Obama’s democracy, peace promise US President Barack Obama’s second inauguration speech promised oratorical principles that may not so easily be attained. Emphasising his second term foreign policy objectives, the president vowed the US would support democracy in Asia and the Middle East and resolve its differences with the world peacefully. This may serve to remind those who remember the ‘promise’ attached to the first black president in the US’s history when he was first elected four years ago. The hype surrounding Obama’s ascent to the pinnacle of the most powerful country blinded many to the exigencies of power and the interests of the US worldwide. Reaching out to the Muslim world was one of the foremost commitments Obama made, as witnessed in his famous Cairo speech soon after taking office the first time. The inevitable disillusionment that set in could and should be ascribed to the vested interests of the US’s security and foreign policy establishment, including the powerful Israeli lobby, all of which hamstrung Obama’s intent to make departures and strike out in a different direction in the US’s relations with the rest of the world. One manifestation of that failure can be seen vis-à-vis Palestine, owed in no uncertain measure to the right wing Israeli premier Netanyahu with whom Obama’s relations have been, to put it politely, frosty over Israeli settlements expansion that has all but buried the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in the sands of the West Bank. Obama’s first term also witnessed the intervention by the western alliance in Libya, leading to the overthrow and horrific murder of Gaddafi. Currently, the ongoing intervention in Syria through pro-western proxies, amongst whom ironically al Qaeda affiliated groups have a major role, is another example of what Obama means by supporting ‘democracy’ in the region. Both the Libyan and the Syrian regimes have been the foremost opponents of Israel. Is it an accident then that they were the first to feel the brunt of the new messianic call to democracy? And if the US and western allied regimes of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and others are counted, how many tatters does this reduce the democracy mantra to? While ‘peace’ in Palestine, Syria and even Afghanistan, the last despite or even because of the fears surrounding developments after the US troops withdraw by 2014, seems a long way off, the continuing confrontation with regimes such as Iran and North Korea signal new conflicts simmering on the surface. As if all this were not worrying enough, we now have the doctrine of the ‘pivot’ to the Asia-Pacific, a euphemism for potential conflict with China, the rising power in that region. While on the foreign policy front the second term is unlikely to yield much that will be different from the first, Obama’s domestic agenda is likely to dominate the next four years. Obama talked in his speech about equality and unity, while conceding the fraught state of the traditional consensual system of decision making in the US polity because of what he termed “absolutism", a reference no doubt to the intransigent attitudes that inform the Republican Party. Obama’s domestic agenda of seeing through the implementation of healthcare, gun control, climate change, gay rights and illegal immigration promises a bruising confrontation with his opponents in the Republican Party. Some American analysts have repeatedly stressed that the US traditional political system is broken, with no redressal in sight. The fight therefore within the US may turn out really ugly and leave Obama without the means to boast of major accomplishments by the time he leaves office. US presidents tend to be sensitive about leaving a legacy. In Obama’s case, while his first election was a historic turning point for a US with a history of brutal slavery that needed a bloody civil war to eradicate, and his re-election is a further proof of how the US has, and is, changing, legacy-wise, so far at least, the Obama period may be seen with hindsight more as unfulfilled promise than anything to write home about.