Barack Obama raised the hopes of global justice advocates by committing to significant changes in our international economic policies. As president, however, his efforts to implement alternatives have been slow to get off the ground.
The June 28 coup in Honduras against democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya presented a crisis that would color the Obama administration’s foreign policy outlook for all of the Americas — and would ultimately become one of the administration’s most disappointing foreign policy failures of its first year.
The Obama administration is earning a B on trade policy so far, mostly on the grounds that no news is good news in this area. Some analysts might feel it is more accurate to give the administration an “incomplete.”
Much attention has recently been focused on the poverty-stricken country of Yemen.
The Chilean right-wing is salivating.
Buoyed by a better-than-expected showing in mid-December’s first-round presidential voting, conservative candidate and billionaire business magnate Sebastián Piñera is the frontrunner to triumph when Chileans return to the polls on January 17.
In his first year in office, Barack Obama gave several exceptional speeches on foreign policy. In Prague, he endorsed nuclear disarmament. In Cairo, he called for a new engagement with the Islamic world. In Oslo, he repudiated torture. At these moments, the new president firmly broke with the policies of his predecessor and provided a glimpse of what a new, cooperative, just U.S. foreign policy could be.
Barack Obama is not the first U.S. president to find Yemen a challenge. And the current $70 million package of military and security assistance is not the first $70 million US aid program to Yemen.
Call it guilt money, a long-overdue environmental debt payback, or a smart investment in a hurting planet. Whatever it’s called, climate-change repair funds are on the way.
The United States may be on the verge of involvement in yet another counterinsurgency war which, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, may make a bad situation even worse. The attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight by a Nigerian apparently planned in Yemen, the alleged ties between the perpetrator of the Ft. Hood massacre to a radical Yemeni cleric, and an ongoing U.S.-backed Yemeni military offensive against al-Qaeda have all focused U.S. attention on that country.
The latest attempt to highlight the crisis in Gaza captured some media attention. But a failure to balance principle with pragmatism meant that the Gaza Freedom March did not achieve its full potential.