Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Obama's New Cold War

Obama Offered Deal to Russia in Secret Letter
By PETER BAKER
Published: March 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/washington/03prexy.html?hp
New York Times copyright
http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2009/03/03/washington/03prexy.html#postComment
New York Times copyright
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The core problem with US foreign policy for the past 60 years is its exceptionalist, triumphalist,supremacist, dictatorial and interfering posture, matched by a 60-year accumulation of actions of unparalleled state-sponsored violence marked by invasion, occupation, militarization, nuclearization, destabilization, satellization.

That foreign policy posture and actions in the West Asia and Central Asia regions has a counterproductive Israel subtext, as well as affirms that the US continues to maintain its confrontational Cold War stance in a post-Cold War, multipolar era of sovereign-state intra andinter-regional alliances that do not necessarily include the US, or Russia for that matter.

Obama's "secret" (what happened to transparency?) reportedly hand-delivered letter to Russia's President Medvedev, three weeks ago, attempts to dictate and micromanage geopolitics in West Asia and Central Asia, which the last time I looked is not where the US is located. The sovereign nation-state stakeholders in these regions have every right to safeguard their perceived local interests without the US menacing nation-states that are located there.

Q. Why shouldn't Russia help Iran nuclearize? Iran and Russia are strategic neighbors, the US is not. Did the US nuclearize Israel?

Q. Why shouldn't Iran develop nuclear power for both military and civilian purposes? The US, Israel and Russia are all nuclear. The last two are regional neighbors, the US is not.
In the adjoining South Asia region, Pakistan and India are nuclear. What would motivate Iran NOT to nuclearize and Russia NOT to help Iran do so?

Obama's shopworn Star Wars bargaining chip of a National Missile Defense Shield (NMD) suspension wont wash with Iran, especially since the US helped Israel develop its Arrow missile system which has been successfully tested repeatedly by the US and Israel acting in combination. Is it possible, therefore, both Iran and Russia might feel their respective national security interests are threatened by such unilateral and unprovoked militarization in their backyard?

Obama's foreign policy in Central Asia, West Asia and South Asia is likely to be no different than that of his white male predecessors.

Superpower foreign policy ideology trumps race.

At the same time, supremacist ideology in U.S. foreign policy has its roots in white male dominance (developed and enforced during three centuries of slavery and genocide of indigenous people in the US, by white males), in which all 'others' are racialized and rendered inferior. Obama is embedded in that Whiteness system and rewarded by it.

Change We Can Believe In? A new and ethical direction for US foreign policy where strategic interests are sincerely attempted to be aligned with ethical concerns ?

Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
See Theory of Systemic Whiteness and related articles
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
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