On the sidelines of the Group of Twenty (G20) Summit in Brisbane, US President Barack H. Obama delivered a keynote speech to diplomats, policymakers, faculty members, and students at the University of Queensland on the United States of America’s foreign policy and Obama’s so-called “Asian pivot” or “pivot to Asia.”
In 2013, a report by Brian Andrews and Kurt Campbell for the British think-tank Chatham House described Washington’s redeployment efforts in the Asia-Pacific region like this: “The United States government is in the early stages of a substantial national project: reorienting significant elements of its foreign policy towards the Asia-Pacific region and encouraging many of its partners outside the region to do the same.”
“The ‘strategic pivot’ or rebalancing, launched four years ago, is premised on the recognition that the lion’s share of the political and economic history of the 21st century will be written in the Asia-Pacific region,” the Chatham House report points out. In one way or another, what this analysis insinuates is that the nation that controls the Asia-Pacific region will dominate the world.
During the time Obama had been in Australia for the G20 gathering, it was falsely but consistently reported by the mainstream media in the US, Canada, the European Union, and Australia that Russian President Vladimir Putin and his delegation were isolated by the leaders of the so-called “Western” countries. Not only did Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott fail to violently “shirtfront” President Putin at Brisbane like he promised, but in fact Abbott had a cordial bilateral meeting with Putin days earlier in the Chinese capital of Beijing during the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting. Nor did British Prime Minister David Cameron or Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper – men of Abbott’s own conservative political cloth that have subordinated their countries to Washington and its empire – dare confront Putin.