Us politics

After a week of hesitation and well-publicised problems evacuating British citizens from Libya, the government has led the international community's response to the crisis. The decision to move HMS Cumberland into position was astute, as was the authorisation to rescue the people stranded in the dessert. At the UN, British diplomats have been drafting most of the key resolutions and now David Cameron has out-hawked everyone by saying he'd be willing to contemplate a no-fly zone. US lawmakers have asked the Obama administration why they have not been as swift as the UK. As a Bosnian-born friend of mine said last night: "If only David Cameron and William Hague were around in 1992, so many of my friends would have been alive today!

Rumours abound that General David Petraeus will leave his post as commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan. Early editions of The Times quoted Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell saying that “General Petraeus is doing a brilliant job but he’s been going virtually non-stop since 9/11 [and] he can’t do it forever”. According to The Times, President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates are searching for a replacement. And, says the newspaper, there has apparently even been talk of Petraeus succeeding Gates as Defense Secretary. Really?

President Obama’s new budget proposal is an interesting moment as Obama is now admitting that the time for fiscal stimulus has passed and that cuts needs to be made. As one administration official tells The New York Times, “The debate in Washington is not whether to cut or to spend… The question is how we cut and what we cut.” Interestingly, Obama has proposed a ratio of two third spending cuts and one third tax rises. By contrast, the bi-partisan Simpson Bowles commission on the deficit proposed something very similar to the 80 percent spending cuts, twenty percent tax rises model that Osborne is using.

The last six years have been fallow ones for the neoconservatives. From around 2005, when Iraq began its descent into chaos, the ideology that did so much to shape US foreign policy became marginalised as, first, George W Bush turned increasingly realist and, then, Barack Obama continued where his predecessor left off. While ideas are not responsible for the people who hold them, it did not help that, after President Bush left office, those who espoused a neoconservative outlook included the likes of Sarah Palin. Funding for democracy-promotion was slashed, and the focus for aid programmes became "accountability" – with the word "democracy" banished from sight.

When John Huntsman, the Republican governor of Utah, accepted Barack Obama’s offer of the ambassadorship to China it seemed to be further evidence that Obama was going to be a two term president. The ambitious Huntsman, who would stand a good chance in a Republican primary, appeared to have decided that the nomination in 2012 wasn’t worth having. So it is a sign of the shifting political tide that Huntsman is now indicating that he may resign as ambassador to China soon and run for the Republican nomination. With Obama’s approval rating now significantly below 50 percent, the Republican nomination is now a far more appealing prize. There is, unusually for the Republicans, no clear front-runner.

Barack Obama has had a great couple of weeks. First DADT was repealed and then START was ratified by the Senate, safeguarding a major Obama foreign policy initiative In truth, both issues are peripheral to voter concerns. To them, the jobless recovery is what matters. New figures show that the unemployment rate in the US has jumped to a seven-month high of 9.8 per cent. Nor did the White House get all it wanted from Congress recently. As the Senate was debating DADT, the House of Representatives killed a provision in a defence bill to transfer detainees from Guantanamo to the US. But in politics having momentum - the Big Mo - is one of the most important, if intangible, factors. Recently, Obama could not even find Lil' Mo, Big Mo's smaller brother.

This week will give Barack Obama's liberal credentials a significant boost. On December 18th, the Senate had a  successful cloture vote in favour of a bill to repeal "Don't ask, don't tell". DADT as it is commonly known restricts the US military from trying to discover or reveal closeted gay, lesbian, and bisexual service members, while it bars those who are openly gay, lesbian, or bisexual from military service. The bill has now passed in both Houses of Congress and it only awaits President Obama's signature. As my friend R.

When the Obama administration started its latest Middle East initiative, it was amid great fanfare. I blogged – sceptically -- about the optimism exuding from the State Department at the time. Now, however, the US government has given up its push for a freeze in Jewish settlement construction as quietly as possible. As Martin Indyk of the Brookings Institution puts it: “The Middle East peace process just died, but nobody seems to be in mourning. Twenty months of U.S. efforts to freeze Israeli settlement activity to create a conducive environment for negotiations have produced only deadlock.

Now the Wikileaks are beginning to become dangerous. Before, the leaks contained high-level tittle-tattle, confirmation of existing analyses and embarrassingly accurate portraits of world leaders. I still thought it wrong to regurgitate this data, as it will lead to more secrecy, bilateral problems and potentially even conflicts – the things that Julian Assange claims he is seeking to avoid. Yet I told NPR that the idea of prosecuting the Wikileaks founder for treason was far-fetched; he is not a US citizen and it was not clear to me what kind of charges could be brought against him in the US courts. Now, however, with the publication of data which will be useful background reading for any would-be terrorist, the situation has changed.