The Obama Moment. European and American Perspectives

John Bruton
President Obama is also more forthright than his predecessor in promoting the
two-state solution to the Israeli/Palestinian dispute. He has shown his realism by
opposing both the expansion and building of new Israeli settlements in the small
remaining portion of the territory of Mandate Palestine that is left for a Palestinian
State. The time window is closing here. If settlement activity continues, a two-state
solution will become geographically impossible. Given the scale of US aid to Israel,
the US has influence to stop settlement activity that it has yet to use.
While President Obama does continue to emphasise the use of military force to resolve
problems, notably in Afghanistan, he is proposing a very substantial increase
(11 percent) in the foreign aid budget of the United States and is developing a civilian
response capacity to help build the administrative and judicial structures essential
to creating functioning states in places like Afghanistan and Somalia. In other
words, he is stressing that the US must be prepared to deploy soft as well as hard
power.
He has also removed two important justifications of resistance to the United States;
firstly he has made it clear that the United States is not seeking to establish a longterm
military presence or military bases in either Iraq or Afghanistan; and secondly
he has disavowed the use of torture and committed himself to closing the detention
facility in Guantanamo Bay, although it remains unclear what will happen to those
detainees there who are regarded as a continuing threat, but against whom there is
no evidence sufficient for a trial. The position of detainees in the US base at Bagram
also remains to be clarified.
President Obama is further willing to tackle the problem of climate change in a way
that President Bush was not, and specifically he advocates a cap-and-trade approach
to limiting CO 2 emissions, a position very close to that of the European Union.
Building on the work of his predecessor who dramatically increased US aid to Africa,
President Obama is giving increased flexibility to programmes like PEPFAR 1
and is proposing a $3.5 billion food security initiative to help countries in Africa
to develop the capacity to produce their own food. This is a big departure from the
attitudes of many in Congress, who see places like Africa as somewhere to dump
surplus American farm produce without regard to the effect that has on the market
prices obtainable by local African farmers and on the longer term development of
African agriculture.
1. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.
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