SPEAKING before the NATO summit President Obama made clear that his business in Europe was to raise a war party for Afghanistan, when he announced that Al-Qaeda was much closer to Europe and therefore was a greater threat to Europe than it was to the US.
Mocking the European bourgeoisie, he added that the US wanted to be a partner rather than a patron of Europe.
Obama has already pledged 21,000 extra US troops for Afghanistan.
After he spoke, British PM Brown let it be known that he was supporting Obama, and that the UK would send thousands of extra troops to Afghanistan in August for the period of the presidential election, and was expecting other EU states to follow suit.
However, there was opposition even as the middle classes swooned about Obama.
Nato Secretary General, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, earlier in the day denounced the new ‘Taleban type’ laws that President Karzai was bringing in to try and win the August election. He said that such laws returned women to the dark ages and that troops could not be sent in support of such laws.
He told the BBC: ‘How can I defend this, and how can the British defend this, when our boys and girls are dying there in defence of universal values, and here is a law that fundamentally violates human rights.’
At Strasbourg, Obama, a patron of Israel’s secret nuclear arsenal of 200 bombs, declared himself to be working for a world without nuclear weapons.
This was a cynical diplomatic gambit whereby Obama and Russia’s President Medvedev will announce a reduction in their huge nuclear arsenals, while insisting that Iran must not disrupt this trend towards nuclear disarmament by acquiring technology that could be used to develop a nuclear weapon.
Meanwhile, Obama is opposed to the Middle East becoming a nuclear free zone since its only nuclear armed state, Israel, would be urged to give up its massive nuclear arsenal.
Meanwhile, beneath all the pomp, circumstance and the contrived unity of the imperialist powers, the crisis of US and worldwide capitalism is growing.
The number of people employed in the US fell by 663,000 in March. The jobless rate is now at 8.5%, up from February’s figure of 8.1%, the highest since 1983.
Since December 2007, 5.1 million US jobs have been lost, 3.3 million of them in the past five months.
The total number of unemployed people in industry rose to 13.2 million in March with the number of people forced to work part-time, but who would prefer to work full-time, rising 423,000 to nine million.
This means that the average working week has been cut to 33.2 hours, the lowest since records began in 1964.
US GDP has contracted at an annualised rate of 6.3%, worse than a previous estimate of 6.2%.
Because the US government has had to spend billions bailing out financial institutions, the US budget deficit will hit $1.8 trillion this year.
It is predicted that President Obama’s budget will see a total deficit of $9.3tn over 2010-2019.
Despite the fact that Brown proclaimed the New World Order when he closed the G20 summit, it remains to be constructed.
The situation in the US is so grave that Obama has had to sack Wagoner, the GM boss, after telling him that his austerity plan was not lean or mean enough, and that more plants must close and car workers’ wages and benefits must be further slashed.
The mass of trade unionists who voted to elect Obama will now begin to turn against him and the Democratic party.
Abroad, the plain fact is that the UK is the only EU state that is willing to send more fighting troops to Afghanistan and no doubt to Pakistan.
Obama is at his high point, ahead is his rapid demise as workers in the US and workers throughout the world take issue with his policies.