The Noble World Peace Candidate

American President Barack Obama's election to the highest office of the land was universally hailed as a breakthrough. It was a breakthrough. A long-awaited and perhaps very needful one. A vital demonstration that sufficient numbers of American voters were willing to view a black man as their equal and more than their equal if he qualified as the extraordinary man that he portrayed himself to be.

Expectations were high in his first four years in office. So high that in a spirit of happy delirium before he had the opportunity to deliver on any of his promises he was anointed as the world's premier peace-maker.

Now, into his second and final installment as President of the United States of America, the prestige, power, authority and well-being of his country has been diminished. While still an aspirational candidate for the presidency he spoke of conciliation and goodwill and the intention to groom government in a bi-partisan relationship reflecting the needs of the entire country.

The reality is, now, that the two political parties have never been as estranged and indifferent to the needs of the entire country.

He finally managed to broker a much-needed version of universal medicare for the country in aid of the millions of Americans unable to afford medical insurance and thereby the wherewithal for medical treatment, but in the process divided the country into fiercely contesting combatants for and against. His social-minded agenda, so foreign to the free-enterprise-minded society he now heads represents an offence in political and social-contracting to those for whom it is anathema.

A gradual adaptation by incremental means would have resulted in a far more acceptable solution to his long-range vision for the country. But the schisms that now exist between Republicans and Democrats appear so deeply polarizing the country now exists as a dual-personality nation of blue and red opposing belligerents who seem incapable of agreeing on anything much.

To the extent that Americans suffered while the government effectively shut itself out of commission, threatening the spectre of bankruptcy, each side blaming the other. While the international community shuddered in fearful consternation of economic ripple-effects on their own delicate economies still recovering from an earlier U.S. recession.

On the foreign scene, President Obama has created huge distances between his country through his administration of foreign affairs, and his former allies. The country with whom his has contiguous borders has been put in an icy waiting room while he considers whether to consolidate an agreement on accepting energy sources directly through a fuel pipeline to his own refineries.

Citing his obligations to the arguments of environmentalists who ignore the massive load of carbon exhausted in the US through the use of coal-fired furnaces to create energy, while deploring Alberta oilsands delivering a relatively minuscule amount of carbon in comparison, to the atmosphere.

The countries in Asia which have taken his word as a given in his 'pivot' from the Mediterranean to the China Sea, chafe under the implied and experienced aggression of China toward Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, while President Obama suffers a case of sudden amnesia. His bored inability to appear at critical Asian summits has baffled and embittered.

He abandoned Egypt's president, lauded the replacement Muslim Brotherhood president, then huffed over his removal and threatened to delist Egypt from American charity, deploring the activities of the Egyptian military seeking to restore order and security to the country against an Islamist backlash of vicious violence.

He succumbed to the finer chess-board moves of Russian President Vladimir Putin, in relief that he would not have to act on his threat of a "red line" being tramped under the rush of Syria's President Bashar al-Assad to impose the penalty of death by chemical asphyxiation on thousands of civilians for the crime of harbouring among themselves in his very own capital's suburbs, rebellious Sunni militias.

Syrians are still dying and suffering, but not through chemical warfare. And the country whose military and non-state militia, both terrorist groups, which have been aiding the Syrian bloodbath is given another opportunity to flick its thumb in the eye of world concerns over its nuclear aspirations.

The Middle East countries most reliant upon American goodwill and its promise of defence suddenly find themselves cut loose from that traditional assurance as the Islamic Republic of Iran, looming as a malicious menace over the geography, smiles accommodatingly at the offer to negotiate terms of enriching uranium.

Finally, America's European partners and allies have been assailed by newly released secret documents attesting to the fact that the United States' surveillance apparatus has targeted them and their citizens irregardless of who they are and what their relationship is. While it's true that the hysteria is a manufactured one based on the thin gruel of not knowing they are being watched, just as they themselves use similar means of espionage on the United States, their dismay is palpable and requires a diplomatic solution.

Diplomacy and deft handling of complex situations, supported by firmly resolute decision-making is what ails the United States of America under Nobel Laureate Barack Obama.

Pity, that.