The World President: Great Expectations for Project Obama
No Responses | Leave a Comment »
This is a fantastic (and lengthy) article from Der Spiegel summarizing the immediate challenges facing the Obama administration, and the world’s perceptions and hopes. I’ve included some interesting excerpts below, mostly to do with foreign policy.
Parents watching President-elect Barack Obama’s acceptance speech probably noticed the hands first, Sasha’s right hand holding her father’s left hand, firmly and trustingly. The daughter looked up at her father, who returned the glance, and both smiled. For historians, it was Obama’s reference to Abraham Lincoln, the greatest of all American presidents, who embarked on a civil war for the unity of the country and the freedom of black slaves. For those with a love of language, it was his masterful speech on the responsibilities of today’s citizens, and on solidarity and honesty. The victor’s acceptance speech became an appeal against megalomania and triumphalism, and for humility and respect for what is to come. It was a mature speech.
…
Finally, the strategist was, as always, already looking ahead, preventing the fireworks display that had been prepared. He saw this man on the stage, against a backdrop of Chicago’s skyscrapers, trees and floodlights, and he saw 150,000 people and not a single one of them who was not moved, not a single person who was not aware that this was a special night. Who needed fireworks?
…
They celebrated on the Champs-Elysées in Paris, and so did the black kids in the city’s suburbs. There were parties in cities on all continents, and they even celebrated in the Gaza Strip where, normally, the only good Americans are considered to be dead Americans. Obama is the world’s president, at least for a few days, weeks, months of euphoria and idealism and belief in decency that President George W. Bush had almost beaten out of the world. Tristram Hunt, a British historian, said that Obama “brings the narrative that everyone wants to return to — that America is the land of extraordinary opportunity and possibility, where miracles happen.” And miracles are what people of all skin colors are wishing for, especially people from those parts of the earth where miracles are not as reliable an occurrence.
…
Nevertheless, writes New York magazine, the Obama administration is still difficult to assess because Obama, as a candidate, sent out signals ” in all directions.” His voting record in the Senate was conventionally liberal, his essence is that of the pragmatic technocrat, and his rhetoric is somewhere in between.
…
The creases in his face have become deeper and his hair grayer in the last two years. Obama gets up every morning at 6 a.m. and spends 45 minutes in the gym. When he has time, he plays basketball with old friends. In the final days of the campaign, he read two newspapers a day and the book “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden.” Obama is a Blackberry junkie, working his way through e-mails, memos and messages up to 30 times a day.
…
With his sense of symbolism, the 44th president is likely to sign an order soon that will close the Guantanamo detention center for terrorists, both real and presumed. In the United States, it has long become part of the prevailing opinion outside the White House that the establishment of totalitarian islands within democracy was a mistake that harmed the country and damaged its aura worldwide. The luminaries of al-Qaida, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (the mastermind of Sept. 11, 2001) and Ramzi Binalshibh (who prepared the attacks with Mohammed Atta) will presumably be tried in civilian courts in the United States, as will a few of the less prominent among Guantanamo’s roughly 250 detainees.
Guantanamo is a wound that America inflicted upon itself. Obama will raise a cheer worldwide, and deservedly so, when he transforms the enormous high-security tract back into a dull, anachronistic US military base on the fringe of Castro’s Cuba.
…
Iraq is the second bleeding wound for America as a superpower, even though more US soldiers are now dying in Afghanistan. For at least the past five years, since the invasion in March 2003, all conflicts in the region have been heightened tremendously, almost to the point of spinning out of control. The balance of power has shifted to the disadvantage of the United States. The lesson from the Bush era is that the country cannot achieve productive results by going it alone. But it is also true, in this nervous, hysterical part of the world, that nothing can be changed if America is no longer a part of the picture.
…
America’s third bleeding wound is Afghanistan, where the “war on terror” that Bush proclaimed began after Sept. 11, 2001. The future president believes that this campaign of revenge against the Taliban, which gave safe haven to Osama bin Laden, is justified. But it is also a major conflict in which the conventional approach is increasingly proving to be a failure.
…
Interestingly, Obama faces the same decision in Afghanistan that Bush faced in Iraq: Should he try the Petraeus method, that combination of military toughness and political flexibility? Unlike Bush, however, Obama has a lot to lose if the number of civilian casualties does not diminish, and if the air strikes in Pakistan lead to attacks on US interests or jeopardize the already weakened government in Islamabad — in other words, if this war becomes his war.
…
The Europeans’ relationship with the United States could hinge on a development over which they have little control: the new US administration’s treatment of Russia. It is customary for the government of a country to congratulate the newly elected president of the United States, to leave differences unmentioned and, in the interest of both countries, hope for better times. But even before the night of Obama’s victory had ended, the news had arrived from Moscow that Russia plans to deploy Iskander short-range missiles to the Kaliningrad region near the Polish border.
It was an astounding affront. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, still the de facto most powerful man in Russia, seems to be walking in Bush’s steps, taking on his with-me-or-against-me rhetoric, his unilateral politics and his disdain for what the rest of the world thinks.
…
However, the Russian leadership is hardly wrong when it argues that Democrat Obama’s stance on the other two conflicts Putin considers existential, Georgia and Ukraine, hardly differs from that of his predecessor. Obama has consistently said that both countries, products of the collapse of the Soviet empire, should be allowed to join NATO if they wish. Although there is no consensus within the political elite in the United States over Iraq, Iran or Afghanistan, there is widespread agreement over the right of Georgia and Ukraine to be accepted into the West’s military alliance.
…
In addition to international crises, he will be confronted with America’s own worries and the domestic problems of a country that is a strange mixture of cutting-edge progress in the first world and the bizarre backwardness of a Third World country. The United States is in the most severe crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, as the superpower sees its economic foundation beginning to crumble.
…
The “American Way of Life,” that special blend of deliberate recklessness, wanton waste and a touch of megalomania, is reaching its limits. In recent years, the superpower has gone from one careless mistake to the next. The government was too arrogant, the banking industry was too greedy and the economy, after allowing itself to indulge in obscene scandals, was no longer innovative enough to be able to maintain the country’s status as an economic superpower. This has left the United States with massive problems of historic proportions.
In no other country in the Western world is so much costly energy wasted. The United States is home to only five percent of the world’s population, but it consumes a quarter of its oil production. The United States sends $90 billion to the Middle East in the space of only one year.
…
The Bush administration has aggravated all of these problems instead of alleviating them. It has allowed industry to continue to believe that cheap oil would be available forever. It urged the population to keep on borrowing and consuming, so that now — at the beginning of a deep recession — it has nothing left to spend. A system has come crashing down. The crisis of capitalism brings to a full circle the loss of moral and political authority after the Iraq war.
The mood in the ancestral homeland of optimism is appropriately pessimistic. It is the insidious simultaneity of the crisis of confidence, the real estate disaster, the drama in the financial markets and the most recent oil price shock that has put American citizens in such a foul mood. In an article titled ” Unhappy America,” the Economist writes: “Nations, like people, occasionally get the blues.”
…
Obama can’t possibly please everyone, despite the long list of pledges he made during the lengthy campaign. He will have to decide whom to disappoint first.
The Obama team knows only too well that the worst enemy of an Obama presidency will be within the Democratic Party ranks. In two other similarly overwhelming victories for Democrats — in 1964 and 1992 — the party pushed through its wish list. But the tax increases and new social programs for the poor that they implemented horrified swing voters. It took only two years for the Democrats to lose their majority in Congress, as well as the nation’s good will.
Obama, on the other hand, has promised to overcome the culture wars between the parties and divisions within the electorate. In his acceptance speech on the night of the election, he said: “We rise or fall as one nation, as one people.” And in the end, the 44th president will rise or fall with the success of the reforms he has promised his country, which both wants and needs reforms.
“This president is going into office with more expectations than any president I have ever seen,” says Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives and Obama’s most important contact for all the laws he hopes to enact in order to bring change to the country. Because of the enormity of the challenge, Obama will likely attempt to advance his reforms one step at a time, not all at once. He will “govern the country from the center,” says Democratic Party strategist Tad Devine.
This would be the most reasonable approach, too, because America is still primarily a conservative nation. In surveys, Americans are much more likely to call themselves conservative than liberal. Obama cannot change this, but he needs advocates who are willing to make compromises, and he will seek some of them from among the so-called Obamacons — Republicans who supported him during the election — including such high-profile politicians as Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel and former Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Leave a Comment »
Share
Entries (RSS)
