Barack Obama

The Dalai Lama’s Middle-Way Approach needs re-adjustment

East Asia Forum - March 8, 2010 - 3:30pm

Author: Sourabh Gupta, Samuels International

On February 18th, President Obama personally welcomed His Holiness the Dalai Lama to the White House, drawing the predictable ire of the Chinese leadership. As if in response, on March 1st, Beijing named its hand-picked Panchen Lama to its top political advisory body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. In 2013, it is speculated the young lama will be elevated to the prominent political position of vice-chairmanship of the National People’s Congress. With Beijing gradually moving towards engineering a similar schism in the revered institution of the Dalai Lama by way of issuing regulations that purport to manage the reincarnation of living lamas, an altogether more purposeful negotiating approach by the Dalai Lama vis-à-vis Beijing is imperative. Read more »

A more effective US policy on North Korea

East Asia Forum - February 27, 2010 - 10:00pm

Author: John W. Lewis and Robert Carlin, Stanford University

It is routine in US foreign policy for a pot not boiling over to be moved to the back burner. But precisely because the North Korean issue is not boiling, it might offer an all-too-rare chance to make progress with Pyongyang. Over the past several months, the North has signalled publicly and privately that it is in engagement mode. In Washington, arguments abound about whether or not this is a stall tactic or a trick, but we will never know if we do not move ahead with serious and sustained probing of the North’s position. So long as our government sticks to an all-or-nothing approach in terms of Pyongyang, the opportunity to advance vital US security interests in northeast Asia could be lost. Read more »

The Greens support war criminal Obama

en Passant - February 17, 2010 - 8:06pm

Barack Obama has approved more drone attacks, killing more civilians, in one year than George Bush did in 8.

The current President has increased the number of troops in Afghanistan by 34,000, guaranteeing more dead, maimed and dispossessed Afghan civilians in the here and now and the years to come.

He has spread the war into Pakistan with hundreds of thousands dispossessed and thousands dead.

Obama has escalated the dispute in Yemen, helping the dictatorship there kill civilians and combatants.

His troops occupy Haiti to bring it under direct US control.

Obama is threatening Iran for daring not to toe the US line. He wants to increase sanctions (an act of war) against the dictatorship and the people of Iran. 

The logic of US imperialism drives Obama to kill innocent people and those resisting foreign invaders, just as it drove Bush to do the same in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

This logic doesn’t change from President to President. They are as much the puppets of the vast forces they control as are we the ruled. Read more »

Bernanke’s confirmation in doubt

Larvatus Prodeo - January 26, 2010 - 1:25am

A number of US financial blogs are reporting that Ben Bernanke faces a chance of failure to be confirmed by the American Senate for a second term in office.

James Bianco at The Big Picture has all the details, and there’s also coverage at Naked Capitalism.

What’s the big picture here?

On the short term political front, Scott Brown’s win in Massachussetts exemplifies the frustration felt by many with politics as usual. Whether it’s expressed as concern over deficits (and that’s a much more salient touch point with Indendent voters on health care than the rhetoric of the wingnuts), or just as disgust with the jobless recovery’s disjunction with business as usual on Wall Street, there’s no doubt that an election year is starting to focus minds on the politics of financial decision making. Read more »

The US–Indonesia–Australia triangle – Weekly editorial

East Asia Forum - March 8, 2010 - 10:30am

Author: Peter Drsydale

The flurry of leaders’ visits — by Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to Canberra this week and American President Barack Obama to Canberra and Jakarta a little over a week later — signals an elevation in the triangular relationship between the United States, Indonesia and Australia, not merely the growing depth of their bilateral relations. Indonesia is one of the world’s newest democracies, a secular state with a predominantly Muslim population, of immense importance to Australia and America in securing Southeast Asian stability and openness. Indonesia and Australia are members of the new G20 group and have deep and common interests in working with America to entrench the G20 as the pre-eminent and enduring forum for global economic governance. Indonesia, with its pivotal role in ASEAN, and Australia, an anchor in trans-Pacific security, are close confidants on America’s re-engagement with Asia under the Obama administration. Read more »

Taiwan: Is Beijing testing Obama’s mettle?

East Asia Forum - February 24, 2010 - 4:00pm

Author: Ron Huisken, ANU

China’s fierce reaction to Washington’s recent confirmation of a US$6.4 billion arms deal with Taiwan was pre-meditated, not spontaneous. The deal itself has been around since 2001, and it was an open secret that the recent announcement was a matter of when and not if. This issue played out alongside a subsequent confirmation that President Obama would meet the Dalai Lama in his capacity as Tibet’s spiritual leader, a development that Beijing warned would threaten trust and cooperation with the US.

Read more »

Obama’s real world economic experiment

Larvatus Prodeo - January 26, 2010 - 2:20pm

Responding to the loss of Ted Kennedy’s Massachussetts Senate seat to Republican Scott Brown, Barack Obama is set to announce a three year discretionary spending freeze. (Note that military spending is apparently compulsory not discretionary.)

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.Com thinks that the move is, politically speaking, a “brain freeze”. He also queries “the wisdom of curtailing government spending in the middle of a massive consumption deficit”. Read more »

Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat lost: The politics of anti-politics

Larvatus Prodeo - January 20, 2010 - 1:50pm

News is just coming in that Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts has been lost by the Democrat, Martha Coakley, to the Republicans’ Scott Brown. FiveThirtyEight.Com has the margin at 52-47 and that blog will be well worth watching for analysis and breakdown of the result.

Writing for Crikey today, David Hirst observes:

Luckily for the Republicans, who doubted they had a chance at taking a seat Ted Kennedy had held for 47 years, they nominated a nobody called Scott Brown who drove a truck?—?a fact the Democrats somehow allowed to become an issue. Naturally Brown, equipped with political advisers as the Republicans smelled not blood but a bloodbath, drove at their behest to Wall Street, where he somehow managed to park. Read more »