The Pacific President

On Monday, as Barack Obama is sworn in again as President, his allies in the West will ask themselves the same nervous question they posed four years ago: how much does he care about us?

The British, in particular, are worried. War looms in Mali, yet Washington seems happy to let the French take charge, showing even less interest than it did in Libya two years ago. Cheerleaders for the ‘special relationship’ accuse Obama of taking a back seat, of failing to show leadership and even of betraying his country’s oldest friends. They look back to that much-discussed episode when the new President removed a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office and point out that he has steadily sought to disentangle America from its strategic partnerships with Europe ever since. Now, the man who once committed 30,000 more troops to the allied fight against the Taleban is planning to withdraw almost all American troops from Afghanistan before the end of next year. Is the President an isolationist? Is he anti-West?

The truth is more hurtful. Obama isn’t against us; he just isn’t that into us. He recognises that Europe is no longer the cockpit of world affairs, that our concerns are no longer all-important, and that the Atlanticist idea of West vs East has become utterly redundant.

Rather than retreat from foreign commitments, Obama is simply reorientating them to face up to the rise of the Far East. This so-called ‘Asian pivot’ is the most important strategic shift since the Cold War. It is perhaps no surprise that it took a president with a Kenyan father, born in Hawaii and brought up in Indonesia from the age of six until he was ten, to redirect America’s attention.