When Barack Obama campaigned for president in 2008, he postured as an outsider who would bring real change to Washington. Those of us who paid more attention to his policy prescriptions than his racial background noticed that in fact he was just another fiscal moderate / social liberal in the mold of John Kerry. His one distinguishing trait from Hillary Clinton was his apparently non-imperialist foreign policy, exemplified by his outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq. Between the election and his inauguration, he debunked his own mythology by finalizing Bush’s bank bailout and nominating Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, thereby defeating the purpose of choosing him over her. Once again, the imperial establishment won.
The center-left news media, being a propaganda organ of the neoliberal elites, who gleefully dole out freedoms in sexuality and narcotics in place of any real political or economic power, continued to burnish the Obama mythos, despite all evidence against it. He was praised as an agent of peace and a man of the people even as he continued the American imperial project and defended the financiers who ruined the economy. He was actually praised while doing the exact same things for which Bush had been vilified. Here are some of the more pertinent similarities to his predecessor.
Both Bush and Obama lowered corporate taxes and increased U.S. energy production. In the 2012 campaign, Obama boasted of having eliminated 77 government programs and having cut $1T in discretionary spending. “More importantly,” he said, “cuts will help us grow,” accepting GDP growth as a categorical imperative. He cut $716 billion from Medicare, ostensibly from overpaying insurers and providers.
In his second debate with Romney, Obama postured as being pro-oil and gas production, and did not challenge the dogma that the economy trumps other social criteria. He claimed that Romney’s “social extremism” (i.e., the values that were the norm of Western civilization until yesterday) was “bad for the economy.” At the same time, he bragged about small businesses and tax cuts for the middle class, while claiming that Romney’s cuts “won’t help us grow.”
In counter-terrorism, he evinced the same vengeful attitude that was deplored in his predecessor, saying, “When you mess with Americans, we hunt you down.” He liked to boast that national security is not political, only confirming that U.S. foreign policy is dominated by a power elite straddling both parties.
For all his supposed sophistication, he shared with Romney the simplistic mercantile canard that a country needs to have a “favorable” balance of trade by increasing exports.
In foreign policy, the similarities are most striking. Obama kept military spending high, in fact above the Bush-era peak. He openly claimed the right to depose heads of state at will, even when they posed no immediate threat to the U.S. He remained pro-Zionist, while engaging in anti-Iranian rhetoric, using the deceitful claim that Iran wants to “wipe Israel off the map” as though they had genocidal intentions. His pledge to stand by Israel if attacked binds the U.S. to whatever aggressive policy Israel exercises toward her neighbors.
He boasted about his war of choice against Gaddafi, and claimed there was no “mission creep.” He bragged about killing Bin Laden without obtaining permission to enter Pakistani airspace. In a word, he showed the same contempt for the sovereignty of other nations’ as his imperialist predecessors.
In 2012, Obama recast his opposition to the Iraq war in imperialist terms, claiming that the fault was not the lack of just cause to invade a sovereign nation (he could claim no such high ground after Libya), but because, absurdly, this supposedly “took our eye off the ball” in Afghanistan, as if the U.S. military couldn’t do two things at once. He claimed he could focus on Afghanistan after the war in Iraq ended. The withdrawal actually was completed on Bush’s schedule, despite Obama’s attempt to get the Iraqis to allow U.S. troops to stay longer. He actually increased the use of drone strikes compared with Bush.
Like other American imperialists, Obama proclaimed the objective of promoting the free market system everywhere. He also espoused “nationalism in trade,” which means protectionism if it means anything, and making sure that everyone else plays by the rules. In other words, when it was time for re-election, he played to the same economic populism and nationalism for which he later disparaged his successor.
In view of these broad outlines, my readers may perhaps be less than surprised when I fail to get caught up in U.S. partisan politics. They are both halves of the same imperialist whole, or at least that has been the case until the unthinkable happened in 2016. More on that to come.