Barack obama

Today I joined number of leading Afghan experts, from Ahmed Rashid to Gilles Dorronsoro, in calling on President Obama to change the American strategy in Afghanistan. Based on our work in and on Afghanistan, we wanted to make a number of points just as the White House begins reviewing its strategy: First, that the cost of the war is now over $120 billion per year for the United States alone. This is unsustainable in the long run. Second, despite these huge costs, the situation on the ground is much worse than a year ago because the Taliban insurgency has made progress across the country. The military campaign is suppressing, locally and temporarily, the symptoms of the disease, but fails to offer a long-term cure.

There is no diplomacy with maniacs. North Korea has been the grip of one or another lunatic for 60 years; with the succession still unsettled, Pyongyang is now a salon for the insane. The escalation of posturing, violence and the nuclear programme is a brazenly mad strategy to bribe other countries in exchange for good behaviour; it’s piratical. The world’s geopolitics may be changing, but the US President remains supreme among leaders. Yesterday, Iain Martin argued that Barack Obama had to make a strong and unequivocal statement about the situation, at least to encourage China to reprimand its errant ally. The President did so.

Over the last decade, Wall Street has become an important foreign policy actor in its own right, almost as important as the lobbyists on K-Street and the White House on Pensylvania Avenue. The ebb and flow of capital has been a decisive international force in determining the fate of nations - most recently illustrated in the cases of Greece and Ireland. As an aide to President Clinton once said: in a second life he would like to come back as the bond market. But Wall Street has influenced foreign policy in a deeper way too: by changing the way that successive US administrations see the world. Not by focusing on the bottom-line. International relations cannot be reduced to cost/benefit analyses.

This snippet from Anthony Seldon and Guy Lodge’s latest book merits repeating: ‘As Barack Obama waited in a cavernous building in London, he suddenly noticed Gordon Brown stomping towards him down a corridor, with a flurry of aides in his wake. Unfortunately — probably because he has a glass eye as the result of a rugby injury — the Prime Minister didn’t see the President. To the surprise of Obama and his entourage, the British premier was doing a passable impression of an erupting volcano. He was clearly furious about something his aides had or hadn’t done. It was hardly the behaviour anyone would expect of a G20 summit host, and the American President watched with growing disbelief.

Two years into her term, and after carefully avoiding any success-free issues, Hillary Clinton has finally launched herself into the Middle East peace process. According to Roger Cohen in the New York Times, "The heavy lifting is now in Clinton’s hands". As evidence of Clinton's new role, Cohen lists a video conference with the Palestinian prime minister, where the US secretary of state announced $150 million in US aid to the Palestinian Authority and said the Obama administration was “deeply disappointed” by recent Israeli behaviour. Mrs Clinton's foray into the Middle Eastern quagmire  is interesting.

President Obama's return to Indonesia this week was remarkable, in part, for the limited attention it has garnered outside his childhood nation. You can't walk through an airport bookshop without being inundated by bestsellers about China's rise. India has always occupied a special part in British hearts. But Indonesia is different. There are few in the British foreign policy establishment who really know the place. Some British military officers know a few Indonesian counterparts through their time at Sandhurst and the Defence Academy. The human rights lobby grew familiar with Indonesia over years of protests against the Sukarno/Suharto dictatorships and the country's mistreatment of East Timor. But, on the whole, little is still known about Indonesia.

As the G20 summit begins in Seoul, the emphasis in much of the papers is on the economic hostility between America and China. The FT's Gideon Rachman wrote a cover piece on this matter for The Spectator two weeks ago, which we've reprinted here for the benefit of CoffeeHousers: In a couple of weeks’ time, David Cameron and George Osborne will arrive in China and witness at first hand an economic boom that is shaking the world. The British duo will doubtless receive a polite and outwardly respectful reception. But, as I discovered on a visit to Shanghai last week, Chinese diplomats and academics have noted the deep cuts in British spending — and they are drawing the obvious conclusions about the relative fortunes of the two nations.

Number 43 is back. And judging by his interview (£) with the Times editor James Harding – and that paper's serialisation (£) of his memoirs – he is standing defiant. As Bush himself puts it to his critics, "I ask those people to read the book. I understand that the filter can be harsh. But I think people will see someone who deliberated carefully on key issues, someone who did not sell his soul for politics, that he was willing to stand on principle and people can draw their own conclusions." "The book" is out tomorrow, so we will be able to draw our own conclusions then. But, in the meantime, here's a selection of extracts from the first part of the Times serialisation. The second part will come tomorrow, and cover 9/11, Blair and Katrina.

The backlash that Barack Obama is now experiencing seemed almost impossible when the neophyte senator swept into the White House. It was, in fact, predicted by some. In 2007 when Barack Obama was but an ambitious Illinois senator, American defence expert Kori Shake penned an essay called the Coming Crisis of High Expectations. It was about how the EU and the US would inevitably slide apart - but its message was broader. Beware of exorbitant expectations, she seemed to be saying. Reality hurts. How much it hurts will become clear today. It looks like a House of Representatives-sized hurt but not a Senate-shaped one. Harry Reid clung on to his Nevada Senate seat, and California will be Democrat-run.

Wikileaks is the story of the day. The Guardian has extensive coverage of unsubstantiated allegations made by unnamed Iraqis. That is not to prejudge the revelations, just to provide balance against the sensational headlines before proper investigations called for by the UN. In addition to the alleged atrocities and cover-ups, Wikileaks’ disclosures support what Blair and Bush said and maintain: Iran incited dissidence to exploit instability. In fact, it is still doing so, despite the Obama administration’s protests to the contrary. The New York Times has eviscerated Biden and Obama this morning.