the United States would not be banking on any candidates for the Ukraine presidency.
Wallander noted, as a Pentagon official, that there are good relations of strategic partnership between the two countries’ ministries of defense. She quoted, as her State Department colleague also did, Vice President Biden’s words about supporting Ukraine’s democratic course. Wallander stressed that, “if the population of Ukraine votes to join NATO, the US will be prepared to support this process.” She just failed to say what percentage of popular support is required by new US standards. 51.6 percent? 79.2 percent? Or, maybe, like it was in the Soviet era, 98.8 percent are to express their desire to be in NATO?
Citing some positive examples in the cooperation between Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense and NATO, Wallander fleetingly mentioned, with a reproach, the refusal of our glorious Verkhovna Rada to hold joint Ukraine–NATO military exercises (Sea Breeze and Trident).
It became clear after these coldly polite statements of the US administration’s top representatives that it is up to Ukrainians themselves to save Ukraine and take the country out of the grey security zone. But still democracy is a great thing. None of the US officials even mentioned — in the context of obvious threats to our sovereignty — the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which comprised indistinct assurances (not guarantees) of Ukraine’s security on the part of Russia and other nuclear powers, above all, the United States, after Ukraine had acquired non-nuclear status.
Only Bill Miller, a well-known friend of our state and people, ex-US ambassador to Ukraine, pointed in a hot-heated speech to an abrupt deterioration of Ukraine’s geopolitical situation and called for invoking the Budapest Protocol in order to ensure reliable guarantees of security for our country.
The Ukrainian delegates voiced serious concern over a change in US and NATO priorities about Ukraine and the likely West–Moscow deals at the expense of Ukraine’s security interests.
The forum heard a highly alarming speech from Borys Wrzesnewskyj, a Canadian MP from the oppositional Liberal Party and an ethnic Ukrainian. He is convinced that only a joint NATO military shield can thwart Moscow’s imperialistic plans regarding Ukraine. The parliamentarian said that Ukraine is not at the bottom of Canada’s list of priorities, and this country is ready to actually help Ukraine reduce its energy dependence on Russia. It was suggested behind the scenes that when Canada came across Russia’s encroachments on the Arctic areas that were traditionally considered the sphere of Canadian interests, it began to show more understanding about the increasing dangers in the post-Soviet space.
Many roundtable participants had an impression that, unlike in the previous years, US officials are now taking a more restrained and estranged attitude to Ukraine, still trying to preserve the “good face” of former strategic partners. This may be just a biased vision of this writer — I wish it were so. By all accounts, the root cause is the position of the Obama administration — people whom cartoonist depict as sort of ordinary Chicago guys with broad smiles on their young faces and baseball bats in hand. Attempting to win the amity of Russia which will allegedly force Iran to discontinue its nuclear programs and turning a blind eye to the growing concern of post-Soviet and Central European states, the Obama administration has begun a dangerous experiment as a result of which it may fail to find new friends and, instead, lose the old ones.
It will be recalled that Gorbachev, a charismatic and eloquent leader of the Soviet Union, once tried to take that country down a similar illusory road of “new thinking” from Vancouver to Vladivostok. What this led to is common knowledge.
