Unpacking American foreign policy behind the Obama-Uhuru rapprochement

What you need to know:

  • Administration seems to be confusing killing militants with winning, says author of book on Yemen.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof observed that Mr Obama may be the only person in the world who would cite Yemen and Somalia as triumphs ... By disembarking from the democracy high horse and pursuing naked, narrow self-interest, the Obama administration is now plumbing the same murky depths it accuses China of, in pursuit of a seriously flawed counter-terrorism strategy, writes David Ndii

“The occasion has been judged proper for asserting, as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonisation by any European powers … We owe it, therefore, to candour and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere dangerous to our peace and safety.”

Proclaimed in 1823, the Monroe Doctrine has been the lodestar of US foreign policy for well over 200 years, making it the most enduring foreign policy tenet of modern times. In the 19th century, it was invoked to, among others, annex Hawaii and Puerto Rico, muscle Spain out of Cuba and its Pacific colonies, as well as a failed attempt to annex the Dominican Republic.

But it is to the Cold War that it owes both its record run and notoriety. Hitherto, the doctrine was viewed as aiding decolonisation. During the Cold War, it became associated with wreaking political havoc in Latin America and beyond, what some scholars have termed the age of American imperialism.

Latin Americans had a predilection for electing leftist governments, which the US saw as potential Soviet trojan horses. The Monroe Doctrine was invoked to engineer their overthrow by right wing puppet dictatorships. It destabilised permanently those it failed to overthrow.

What followed was plunder by the puppet dictators and US multinationals on an epic scale, obscene inequality, and the most egregious human rights abuses. The pillaging culminated in the debt crisis of the mid-80s, a decade of painful structural adjustment, and finally, democracy, stability and development.

STATING THE OBVIOUS

Addressing the Organisation of American States a year and a half ago, Mr John Kerry, President Barack Obama’s Secretary of State (foreign minister), declared that “the era of the Monroe Doctrine is over”.

The declaration was not seen as earth- shattering. Mr Kerry was seen as stating the obvious.

Latin America had fallen off the foreign policy radar in the post-cold war political and intellectual confusion. Had we reached the end of history or were we hurtling towards a clash of civilisations?

The September 11 attacks settled that debate. Step forward Mr George W. Bush. In his memoir, Decision Points, Mr Bush articulates his doctrine as making no distinction between terrorists and the nations that harbour them, taking the fight to the enemy; confronting threats before they materialise, and advancing liberty and hope as an alternative to the enemy’s ideology of repression and fear.

PACIFIST PLATFORM

In practice, the Bush Doctrine boiled down to three things — might is right, pre-emptive war and regime change.

Seven years of the Bush Doctrine left America bloodied, broke and no nearer to vanquishing the enemy, paving the way for Mr Obama’s pacifist platform.

Mr Obama set five goals for his foreign policy. These, in his own words, were “ending the war in Iraq responsibly; finishing the fight against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban; securing all nuclear weapons and materials from terrorists and rogue states; achieving true energy security; and rebuilding our alliances to meet the challenges of the 21st century”. Score?

The war in Iraq has morphed into a regional conflagration. He will leave the Middle East worse than he found it. The Al-Qaeda franchise has gone global. The Taliban are unvanquished and extremism is more virulent. The Iran deal is a bright spot on nuclear arms, but critics contend that the price will be high — that it will economically empower Iran to finance more terrorism. Time will tell.

The US is more energy secure but not on account of his efforts. Fracking has unlocked domestic oil and gas on a scale unforeseen a decade ago. It is doubtful that Mr Obama would have been able to cut the Iran deal had the US still been as dependent on Middle East oil as before.

He has mooted ambitious trade blocs with Western Europe and Asia, which may or may not materialise and which, in the larger scheme of things, divert attention and resources from multilateral trade negotiations that benefit the whole world. It’s definitely not an A. Even a B is generous.

ARAB SPRING

As Mr Obama was being feted in Nairobi and sanitising dictatorship in Addis Ababa, Saudi bombs were raining on Sana’a, the ancient capital of Yemen. Yemen, to quote CNN, is “the petri dish” of the Obama administration’s counter-terrorism strategy, “a hybrid warfare of US drone strikes, Special Forces and on-the-ground intelligence provided by local partners”.

The strategy has run into Yemen’s sectarian politics. The “partner” Sunni- dominated government has been overrun by Houthi (Shia) rebels, allegedly Iranian backed, and forces loyal to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was ousted by the Arab spring uprising.

The pro-US President Abdi Rabbuh Mansur Hadi fled the country in March, forcing the US to pull out its Special Forces. The US is backing the Saudi-led regional offensive to restore Hadi’s government. A protracted civil war seems inevitable.

The stakes are high. Mr Obama assured Americans late last year that this proxy war strategy is the panacea for ISIS.

“This strategy of taking out terrorists, while supporting partners on the front lines, is one that we have successfully pursued in Yemen and Somalia for years,” he confidently asserted.

Americans are loath to deploy massive ground troops into any more intractable foreign wars. If Mr Obama’s proxy war strategy fails, the war on terror will be all but lost.

The American taxpayer does not fuel Airforce One to go on junkets. Mr Obama’s homecoming was incidental to his mission. Somalia is a stone’s throw away from Yemen. Somalis used to flee to Yemen. Now Yemenis are fleeing to Somalia, and Somalis fleeing back home.

The problem is, says Somalia’s Foreign Minister Abdusalam Omer: “We don’t know who is coming back. The Somalis who are radicalised will come back. Yemenis who are radicalised by ISIS and Al-Qaeda will come.” You get the picture.

We and Ethiopia are the Obama administration’s last line of defence on the Yemen-Somali strategy — the “partners on the frontlines” that he refers to. Ethiopia is dependable.

It has disciplined authoritarian leadership with the vice-like grip on society you want in a client state and an equally disciplined, battle-hardened military. If it means stretching the meaning of democratic elections to lend it legitimacy, so be it.

We are anything but. We are a noisy open society with fractious politics, a rapacious, duplicitous leadership, a free-wheeling enterprising military, more Pakistan than Ethiopia, you are never sure whether they are hunting foes or harbouring them.

It turns out that Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban with a $10 million (Sh1 billion) bounty on his head, died peacefully in Karachi two years ago.

COMBATING CORRUPTION

But President Uhuru Kenyatta has the makings of a useful if not altogether dependable ally, a Hamid Karzai sort of guy. He is the Ivy League-educated son of a staunch pro-Western autocrat, the same authoritarian instinct, if not the gravitas. He may pander to China when it serves him, but Western patronage is more to his taste. A few dry days a week and he is your man.

Yemen’s unravelling is as a result of sectarian exclusionist politics and corruption. We, of course, know that the two are sides of a coin — “eating” is the primary motivation of excluding. I am intrigued by why corruption is so ethnic — even in Jubilee, the Kikuyu and Kalenjin factions eat separately, but I digress.

The Obama administration is aware that here, too, corruption is the Achilles heel. Not surprisingly, the agreement with the Jubilee government on combating corruption is the only one that it has elected to publicise. It is clear from the joint communique that the Americans’ primary concern is the corruption-terrorism nexus (narcotics, poaching, money laundering). The Obama administration seems to believe that it can extricate Mr Kenyatta from the corruption quagmire he is wallowing in, or at least insulate their security operation from its worst excesses.

You have to be incredibly naive or desperate to expect the Jubilee government to deliver on corruption. For starters, Mr Kenyatta is no match for the corruption networks. They have already made nonsense of his own declaration of war on graft.

Secondly, even if he could, it is not in his political interest to have a bloody war on corruption going into an election.

Third, there is nothing to lose if he does not deliver. The Americans have zero leverage. As we say in Gikuyu, muharwo niwe uthingataga githaka (It is the person with a running stomach who seeks the company of the bush, not the other way round).

We have been here before. I had an opportunity a decade ago to participate in a high-level international expert panel meeting on aid and corruption convened by Transparency International to advise then World Bank President James Wolfenson, at which I made the mistake of bringing up his failed “dream team” experiment.

He went ballistic, accusing us Kenyans of being an ungrateful lot who did not appreciate how he had gone out on a limb to help us, even disclosing how he had President Daniel arap Moi pinned to the wall at a secret meeting in London he thought we did know about.

When he was done pontificating, I calmly pointed out two things to him. First, that it was impossible to have a secret meeting abroad with a president, especially one who travelled with as large and undisciplined a retinue as Mr Moi did.

Second, that he had been conned. That Kenyans could have told him that Mr Moi’s objective was to secure the first instalment of the aid package that would be released once he took the dream team on board to tide the economy over until the next crisis, and he would dump the dream as soon as he could and cross the next bridge when he came to it, as we had seen Mr Moi play this game with Western donors successfully for 20 years. He calmed down.

And so it is with Mr Obama. The Jubilee administration’s foremost interest in the detente was political legitimisation, and that was achieved as soon as Mr Obama stepped out of Airforce One.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof observed that Mr Obama may be the only person in the world who would cite Yemen and Somalia as triumphs, while Gregory Johnsen, author of a recent book on Yemen opined that the administration seemed to be confusing killing militants with winning. By disembarking from the democracy high horse and pursuing naked, narrow self-interest, the Obama administration is now plumbing the same murky depths it accuses China of, in pursuit of a seriously flawed counter-terrorism strategy.

The irony is, first, deepening democracy and the rule of law is the only certain corruption deterrent. This is precisely the reason why the Jubilee administration is hell-bent on restoring autocracy — to pillage without question or consequences. Second, all the money that the US will spend on occupying Somalia would have been better spent rebuilding it. You could probably buy Al-Shabaab and all the warlords for half of it.

As the bemused Agikuyu of old observed, urimu no ta uthungu (foolishness and the ways of white folk are hard to tell apart sometimes).

The writer is the managing director of Africa Economics. [email protected]