Obama's Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State

By Jeremy Kuzmarov and Glen Ford

Many academics consider Obama to have been a master foreign policy strategist and shrewd practitioner of the art of realpolitik. This book demonstrates, however, that Obama in reality helped to institutionalize a permanent warfare state that resulted in gross human rights violations and contributed to America's strategic decline. His perpetuation of the War on Terror created more enemies and prompted the United States to lose influence in the Middle East. His Pivot to Asia policy intensified prospects for regional war while his unnecessary and willful military intervention destroyed Libya and drew the Russians in to protect Bashir al-Assad who won Syria's civil war. The Obama administration's heavy-handed interference in Ukraine led to effective Russian counter-moves, promoting a strategic alliance with China and regional integration that is moving the world towards multi-polarity.

Obama's Unending Wars provides the first critical, comprehensive and highly documented history of the foreign policy of America's forty-fourth president - the drone king who ordered the bombing of seven Muslim countries, backtracked on a pledge to reduce America's nuclear arsenal, and helped fuel a new Cold War with Russia. During his years in office Obama provided billions of dollars in arms sales to Saudi Arabia as it assisted in the crushing of pro-democracy demonstrators in Bahrain and invaded Yemen. He sanctioned a coup in Honduras which plunged that country into chaos, perpetuated a failed drug war policy and contributed to the recolonization of Africa.

While any Democratic Party president would have faced peril in confronting the Pentagon which had carried out a slow coup d'etat over the decades, Obama was rather, in many ways, the most perfect spokesman for the military-industrial complex. Who else but this articulate constitutional law professor could pull off a pro-war speech after winning the Nobel Peace Prize while ramping up drone assassinations and America's network of military bases in Africa and still retain the support of liberal-progressives?

As many in the time of Trump now glance nostalgically back to the Obama presidency, this book will help them to see the continuity -- and continuous failure -- of American foreign policy irrespective of the party or figurehead representing it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Clarity Press
• Release date: Jul 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9781949762013

Jeremy Kuzmarov

Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing editor of CovertAction Magazine and author of 4 previous books on U.S. foreign policy: The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs (University of Massachusetts Press, 2009); Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American Century (University of Massachusetts Press, 2012); The Russians are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018); and Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Clarity Press, 2019).

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indispensible.

PREFACE

This book essentially is a story of how money has corrupted politics and perverted American foreign policy. When candidates are beholden to arms merchants, crooks and billionaires, they will adopt a policy that is antithetical to national and human interests. Court intellectuals may try to spin it that the United States is intervening militarily for humanitarian purposes, but the contradictions are so egregious and actual consequences so horrific, it is incredible that so many people have bought into the façade. Barack Obama is a political genius but not in a positive way. Using identity politics and liberal guilt about race to his advantage, he crafted a narrative about himself that was misleading and hypnotized liberals into believing that he was pragmatic and a do-gooder even as he escalated bombing, drone strikes, and secret wars. Obama had been known by his poker-playing buddies back in the Illinois State House as an effective bluffer because he was very strategic and smooth about it.¹ This is what differentiates him from conservative presidents such as George W. Bush and Donald Trump whose lack of intellectual sophistication and guile have made them easier to mobilize against.

In writing this book, I have tried to read every book written about Obama. This includes many conservative critiques. Some of these, embodying what the historian Richard Hofstadter termed the paranoid style in American politics, assumed Obama was a socialist alien implant on America. Mixed with the bad, I often found some good information and probing scrutiny into Obama’s background and qualifications for the presidency lacking among liberal authors who adopted a defensive posture in his regard. An example of the latter is Harvard University Professor James Kloppenberg’s book, Reading Obama,² which attributes to Obama phantom intellectual influences and fails to recognize how Obama often bends or distorts the truth. According to one critic, the book might as well be a biography of Kim Il-Sung on sale at Pyongyang airport.³ Kloppenberg refuses to acknowledge Obama’s actual lukewarm commitment to social reform, deep corporate ties and the regressive features of his thought, including his positioning himself in the archetype of reformed radical reminiscent of the professional anti-communists of the McCarthy era.

David J. Garrow’s 1300+ page tome Rising Star is more critical about Obama’s background than Kloppenberg and an excellent resource for researchers. However, for all the interviews he conducted, Garrow fails to probe into certain aspects of Obama’s background or milieu of supporters and his critique of Obama’s foreign policy draws exclusively on the assessment of newspaper columnists who attack his foreign policy for not being militaristic enough.⁴ Ta Ne-Hisi Coates in his award winning book We Were Eight Years in Power presents Obama as an heir to Malcolm X., which ignores X’s fiery and prescient denunciations of American imperialism and Obama’s political conservatism, which Coates himself acknowledges.⁵ Some other black intellectuals such as Peniel Joseph want to root Obama in the black radical tradition and depict him as a fulfilment of the Black Power movement whose leaders Obama in fact criticized and spirit he often betrayed.⁶

I have written this book in order to provide a comprehensive assessment that provides a critical perspective on Obama’s foreign policy which is lacking among most previous books. Garrow and Kloppenberg and other authors like Morton Keller in a study published by Oxford University Press efface certain kinds of analysis, and rely exclusively on mainstream media sources, ignoring alternative and international media and many critical books about Obama, including by conservative authors. Keller calls foreign policy isolationists delusional and considers Obama’s policy in Libya as successful leading from behind, which is counter to Obama’s own assessment (Obama called Libya a shit show in 2016).⁷ A number of journalists have done important work in showing the inner working and deliberation of the Obama administration. However, I ask these questions: Would it have been so difficult to track down people affected by U.S. foreign policy to provide a more rounded assessment? Afghan civilians or Pakistanis targeted by drone strikes? Libyans who lived through the Operation Odyssey Dawn, Okinawans or residents of Jeju-do? Or Eastern Ukrainians, Russians who might like Putin, Africans living under the shadow of AFRICOM, Yemenis or Latin Americans? With limited resources, I have myself tried to capture a broader perspective and hope future historians will do the same.

Endnotes

1Sasha Abramsky, Inside Obama’s Brain (New York: Penguin, 2012), 85.

2James Kloppenberg, Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

3Chris Bray, Party of None, The Baffler , July 2012.

4David J. Garrow, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama (New York: William Morrow, 2017).

5Ta Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (New York: One World Publishers, 2017). On X, see Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Penguin, 2011).

6Peniel Joseph, Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Obama (New York: Basic Books, 2010).

7Morton Keller, Obama’s Time: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

INTRODUCTION

On December 6, 2016, President Barack H. Obama II delivered his final speech on counter-terrorism before a cheering throng of U.S. troops at MacDill Air Force base in Tampa, Florida. Obama started by thanking the soldiers for their extraordinary service over the last eight years and stated that he was feeling sentimental since this was going to be the last Hail to the Chief of his watch. He went on to convey his pride that as a result of the Global War on Terror, Al-Qaeda was now a shadow of its former self; the troop surge had denied Al-Qaeda a safe haven in Afghanistan and allowed girls to go to school there, and the U.S. military had worked to dislodge ISIL [Islamic State in the Levant] terrorists from Syria and Libya. The loudest applause came when Obama stated that he would become the first President of the United States to serve two full terms during a time of war.¹

Passing unnoticed in much of the media, Obama’s latter observation showed the significance of his presidency in institutionalizing a permanent warfare state. In 2016, the U.S. dropped 26,171 tons of bombs in seven countries (Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Somalia), equivalent to nearly three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day. Special Forces could be found in 138 countries, a jump of 130 percent from the previous Bush administration. Obama further brokered more arms sales than any other president since the Second World War, with a 54% increase over Bush, sanctioned more entities, and authorized over 10 times more drone strikes.² More money was allocated for war-related initiatives under Obama than under Bush ($866 billion to $811 billion) and more bombs were dropped (100,000 tons to 70,000). Obama’s defense budgets also outstripped those of Bush by an average of $18.7 billion per year and his base budgets exceeded those of Bush during his two terms by $816.7 billion.³

Obama was himself a gifted orator who had an ability to make people of different political outlooks feel like his views were aligned with their own. His convictions were predominantly conservative in his respect for tradition and belief that the world could only be changed very, very slowly. People who worked with him described him as cold, calm, calculating, opaque, very corporate and one who had always possessed delusions of grandeur.⁴ Journalist Evelyn Pringle referred to him as a political psychopath because of his association with the Illinois combine, the state’s crooked businessmen and politicians, and his willingness to do whatever it took to win, including accepting donations from corrupt figures.⁵ According to political analyst Chris Hedges, Obama was marketed effectively as a brand designed to make us feel good about ourselves. At times he sounded like a progressive, however, like all branded products spun from the manipulative world of corporate advertising, he duped the public into doing and supporting a lot of things that were not in its interest.⁶ This included extending Bush’s imperial wars and the empire of military bases along with unprecedented domestic surveillance.

One of Obama’s primary financial sponsors was Henry Crown & Company, which owns twenty percent of General Dynamics (GD), manufacturer of the Trident rocket, Stryker troop carrier, bunker buster bombs, LAV-25 amphibious armored vehicle, Abrams tank, and nuclear-powered submarines and naval destroyers.⁷ During Obama’s presidency, General Dynamics bought out 11 firms specializing in satellites, geospatial intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance and amassed contracts from sixteen intelligence agencies after investing $10 million in annual lobbying. Paying $4 million to settle a lawsuit for defrauding the government, its revenues shot up to over $30 billion in 2016, a three-fold increase from 2000.⁸ The Crown family’s net worth was estimated at $8.8 billion, double from when Obama first took office, and they rose in the Forbes rankings to 27th richest family in America.⁹

During the 2008 election, Obama received more money than military icon John McCain from General Dynamics as well as from Raytheon and Lockheed Martin.¹⁰ A voracious consumer of intelligence, Obama’s trademark was to move war into the shadows, a light footprint approach designed to expand U.S. power covertly.¹¹ In a meeting over Afghanistan, he told CIA Director Leon Panetta that the CIA would get everything it wanted.¹² The New York Times reported that in the 67 years since the CIA was founded, few presidents have had as close a bond with their intelligence chiefs as Mr. Obama forged with Mr. [John] Brennan, an architect of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program and former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia. Obama’s worldview meshed so closely with this unsentimental intel warrior and terrorist hunter that Obama found himself finishing Brennan’s sentences.¹³ An anonymous Cabinet member explained that presidents tend to be smitten with the instruments of the intelligence community [but] Obama was more smitten than most – this has been an intelligence presidency in a way we haven’t see maybe since Eisenhower.¹⁴

The consequences could be seen in expanded financing of the CIA’s paramilitary forces, suppression of evidence about CIA torture, refusal to pursue a criminal case against the CIA’s money laundering bank (HSBC), and prosecution of whistleblowers under the Espionage Act.¹⁵ Not by happenstance, the Crowns were among the prime beneficiaries. General Dynamics embraced every intelligence driven style of warfare, developing small target and identification systems and equipment that could intercept insurgents’ cell phone and lab-top communications and computer software used for cyber and psychological warfare.¹⁶

Ideological rationalization for military intervention in the Obama era was provided by Samantha Power, an adviser on the National Security Council and U.S. envoy to the UN, in her Pulitzer Prize winning book, A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide (2002) which claimed that America failed to prevent genocides in the past when it had a moral responsibility to do so. Even if lacking perfect information, a president must have a bias towards belief that massacres are imminent, justifying pre-emptive war.¹⁷ Senator Obama is alleged to have hired Power – the founding executive director of Harvard University’s Carr Center for Human Rights – as an aide after reading her book. In 2011, Obama ordered a presidential study directive which stated that preventing mass atrocities and genocide was a core national security interest and moral responsibility of the United States…. history has taught us that our pursuit of a world where states do not systematically slaughter civilians will not come to fruition without concerted and coordinated effort.¹⁸ These comments derive directly from Power who provided America’s ruling class with a useable past which misrepresented many aspects of history and affirmed belief in American exceptionalism. Her book lionized a war propagandist, Henry Morgenthau Sr., the U.S. ambassador to Turkey during World War I who misled the public about the Turkish atrocities towards the Armenians, and ignored instances where the U.S. facilitated mass atrocities, including at the nation’s founding when the age of genocide really began.¹⁹

Dubbed the femme fatale of the humanitarian assistance world (attractive and athletic, she once posed for Men’s Vogue), Power was predictably selective in her concern for human rights during her time in Washington. Like her colleagues Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice, she fixated on the plight of Afghan women and Syrian refugees from the Bashir al-Assad regime, while ignoring the victims of U.S. sponsored violence such as the Israeli assault on Gaza, Rwandan occupation of North Kivu, the Saudi attack on Yemen, the Ugandan occupation of South Sudan and the Ukrainian military assault on its eastern provinces. Unmoved by abuses in America’s carceral state, Power further promoted a new Cold War with Russia, pledged $100 million in support of a French neocolonial venture in the Central Africa Republic (CAR) and backed war in Afghanistan, Syria, Sudan and other countries to save the natives without considering whether they wanted outside intervention or whether the U.S. was in fact a source of their misery.²⁰

Power is a fitting symbol of the hollowness of Obama’s commitment to human rights and his use of the concept to expand the warfare state. The Joint Strategic Operations Command (JSOC) under his watch came to run a global assassination campaign that John Nagl, counterinsurgency adviser to General David Petraeus, termed an almost industrial scale counter-terrorism killing machine.²¹ The Pentagon spent over $480 billion to produce an armada of fantastical new aerospace weapons… from the stratosphere to the exosphere worthy of [the 1920s sci-fi comic strip] Buck Rogers, as historian Alfred W. McCoy put it. Their aim was to patrol the entire planet ceaselessly via a triple canopy aerospace shied that would reach from sky to space and be replaced by an armada of drones with lethal missiles and Argus-eyed censors monitored through an electronic matrix controlled by robots.²²

Reminiscent of the cult of Camelot, scholarly appraisals of Obama’s foreign policy have been predominantly enthusiastic, despite its imperial quality. University of Texas historian Jeremi Suri, for example, praises Obama for offering a liberal internationalist vision – emphasizing multilateralism, negotiation and disarmament – after eight years of neoconservative militarism under President George W. Bush. Suri writes that Obama’s vision was progressive and pragmatic, focused on American leadership through democratic alliances and common law that would underpin legitimate force. He worked vigorously to build alliances and negotiations. He sought to tame war with law and where possible end American military conflicts. As a good lawyer, he sought to nurture careful procedures for assessing targets, collateral damage and regional reverberations.²³ Such claims are undercut by the fact that Obama violated the U.S. constitution and sowed regional instability in invading and bombing seven Muslim countries, and ordered the assassination of terrorist suspects without due process.²⁴

Characteristic of the political landscape, most scholarly criticism of Obama’s foreign policy has come from the right. For example, a University of Chicago Ph.D., Ann Pierce, claims in her book, A Perilous Path: The Misguided Foreign Policy of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry that Obama remained idle and mute with regard to Syria and compromised with some of the world’s worst human rights abusers, most notably North Korea, Iran and Russia. Invoking misguided appeasement analogies to World War II, Pierce writes that if we do not take the lead, those who hate democracy will. Under Obama, Clinton, and Kerry they have.²⁵

Alfred McCoy, a brilliant scholar whose work has otherwise exposed CIA criminal activity, asserts that Obama revealed himself as one of those rare grand masters with an ability to go beyond mere foreign policy and play the Great Game of Geopolitics. Let’s give credit where credit is due, McCoy writes, Obama moved step by step to repair the damage caused by a plethora of Washington foreign policy debacles, old and new, and then maneuvered sometimes deftly, sometimes less so, to rebuild America’s fading global influence.²⁶ Acknowledging a ruthless side, McCoy places Obama in an elite category of visionary empire builders along with Zbigniew Brzezinski, who contributed to the defeat of the Soviet empire by bogging it down in Afghanistan, and Elihu Root, a Secretary of State and War who modernized the military and promoted the advancement of international law.

If Obama stands among these alleged giants, however, this should be considered cause for dismay. Brzezinski, after all, was an extreme Russophobe who, parroting Lenin, characterized peace activism during the Vietnam War as an infantile disorder and contributed to the growth of al-Qaeda. His Machiavellian schemes were so unpopular he was loudly booed by delegates at the 1980 Democratic Party Convention.²⁷ Brzezinski’s colleague, Cyrus Vance, referred to him as pure evil.²⁸ Root was architect of the bloody suppression of an anticolonial revolt in the Philippines and author of the Platt amendment enabling military interference in Cuba. Employed as an attorney for Boss Tweed, head of the corrupt Tammany Hall political machine, and the Havermeyer Sugar Trust, he considered labor unrest a war of poverty on wealth and championed intervention in World War I, which resulted in the death of 100,000 Americans.²⁹

Obama gets high marks by the professoriate for his pivot to Asia policy even though it trampled on indigenous rights and changed the atmosphere of U.S.-China relations from cooperation to confrontation for the first time since Richard Nixon’s visit in 1972, according to historian Chi Wang.³⁰ Obama is also credited for showing military restraint in Syria when he orchestrated one of the CIA’s largest operations in support of jihadists there, and dropped over 12,000 bombs in 2016 alone, based on the pretext that Syrian leader Bashir al-Assad had waged chemical gas attacks on his own people (as of this writing, the UN was pursuing further investigation into this).³¹

Obama’s reputation as a grand chess-master³² is further belied by the fact that the U.S. continued to lose political influence under his stewardship in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, where a 2015 RAND Corporation study observed a progressively receding frontier of U.S. dominance.³³ In sub-Saharan Africa, China built soccer stadiums and roads as Team Obama was busy building drone bases, arming dictators and chasing third-grade bandits such as Joseph Kony whom it could not even capture. Harsh sanctions combined with support for a coup in Ukraine meanwhile prompted effective Russian counter-moves, including the return to Russia of Crimea, and greater regional integration and strategic alliance with China.³⁴

The Obama administration is estimated to have added as much as $10 trillion to the U.S. national debt, the largest total of any president in history; he oversaw the debt to GDP ratio increase from 64.8% to 104.7% and a balance of payments deficit of $463 billion in 2015.³⁵ China’s ownership of over one trillion of the U.S. debt helped to shift the economic balance in its favor as the U.S. dollar began losing its appeal as a global currency exchange, further undercutting the claim that Obama was a deft manager of empire.³⁶ His administration wasted taxpayer money on billion-dollar boondoggles like Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jet, which military analyst Pierre Sprey called an inherently terrible airplane, while adversaries like Russia began to develop greater electronic and cyberwarfare capabilities and long-range missiles capable of threatening U.S. military bases.³⁷

Obama alienated traditional allies because of pervasive eavesdropping and espionage. With military spending consuming over forty percent of the budget, austerity policies championed by Wall Street resulted in extensive cutbacks in public services, including in education, thereby weakening American society. The institutionalization of militaristic values was also manifest in the repeal of the Posse Comitatus Act prohibiting the use of the military in civilian policing, development of paramilitary police and an epidemic of mass shootings.³⁸

Obama’s Unending Wars provides the first comprehensive critical history of the foreign policy of Barrack Hussein Obama, America’s forty-fourth president—the drone king who bombed seven Muslim countries, backtracked on a pledge to reduce America’s nuclear arsenal, and helped fuel a new Cold War with Russia. During his years in office, Obama also sponsored a coup in Honduras, contributed to the recolonization of Africa, perpetuated the failed War on Drugs, and sold billions of dollars of arms to Saudi Arabia, assisting it in crushing pro-democracy demonstrators in Bahrain and invading Yemen.

While any Democratic Party president would have faced peril in confronting the Pentagon which had carried out a slow coup d’état over the decades, Obama was in many ways the most perfect spokesman for the military-industrial complex. Who else but this articulate constitutional law professor could respond to winning the Nobel Peace Prize with a pro-war speech while ramping up drone assassinations and still retain the support of liberal-progressives? Had a white conservative compiled the same record, the streets of American cities might have been filled with protestors, but instead, with the exception of Occupy Wall Street, they were as quiet as a schoolyard playground in summer.

The first two chapters of this book provide an overview of Obama’s background and the tradition of liberal internationalism which underlay his approach to foreign policy. The book then proceeds to dissect Obama’s foreign policies in different regions of the world. Many liberals and night-time TV hosts revere Obama and look back at his presidency with nostalgia because of the embarrassing behavior of Donald J. Trump. In doing so, they overlook the many destructive facets of his presidency that set the groundwork for the Trump nightmare. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) told Politico that: We can’t be only upset with Trump. … His policies are bad, but many of the people who came before him [Obama] also had really bad policies. They just were more polished than he was… We don’t want anybody to get away with murder because they are polished. We want to recognize the actual policies that are behind the pretty face and the smile.³⁹

What was striking about Obama was indeed his ability to provide a liberal and humanitarian veneer to policies that were consistent with those of past imperial statesmen, and to maintain his reputation despite presiding over horrendous disasters. His forerunner in this respect was Woodrow Wilson, with whom Obama had a great deal in common. Both were like hypnotists who successfully manipulated public opinion with the assistance of elaborate propaganda campaigns that were supported by media pundits and Ivy League intellectuals. Prior to Obama’s ascension, the Pentagon had been successful in coopting the human rights movement of the 1960s by developing new technologies like drones and smart bombs that required less manpower and gave the illusion of being surgically precise and hence rendering war more humane. In making use of these tools and cultivating linkages with humanist icons like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr., Obama was able to isolate the antiwar movement and convert liberals into supporters of military intervention.

Code Pink founder Medea Benjamin lamented in 2013 that she and her group had been protesting Obama’s foreign policy for years now, but we can’t get the same numbers because the people who would’ve been yelling and screaming about this stuff under Bush are quiet under Obama.⁴⁰

First Lady Michelle Obama assisted her husband effectively through her initiative to support military families and enlist American academic institutions and scientists in combating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). This initiative fed into a discourse that urged support and sympathy for military veterans for the price they were paying, clouding their actual role as agents enforcing American imperialism and overshadowing any concern for the ravaging effects of the wars on the subject societies. The critiques of antiwar veterans, who were stigmatized as having been physically or psychologically damaged from war, was marginalized; instead, the wounded veteran became a metaphor for an aggrieved nation.⁴¹

In a 1960 study, The Rising American Empire, on the expansionist impulses of the founding fathers, historian Richard Van Alstyne noted that in side-stepping terms that would even hint at aggression or imperial domination, American foreign policy developed a vocabulary all its own, which took refuge in abstract formulae and idealistic clichés that explain nothing. The assumption is always that American diplomacy is different, purer morally than the diplomacy of other powers.⁴² Obama carried on this tradition so magnificently that he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. He will go down in history as the first black president, but if we scrutinize his policies, they do not reflect much improvement over his predecessors. More than anything, he embodies the limitation of the American two-party system in an age of corporate-rule and the obfuscation of the left’s current brand of identity politics.

Endnotes

1Barack Obama, Remarks by the President on the Administration’s Approach to Counter-Terrorism, MacDill Air Force Base, Tampa, Florida, December 06, 2016, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/12/06/remarks-president-administrations-approach-counterterrorism

2Medea Benjamin, America Dropped 26, 171 Bombs in 2016: What a Bloody End to Obama’s Reign, The Guardian , January 9, 2013; William D. Hartung, The Obama Administration Has Brokered More Weapons Sales Than Any Other Administration Since World War II, The Nation Magazine , July 26, 2016; Mike Stone U.S. Arms Exports Boom Under Obama, Sees Continuity with Trump, Reuters , November 9, 2016. In 2010 and 2011, the U.S. accounted for a monopolistic 70% of all weapons sold in the world.

3Edward Delman, Obama Promised to End America’s Wars – Has He? The Atlantic , March 30, 2016; Fred Kaplan, Obama’s Whopping New Military Budget, Slate , February 9, 2016; Nicolas J S Davies, Obama’s Bombing Legacy, Consortium News , January 18, 2017.

4Richard Miniter, Leading From Behind: The Reluctant President and the Advisors Who Decide for Him (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012), 16; Larissa MacFarquhar, The Conciliator: Where is Barack Obama Coming From? New Yorker , May 7, 2007; Edward Klein, The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2012), 3; Wayne Madsen, The Manufacturing of a President (self-published, 2012); David Remnick, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama , rev ed. (New York: Vintage, 2011).

5Evelyn Pringle, Barack Obama – The Wizard of Oz, Countercurrent , March 28, 2008; John Kass, In Combine, Cash is King, Corruption is Bipartisan, The Chicago Tribune , March 23, 2008. These corrupt figures include Tony Rezko (discussed in chapter 1), Aiham Alsammarae, who was imprisoned for stealing millions of dollars from the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq while Electricity Minister, and Alex Giannoulis, the Illinois State Treasurer whose family’s bank loaned money to organized crime figures.

6Chris Hedges, Buying Brand Obama, in The World as it Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress (New York: The Nation Books, 2010).

7Obama was the Candidate of the War Lobby Funded by the Crown Family, Global Research News , September 5, 2013; Nicolas J.S. Davies, Investing in Weapons, War, and Obama, Z Magazine , April 17, 2012; Webster G. Tarpley, Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography (Joshua Tree, CA: Progressive Press, 2008), 364.

8Davies, Investing in Weapons, War and Obama; General Dynamic, Annual Report, 2016, https://www.gd.com/sites/default/files/2016-GD-Annual-Report.pdf .

9Crown Family Profile, https://www.forbes.com/profile/crown/#1223a6116044

10 https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/toprecips.php?id=D000000175&type=P&sort=A&cycle=2008 . One of Obama’s top all-time fundraisers, Larry Duncan, had made a fortune as a Lockheed lobbyist.

11 Nick Turse, The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Spies, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012); David Sanger, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power (New York: Broadway, 2012), xviii.

12 Leon Panetta, Worthy Fights: A Memoir Of Leadership in War and Peace (New York: Penguin Press, 2014), 252.

13 Daniel Klaidman, Kill or Capture: The War On Terror and The Soul of the Obama Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2012), 22, 23, 52.

14 David J. Garrow, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama (New York: William Morrow, 2017), 1072, 1073; Philip Giraldi, Let’s Investigate John Brennan, Ron Paul Institute, March 27, 2018; Alfred W. McCoy, Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012).

15 Wayne Madsen, The Manufacturing of a President.

16 Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, National Security Inc, Washington Post , July 20, 2010.

17 Samantha Power, A Problem From Hell: America in the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

18 Presidential Study Directive on Mass Atrocities, The White House, Office of the Press Secretary,August 04, 2011, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2011/08/04/presidential-study-directivemass-atrocities .

19 Jeremy Kuzmarov, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals Redux: Humanitarian Intervention and the Liberal Embrace of War in the Age of Clinton, Bush and Obama ," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 24, No. 1, June 16, 2014; Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (San Francisco: City Light Publishers, 2001). Morgenthau acknowledged his ghostwritte nmemoirs were designed to facilitate U.S. military intervention.

20 Evan Osnos, In the Land of the Possible: Samantha Power Has the President’s Ear – To What End? The New Yorker , December 22 & 29, 2014; Tara McKelvey, Libya War: Samantha Power and the Case for Liberal Interventionism, The Daily Beast , March 22, 2011; Edward S. Herman, Double Standards and Hypocrisy Running Wild, Z Magazine , August 19, 2013; Max Blumenthal, Samantha Power, Obama’s Atrocity Enabler, Alternet , October 27, 2014.

21 Turse, The Changing Face of Empire , 13.

22 Alfred W. McCoy, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 183.

23 Jeremi Suri, Liberal Internationalism, Law and the First African-American President, In The Presidency of Barack Obama: A First Historical Assessment , ed. Julian Zelizer (Princeton University Press, 2018), 195, 197.

24 Obama’s Covert Drone War in Numbers: Ten Times More Strikes than Bush, Bureau of Investigative Journalism , January 17, 2017; Living Under the Drones: Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians From U.S. Drone Practices in Pakistan (Stanford and NYU Law Schools, September, 2012). This important report is not cited in Suri’s article.

25 Ann Pierce, A Perilous Path: The Misguided Foreign Policy of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry (Post Hill Press, 2016). See also Robert G. Kaufman , Dangerous Doctrine: How Obama’s Grand Strategy Weakened America (University Press of Kentucky, 2016).

26 McCoy, In the Shadows of the American Century , 203; Alfred W. McCoy, Barack Obama is a Foreign Policy Grandmaster, The Nation , September 15, 2015.

27 Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America in the Technetronic Society (New York: Praeger, 1982); Tarpley, Barack H. Obama , 69.

28 Douglas Brinkley, The Lives They Lived, The New York Times , December 29, 2002.

29 Ferdinand Lundberg characterized Root as a devious janizary to the economic royalists directly implicated in corrupt financial dealings. America’s 60 Families (New York: Vanguard Press, 1937), 64, 65. Founder of the Council on Foreign Relations, Root was colonial overseer of Puerto Rico and wrote the treaty facilitating U.S. control of the Panama Canal.

30 David Shambaugh, President Obama’s Asia Scorecard: The Obama Administration Deserves High Marks for Its Asia Policy, The Wilson Quarterly , Winter 2016; Chi Wang, Obama’s Challenge to China (London: Ashgate, 2015), 292.

31 Seymour Hersh, The Killing of Osama Bin Laden (London: Verso, 2016); Harriet Agerholm, Map Shows Where President Barack Obama Dropped his 20,000 Bombs, The Independent , January 19, 2017. Second Report of the Organization for the prohibition of Chemical weapons, UN Joint Investigative mechanism, June 10, 2016, which determined that Assad’s forces dropped barrel bombs with chlorine gas though specified the possibility that the bombs hit toxic chemicals on the ground. ISIS forces also used chemical weapons in Marea in August 2015.

32 See Francis Kornegay, The Grandmaster Logic Behind Obama’s Audacious Foreign Policy, The Wilson Quarterly , Winter 2016.

33 Eric Heginbotham et al., The U.S.-China Military Scorecard: Forces, Geography, and the Evolving Balance of Power, 1996-2017 (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2015), xxx, xxxi.

34 See Natylie Baldwin and Kermit Heartsong, Ukraine: Zbig’s Grand Chessboard & How the West Was Checkmated (San Francisco: Next Revelation Press, 2015), 336; Glenn Diesen, Russia’s Geoeconomic Strategy for a Greater Eurasia (New York: Routeledge, 2018).

35 Kimberley Amadeo, National Debt Under Obama: How Much Did Obama Add to the Nation’s Debt, The Balance , May 29, 2018; Diesen, Russia’s Geoeconomic Strategy for a Greater Eurasia , 39; Jude Woodward, The US vs China: Asia’s New Cold War? (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 249. Unfunded U.S. liabilities exceeded $100 trillion.

36 Kimberley Amadeo, U.S. Debt to China. How Much Does it Own? The Balance , May 30, 2018.

37 Sprey quoted in Michael P. Hughes, What Went Wrong with the F-35, Lockheed Martin’s Joint Strike Fighter? Scientific American , June 14, 2017; Andrei Martyanov, Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2018).

38 Patrick J. Buchanan, On a Fast Track to National Ruin, Tulsa World , May 13, 2015; Radley Balko, The Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces (New York: Public Affairs, 2014); Alfred W. McCoy, Imperial Illusions: Information Infrastructure and the Future of U.S. Global Power, In Endless Empire: Spain’s Retreat, Europe’s Eclipse, America’s Decline , ed. Alfred W. McCoy, Joseph M. Fradera and Stephen Jacobson (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 360-386.

39 Tim Alberta, The Democrats Dilemma: What Ilhan Omar and Dean Phillips Tell Us About the Future of the Democratic Party, Politico , March 8, 2019.

40 Daniel Martin, Whither the Antiwar Movement? The American Conservative , December 15, 2017. See also Michael T. Heaney and Fabio Rojas, Party in the Street: The Antiwar Movement and the Democratic Party after 9/ 11 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

41 First Lady Michelle Obama Announces Major Coordinated Effort by America’s Academic Institutions to Combat PTSD & TBI, The White House, January 11, 2012; Jerry Lembcke, PTSD: Diagnosis and Identity in Post-Empire America (Boston: Lexington Books, 2015).

42 Richard Van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire (New York: W.W. Norton, 1960), 6, 7.

| Chapter 1 |

IN WOODROW WILSON’S SHADOW

OBAMA AND THE LIBERAL INTERNATIONALIST TRADITION

From Palestine through Iraq, Obama has acted as just another steward of the American empire, pursuing the same aims as his predecessors, with the same means but with more emollient rhetoric….Historically, the model for the current variant of imperial presidency is Woodrow Wilson, no less pious a Christian, whose every second word was peace, democracy, or self-determination, while his armies invaded Mexico, occupied Haiti, and attacked Russia [yes, Russia!], and his treaties handed one colony after another to his partners in war. Obama is a hand-me-down version of the same, without even Fourteen Points to betray.

—Tariq Ali, The Obama Syndrome.

While many commentators have tried to look deeply into Obama’s past to uncover the