Peter Vale
21 November 2008
opinion
Johannesburg — IT IS difficult not to be excited about the election of America's 44th president, Barack Obama. The package seems so unlike any we've seen before.
The celebration around his race highlights the most evident difference -- but there is much more: the engaging and articulate manner, for instance, the enlightened mind. Add to this the infectious smile, the energetic gait and it is easy to believe that he is, indeed, the change we have been waiting for.
To be of a certain age is to attend in all this the Kennedy moment, and to hear again John F Kennedy's ringing assertion that "the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans".
As it has been these two weeks past, this famous claim was supported by the language of war and of peace -- the promise of talking to enemies, the threat to those who would do the US damage, and the hope that the international systems could finally be a force for good.
After eight bleak years, the world seems finally to have reached out towards the morning in the US -- to pick a phrase once used by another protagonist of change, Ronald Reagan.
Another explanation for the international enthusiasm -- especially in a time when sentiment is remarkably high -- is drawn from the Athenian playwright Euripides, who wrote that friends show their love in times of trouble. And, right now, as the world knows all too well, the US is in trouble.
What the world can expect from Obamamania -- as we might call it -- is wholly uncertain. Long experience, however, teaches that engaging the US is often easier said than done.
So what is needed, perhaps, is a reality check on all of this.
It is said that Obama's presidency will be different from his predecessor. From his early refusal to ratify the Kyoto agreement, George Bush seemed intent on provocation. His foreign policy yielded outcomes that were at odds with the purported benefits of trickle-down and the supposed high-mindedness of three wholly synthetic wars -- terror, Afghanistan and Iraq -- and a proxy war being raged around Israel. In an interconnected world, America's 43rd presidency doomed the world to eight years of war, waste and worrying gaps between wealth and poverty.
This experience seemed to reinforce a seemingly unavoidable rule of international affairs: the US engages the world only on its own terms.
In this approach, alas, there can be no reciprocity, no exchange of views -- US power trumps all other considerations.
Understanding this supposedly immutable outcome raises three tests with which the world might measure the promise that Obama has generated.
The first of these appears quirky until, like the other two, it is viewed through the lens of history. For many across the world, the US is not a place, it is an idea -- an idea, moreover, that embodies what its citizens see as the only true measure of human progress. The record shows, alas, that the form of this progress is seldom respectful of others -- of their ways, of their cultures, of their languages. It is an understanding of progress premised on the idea that one experience, America's, matters more than all others.
Tragically, this has produced a messianic nationalism which, especially since the Second World War, has seen the US involved in every conceivable corner of the world. So, today its armed forces operate out of 761 bases worldwide, while those golden arches of American fast-food fame are prized in every city that considers itself to be truly global.
So, the first test is this: can Obama encourage Americans to engage the world on terms other than their own?
Second, many pundits argue that Obama's path to change has been smoothed (or complicated, depending on how they see it) by the rise of China -- and to a lesser degree, India and Brazil. However, the mess the world faces is of America's making and hers alone. Take these issues: the global economy, international trade, climate change, to name three of a dozen or so. These cannot be fixed without changing the mind of America.
In 1945, a fierce critic of US Cold War policy, James Warburg, wrote a book called Foreign Policy Begins at Home. Alas, Warburg's lesson has been ignored since the presidency of Franklin D Roosevelt, the 32nd incumbent of the White House.
Obama cannot show he has learnt this particular lesson without withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan and, most difficult of all, redefining the nature of America's relationship with al-Qaeda. And here, at the intersection between the domestic and the foreign, is test number three.
America's capacity to engage the world rests largely on a self-perpetuating corps of foreign policy experts, who are positioned between government and the academy. To be found in universities and the omnipresent think-tank industry, they migrate, depending on their political party affiliation, towards a victorious president: so Republicans served in Bush's White House as they did in his father's; the Democrats that hope to serve in Obama's will have served in Clinton's.
With rare exceptions, these policy wonks -- to use the term in which they rejoice -- are schooled in power-based approaches to international relations and the redemptive role that the US traditionally believes it plays in the world. This is a view through which, as we have seen, other people and places are turned into objects; in which America's national interest matters most; a world should either be American or it is nothing.
As Obama's very election has shown, claims to expertise can often be overstated.
If this is to be truly an age of change, the creative exercise of power will matter more than the rote application of America-as-the-Almighty, which brought Bush tottering towards the end of the worst presidency in memory.
As the Cold War ended 20 years ago, the British-born political philosopher, Steven Lukes, wrote a radical book on the nature of political power. In it, he says: "The future is not entirely open, it is not entirely closed either ... it is in the exerciser's or the exerciser's power to act differently."
Can America's new president meet this challenge, or will Obamamania be just another turn of the same old wheel?
Vale is Nelson Mandela Professor of Politics at Rhodes University.
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