The ‘Obama magic’ is believed to be fast fading among particularly Americans, but this is more a sad commentary on the superficiality of public assessments of political personalities than reflective of an authentic ‘beauty into beast’ decline of US President Barack Obama. There were rave welcoming ceremonies even here in Sri Lanka when Obama was voted to power and many were the local political commentators who swooned over him but, hopefully, the lessons of time have now been learnt.

We in South Asia in particular need to be exceptionally perceptive about US foreign and security policies and their fallout. To be fair by Obama, he never held out the promise, even on taking office, that there would be an early and conclusive end to the US-led ‘war on terror’ in our part of the world. Nor did he promise to drastically re-orient in the direction of moderation, Bush-inspired, hawkish US security policies on South Asia. Obama did not quibble over the perception that the ‘terror’ threat to the US originated in Afghanistan and that it is the physical annihilation of the Al-Qaeda leadership that would bring peace to the West and the rest of the world. The continuing ‘war on terror’ in South and South West Asian is based on this belief.

It was clear to this columnist, at least, that given these policy premises, there was not going to be an early end to the bloodshed and wasting internal armed conflicts in this region, deriving from the US-led ‘war on terror’. Today, both the US, its Asian allies and those governments which are generally favourable to a policy of fighting ‘terror’ by coercive means, are at a loss to discern how discord and conflict, involving heavy human costs, could be contained in our part of the world. Those holding the view that this region should be steadily demilitarized and political solutions found to the armed conflicts assailing it, seem to have been handsomely vindicated.

Given the ineffectiveness and apparent short-sightedness of the Obama administration’s South Asia policy, one is left wondering how some ‘observers’ came to be mesmerized by the ‘Obama phenomenon’ but this, perhaps, testifies more to an innate credulous bent in the human personality and by virtue of this fact does not come within the scope of this comment.

However, Obama was well above deceit on account of his open avowal of a militaristic policy for the problem of ‘terror’ in South Asia, although current indicators point to a heightening of international tensions in the region, coupled with an intensification of current bloodshed.

The Obama administration’s painful dilemmas in South and South West Asia are underlined by a security review recently conducted by US Defence Secretary Robert Gates, which said, among other things, that the US should abandon its doctrine of always being in a state of preparedness to fight two conventional wars simultaneously, and instead be "ready for an ‘uncertain security landscape’ where extremists or ‘non-state actors’ sought missile technology or weapons of mass destruction".

The security challenges currently faced by the US, Gates said, ranged from ‘the use of sophisticated new technologies to deny our forces access to the global commons of sea, air, space and cyberspace, to the threat posed by non-state groups delivering more cunning and destructive means to attack and terrorize’. On top of this comes the assessment that the US would need to incur a $741 billion defence budget for 2011, including pounds 120 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is clear that there would be no respite for the US and its allies from the perceived need to continue on the path of war, on account of the security policies they are insistent on pursuing in South and South West Asia. Clearly, the continued ‘war on terror’ in these regions has in no way calmed their fears. On the contrary, they only seem to have multiplied.

In fact, if one were to question today whether any vital differences exist between the Obama administration and its Republican predecessors, including those led by the stridently hawkish Ronald Reagan, in relation to particularly South and South West Asia, the answer would be ‘very little’.

This point is driven home further by the current stand-off between the US and Iran. The confrontation the US is currently having with Iran over the perception that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons capability, took a dangerous turn when the US decided to install sea and land-based missile defense systems in and around the Gulf, in retaliation to what the US sees as moves by Iran to bolster its ballistic missile capabilities. The US’ difficulties were compounded when a $ 150 million effort to test fire a missile in the Pacific Ocean proved unsuccessful. The missile was fired to meet a simulated missile strike by Iran.

These developments take one’s mind back to the early eighties when the Islamic Revolution in Iran proved a major set back for US influence-expansion and consolidation plans in the Gulf. The continuing strained relations between the US and Iran point to the undiminished inability of the US to come to terms with the Iranian Revolution, besides indicating that the US’ strategic and economic interests in Gulf have remained unchanged. In other words, the conservative orientation in US foreign policy as regards the Gulf, has doggedly remained, despite Obama’s frequent pledges to mend fences with those states with which it has been at variance, such as those of an Islamic bent.