'A foundation-hatched black elite’: Obama, the US establishment and foreign policy

US foreign policy has a largely unacknowledged racial dimension due to the racial characteristics of the US foreign policy establishment, and in shared mindsets in a soon-to-be ‘majority-minority’ nation. White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) racial-ethnic and class factors produce managed change through socialisation in an attenuated meritocratic order, adapting to challenges to elite dominance by incorporating rising talent, without altering broader patterns of power.

The greatest success of such a system would be the assimilation of the most elite minority individuals, even as the bulk of those groups’ members continue to experience discrimination. Such success would be compounded by election to the highest office of a minority US president extolling the virtues of post-racial politics. President Barack Obama represents a ‘Wasp-ified’ black elite, assimilated into the extant structures of power that remain wedded to a more secular, non-biologically-racial, version of Anglo-Saxonism or, more broadly, liberal internationalism. Hence, it should occasion little surprise that there has been so little change in US foreign policies during Obama’s two-term presidency.

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“Exclusive: Barack Obama is ‘aloof’ says British ambassador,” at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/3125120/Exclus...
India is included because it has a strong English-speaking (colonial) tradition, with over 100 million speakers.
Richard Brookhiser, The Way of the Wasp. Interestingly, Andrew Sullivan, writing on his Atlantic Monthly blog noted Obama’s less attractive ‘Waspish’ characteristics; http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2010/06/what-does-modo... accessed 11 April 2012.
Srdjan Vucetic, The Anglosphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). Note Niall Ferguson’s notion of ‘Anglobalisation’ in “British imperialism revised: the costs and benefits of ‘Anglobalisation’,” Development Research Institute Working Papers, NYU Stern Business School, No.2, April 2003.
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Maraniss, p.265. Punahou was considered by college admissions officers to be the tenth best American high school in the early 1970s; Maraniss, p.320.
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Sources for this empirical analysis included biographical data supplied on official Obama administration webpages, profiles in newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post, on the website http://www.whorunsgov.com, on the Washinton Post’s Head Count webpages tracking Obama’s appointments at http://projects.washingtonpost.com/2009/federal/appointments/; accessed June 2010. According to analysis of 413 Obama appointees, the Washington Post website indicates: 113 were Clinton administration postholders, 71 had attended Harvard, just 16 were associated with organized labour, and just 5 with the liberal pro-Obama Center for American Progress think tank headed by John Podesta.
Dan Eggen, “Groups on the Left Are Suddenly on Top,” Washington Post 4 June 2009, at http://washingtonpost.com/wp/dyn/content/article/2009/06/03/AR200906... accessed 17 June 2011.
Robert Frank, “That Bright, Dying Star, the American WASP,” Wall Street Journal 15 May 2010. The son of the so-called “Chairman” of the establishment, John J. McCloy, suggests that the US is the poorer for the establishment’s demise.
Brookhiser was speechwriter to George HW Bush, and author of The Way of the Wasp: How it Made America (New York: Free Press, 1991); cited in Christina Lamb, “America’s Wasps lose their sting,” (London) Sunday Times, 11 July, 2010; Mead, God and Gold, p.46.
I am indebted to Mr. Nikhil Parmar for research assistance in gathering some of the data on Obama appointees’ backgrounds and elite affiliations.
This particular data is derived from the Washington Post’s analysis and data base at http://projects.washingtonpost.com/2009/federal/appointments/ ; accessed 30 July 2011. Their data base also showed there were 5 black, 4 Hispanic, and 2 Asian appointees to State.
“Obama’s cabinet Diversity Record ‘Embarrassing as Hell’,” DiversityInc; at http://www.diversityinc.com/diversity-and-inclusion/obamas-cabinet-d... accessed 24 October, 2014; http://beforeitsnews.com/obama/2013/03/clinton-and-bush-still-lead-o... accessed 24 October, 2014.
“How not to tackle Islamic State”; https://richardjacksonterrorismblog.wordpress.com/ ; accessed 4 October, 2014. See also, Ahmed Rashid, “ISIS: What the US Doesn’t Understand,” NYRblog, at http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/dec/02/isis (accessed 2.12.2104).
Public Discussion: "Prospects for Afghanistan: Challenges to Political Stability"; participants included Michael Keating of Chatham House, and former UN deputy envoy to Afghanistan, and Mohammad Jalil Shams, former Afghan minister of economy and deputy minister for water and energy; remarks at Geneva Centre for Security Policy, 21 October 2014.

In December 2014, Obama extended by another year America’s military mission in Afghanistan, reversing a promised withdrawal by the end of 2014; and had ordered US forces back into Iraq. For a useful structured agency approach to Obama’s leadership, LR Jacobs and DS King, “Varieties of Obamaism: Structure, Agency and the Obama Presidency,” Perspectives on Politics 8, 3 (September 2010), 793-802.