Readers may wonder at such a confident title ten months away from the US presidential election. Much can happen in that time, and it may seem unwise and tempting fate to make such a claim. The strange figures creeping out of the woodwork in the hope of becoming the candidate of the Republican Party seem almost handpicked to ensure Barack Obama’s victory, but the American electorate is a strange beast, and can throw up many movements and surprises.
Also, although it looks as if the damaged US economy may have turned a corner in time to benefit the president, the mounting problems in Europe could still cause a more generalised global crisis, despite encouraging trends among the growing powers to the East and South. Influential experts still describe the US recovery as “anaemic”. Obama’s State of the Union speech had an upbeat glow to it, but this was pitched towards the forthcoming election campaign. We cannot predict the course of events, both within America or in the rest of the planet, at a time of unpredictable turbulence.
However, with fingers crossed, I believe it is still worth asserting positively that it is of great significance for the world that Obama should be re-elected, and worthwhile examining some of the priorities to pursue in a second term that may not have been possible in the first. This has been the case for many of his predecessors, and can also apply to presidencies on the American model, including Nigeria. For example, President Obasanjo was able to introduce a far-reaching reform programme after 2003 that would have been hard to implement in his first term (it was only his mistaken pursuit of a third term that overshadowed the positive results of his second).
An Obama second term is of particular concern for Africa. There was recently a useful interview given by the President to the percipient Fareed Zakaria of Time magazine, concentrating on his foreign policy. Zakaria’s article makes strongly the point that Obama has been a “good foreign policy president.” Not many leaders have been made or broken by foreign policy, and it will probably be minor in this election. This may be, as Zakaria points out, simply because the condition of the economy has dominated debate intensely, but there has also not been much that critics have been able to get their teeth into, in the way that they savaged poor Jimmy Carter back in 1980. And not for the want of trying.
Obama has let it be known that George Bush senior, even Reagan, have been his models, and he has been able to balance natural caution (unsuccessfully represented as dithering) against an occasional calculated show of strength as seen in the necessary surgical operation against Osama Bin Laden. It is Obama’s studied approach to power that fascinates. There is deep strategising here, in spite of many unanswered questions.
This is why he will need a second term. In the past four years, he has only visited African once in spite of the huge political capital built internationally for his country, especially in Africa. it was not just that he felt he did not need to, but his natural prudence and maybe even sagacity has led him not to make a big thing of a connection founded on blood ties, no matter how strong he may feel it himself. He was born in Hawaii and had an Indonesian stepfather and a development-minded white mother, the natural making of an internationalist. There have styli been great expectations in Africa.
This month, massive US defence cuts have been announced of $480bn over the next decade. Although it is still the country that spends more on defence than any other, this is highly significant, recognising the strategic impact of technology (such as pilotless drones replacing troops on the ground). It will affect their overblown presence in Europe more than the US army’s comparatively new Africa Command, Africom (still headquartered in Stuttgart although now actively using Djibouti). The prestige surrounding Obama means that US military activity in Africa as part of the ‘war on terror’, demonstrated recently in Somalia, is tolerated in a way that is understandable but disturbing. Should not the US, for example, stay away from involvement in handling the Boko Haram hot potato?
Many in Africa have hopes that Obama will use his second term not just to come visiting, but will promote major initiatives of a kind already seen from the US private sector, as from Bill Gates, that go beyond the present sometimes questionable security considerations. There will probably never be such a time again for the US to develop mutually positive relations in Africa. Americans are well aware of the many who are seeking to ride the current African renaissance. Although Obama can say in his speech that America is “indispensable” to the world, he also recognises that the world is indispensable to America, and the age of ‘top dog’ is past.
