Global Paradigms

Business Times - 07 Jun 2011 Economic fears may dent Obama's re-election hopes By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT A TSUNAMI of bad economic news is raising new concerns about the prospects for the recovery of the US economy and for the re-election of US President Barack Obama. While it may too early to consider the likelihood of a double-dip recession and for a Republican takeover of the White House in 2013, the mood on Wall Street and in Washington is certainly dipping. A negative private job report sent the Dow on its biggest fall in a year on Wednesday. Indeed, figures released last Wednesday and showing a big drop in manufacturing employment was another indication that job growth continues to be slow. And while the US Labor Department announced the next day that the number of jobless benefit applications fell by 6,000 to a seasonally adjusted 422,000, very few economists were cheering. There was no change in the number of Americans who continued to receive unemployment cheq...

Business Times - 03 Jun 2011 Headwinds for Obama trade agenda By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT AS PART of its stated commitment to help American companies double their exports by 2015, the Obama administration has been pressing Congress to approve the proposed free trade agreements (FTAs) with South Korea, Colombia and Panama. Indeed, early this year in his State of the Union speech, President Barack Obama hailed a trade deal with South Korea 'that will support at least 70,000 American jobs'. In fact, President Obama and his aides had to deal with strong opposition from Democrats in Congress and their supporters in the labour unions who opposed the three pacts that were negotiated by former president George W Bush and that enjoyed the backing of a majority of the pro-business Republicans on Capitol Hill. The White House was able to eventually secure Democratic support only after making some modifications to the Korean bill. At a time when the US economy is recovering from...

Ngo Dinh Netanyahu, Benjamin MacArthur by Leon T. Hadar This article appeared in Haaretz on May 31, 2011. On a sunny day in May, the leader of an important U.S. ally from an unstable region of the world where critical American interests were at stake, was addressing a joint meeting of Congress presided over by the Speaker of the House and the Vice President. The foreign leader who reiterated in his address the common interests and values shared by the U.S. and his country in containing the threat posed by global anti-western aggression received a standing ovation and his speech was persistently interrupted by loud applause by legislators, with lawmakers from the two major political parties lavishing him with praise. Seven years after speaking before the U.S. Congress Ngo Dinh Diem, the President of South Vietnam was assassinated on November 2, 1963, in a military coup sanctioned by the administration of President John Kennedy. And in May 9, 1975, the same body that Diem addressed twelv...

Business Times - 27 May 2011 The Republican candidate Obama should fear the most By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT PRESIDENT Barack Obama and his aides have been going out of their way to praise former US ambassador to China Jon Huntsman for the great job he did representing the current Democratic administration in Beijing for two years, before deciding to resign while considering a presidential bid against his former boss in the White House. Addressing members of the prestigious Gridiron Club during their annual dinner recently, Mr Obama joked that he was planning to campaign for Mr Huntsman during the Republican primaries and to tell the very conservative (and anti-Obama) Republican voters in Iowa and New Hampshire that 'Obama's Man in Beijing' was, indeed, a great team player . . . Fifty-one-year-old Mr Huntsman has yet to announce that he is running for the Republican presidential nomination next year. But the leading Republican politician, who served as governor o...

Business Times - 24 May 2011 Obama plays the fox in Middle-East He recognises that what is happening in the region is complex and requires an accommodating response from Washington By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT DELIVERING his much anticipated address on the Middle East in Washington, US President Barack Obama proved once again that he wasn't an ideologue but a thinker inspired by the very American philosophical tradition of pragmatism with its emphasis on empiricism, incrementalism, and scepticism towards grand theories. Indeed, friends and adversaries were confused by what they saw was his disjointed response to the recent upheaval in the Arab World - grudgingly supporting the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt; unenthusiastically backing limited military action in Libya; projecting a nuanced attitude to the unrest in Bahrain. His supporters had hoped that Mr Obama would lay out a new US grand strategy for the Middle East - the so-called Obama Doctrine - during his speech. Th...

Business Times - 18 May 2011 Waiting for a Republican Leader Current slate of contenders, except perhaps Tim Pawlenty, will find the going tough given their real or perceived failings By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT A FEW nights ago, five candidates for the 2012 presidential election gathered for an early debate that touched upon domestic and foreign policy issues. Two of the five taking part in the televised debates - a member of the House of Representatives from a southern state and a former governor of a large state - argued that the time has come to bring an end to Washington's War on Drugs. In fact, one of the two presidential candidates hoping to challenge Democratic President Barack Obama next year expressed support for legalising drugs, agreeing with the suggestion that heroin and prostitution were an 'exercise of liberty', and insisting that he would leave it to the states to make that decision on whether to de-criminalise them. Based on these sound bites, y...

Business Times - 11 May 2011 'First Pacific' president stuck in the Middle East While Obama wants to focus more on China, US will remain 'underweighted' in East Asia By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT AT THE centre of US President Barack Obama's geostrategic thinking has been the recognition that in the aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the devastating financial meltdown, 'America needed to rebuild its reputation, extricate itself from the Middle East and Afghanistan, and turn its attention towards Asia and China's unchecked influence in the (Asia-Pacific) region', according to a much-discussed article about Mr Obama's foreign policy that was published in The New Yorker magazine recently. According to Ryan Lizza, the author of the article, Mr Obama and his advisers concluded upon entering office that America was 'overweighted' in the Middle East and 'underweighted' in East Asia. 'We've been on a little bit ...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leon-t-hadar/pakistan-client-state_b_857019.html Pakistan Is Not a Strategic Ally But an Irresponsible Client State Posted: 05/ 3/11 06:52 PM ET Adolph Hitler and other top leaders of Nazi Germany escape into neutral Spain after the defeat of the Third Reich and find a sanctuary in the Pyrenees Mountains along the border with France from which they launch deadly attacks against the U.S. and its allies and attempt to overthrow the pro-western government in Paris. Would the U.S. allow Generalissimo Francisco Franco to provide a safe haven for Hitler and his associates in Spain and describe his government as an "ally in the fight against Nazism?" And would the Americans wait for another 10 years before sending U.S. Special Forces to capture and kill the Nazi leader hiding in a mansion a few miles from Madrid and just 800 yards away from a military academy that is the equivalent of Spain's West Point? Quite unlikely, you say. But then many elemen...

Business Times - 05 May 2011 Economic realities may obscure Obama victory For him, winning 2012 election could prove to be even more difficult than getting Osama By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT IN THE aftermath of the impressive US military victory in the First Persian Gulf War aka Operation Desert Storm in 1991, then-president George W H Bush seemed to be politically invincible. With his popularity in the public opinion polls surging to the stratosphere - one poll indicated that 90 per cent of Americans approved of his performance in office - pundits on the political right and left seemed to agree that the Republican US president would be unbeatable in the 1992 race to the White House. Moreover, when the names of some of the Democrats who could emerge as potential presidential candidates were mentioned - including that of the young and relatively unknown former Arkansas governor Bill Clinton - the conventional wisdom in Washington was that none of them had a chance of defeating...

Business Times - 04 May 2011 The long and winding trail to killing of Osama By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT IMAGINE that Adolf Hitler and some of the other top leaders of Nazi Germany would have escaped into neutral Spain after the defeat of the Third Reich by the allies in 1945. And conceive of the following (and unlikely) scenario: In the Pyrenees mountains along Spain's border with France - a country that had been liberated from German occupation a few months earlier - the German Fuhrer and his band of Storm troopers and other Nazi brothers would have established a military and political base from which they would be launching deadly attacks against the US and its allies in France. It is safe to say that under these circumstances, it would have been inconceivable that the allies would have declared a military victory in the war in Europe or that they would have re-directed their troops and resources to finish the job in the Pacific or, for that matter, to 'liberate...

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/apr/29/weak-link-in-chain-of-american-alliances/ OPINIONCOMMENTARYSE HADAR: Weak link in chain of American alliances Wishing for friendship with Pakistan doesn’t make it so By Leon T. Hadar -The Washington Times Pakistan is lobbying Afghanistan's president against building a long-term strategic partnership with the United States, urging him instead to look to Pakistan and China for help in making a deal with the Taliban and rebuilding his country's economy, according to the most recent press reports. Yet despite this, the growing friction between the United States and Pakistan over the release of a CIA contractor who shot and killed two Pakistanis and the continuing U.S. drone attacks that have resulted in civilian casualties has been described by American officials as one more example of the unavoidable tensions between two "old allies." Indeed, the George W. Bush administration designated Pakistan as a major non-NATO ally i...

Business Times - 29 Apr 2011 Straight from the horse's mouth Bernanke holds his first-ever press conference as Fed head By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT NOT unlike other top players in Washington, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, dressed in a business suit and red tie, was the cool and calm Master of the Spin, massaging the media and staying on message during what could only be described as a historic event: for the first time in the Fed's 97-year history, the head of the US central bank was holding a press conference on Wednesday and answering reporters' questions. Against the backdrop of high rates of unemployment and rising commodity prices, one could have expected the Fed chairman to be facing a bunch of tough and probing reporters who would be pressing the head of the central bank to explain whether he had failed in carrying out the two central duties of the Fed: maintaining stable prices, and maximum employment. But not to worry. Unlike many of the somewha...

Business Times - 27 Apr 2011 Donald Trump for president? The host of NBC reality show The Apprentice may well defy conventional wisdom and make his way to the White House By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT THE conventional wisdom in Washington these days is that billionaire Donald Trump will probably not be elected as the next US president. But then, the conventional wisdom once upon a time had it that there was 'no way' that an ageing and not very successful Hollywood actor (Ronald Reagan) or an inexperienced and young African-American politician whose last name rhymed with 'Osama' (Barack Obama) would be occupying the White House. The safe bet is still against a Trump presidency. But Trump, currently the host of NBC reality show The Apprentice and who startled politicians and pundits when he announced that he was considering running for the Republican Party's presidential nomination, has defied the conventional wisdom big time after a recent opinion poll sugge...

Business Times - 20 Apr 2011 Stirring Congress to act as one S&P admonishes Washington but Moody's cautious optimism makes more sense By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT THE decision by the credit rating agency Standard & Poor's to lower the outlook on the US credit to 'negative' has been sending shockwaves across Wall Street and Washington. While the US has kept its AAA rating, the downgrade by S&P was a sign that the agency believes that there was a 33 per cent chance that it would have to lower its debt rating on US debt in the next two years. Currently, US government debt is regarded as one of the safest investments. But if S&P decides to change its rating, that could have huge repercussions for the status of the US and its currency in the global economy. 'More than two years after the beginning of the recent crisis, US policymakers have still not agreed on how to reverse recent fiscal deterioration or address longer-term fiscal pressures,...

Business Times - 14 Apr 2011 US lawmakers preparing for next big fight By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT THEY have just signed a deal to cut US$38 billion in federal spending for the rest of this fiscal year and averted a government shutdown - for now, at least. Yet even before the ink is dry on that deal - not to mention the fact that Congress still needs to agree on the federal budget for the next fiscal year - lawmakers in Washington are already gearing up for the next fight. This one is over whether to raise or not to raise the nation's debt ceiling. Simply put, it would allow the government to borrow more money. Indeed, with the amount of borrowing the federal government is allowed expected to hit the legal limit as early as next month, President Barack Obama and Republican and Democratic congressional leaders are drawing lines in the sand over this next clash. The outcome could have a major impact on the financial markets as well as on the voters who will be choosing the...

Business Times - 12 Apr 2011 US budget debate points to big ideological divide Voters will probably have to make a major choice between two competing visions in 2012 By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT THE race for a budget deal came down to the wire. Federal funding was slated to run out at midnight on Friday and the government would have shut down if no budget deal had been reached by then. The government of the world's remaining superpower - engaged in at least two full-blown wars and recovering from the worst economic recession since the Great Depression - was going to run out of money. About 800,000 American federal employees would have been out of work; passports wouldn't have been issued; the annual National Cherry Blossom parade scheduled to take place in Washington, DC on Saturday would have been cancelled to the disappointment of close to 100,000 expected spectators. But the high-stakes game of chicken between Democratic President Barack Obama - represented in the ...