All Over the Map:
The Best of World Beat
By John Feffer
A Project of Foreign Policy In Focus
at the Institute for Policy Studies
Copyright 2012 John Feffer
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Chapter 6 - Culture and Politics
Acknowledgements and Biography
Chronological List of Articles
In August 2008, with Barack Obama the freshly minted Democratic nominee for president, I tried a thought experiment. Although I felt fairly confident that Obama would defeat Republican John McCain, I was also certain that his victory would not herald the much-anticipated transformation of U.S. foreign policy. So, in a fit of futurology, I pretended to look back at that pivotal election year from the vantage point of 2016. I tried to leapfrog over the overheated optimism of the moment, the swelling Obamamania, by looking backward from a dystopic future.
“The new administration did make a lot of changes in its first 100 days, and the sheer number and the sheer pace fooled everyone into thinking that change had indeed come to Washington,” I wrote in The Goldilocks Apocalypse. “It turns out, though, that apocalypse comes in many different forms. There are the dramatic effects of sword and fire and famine. And then there's the apocalypse of muddling through. That's what happens when you just carry on with the same old, same old and before you know it, poof, end of the world. It's an apocalypse that's neither too cold nor too hot, neither too hard nor too soft. It's the apocalypse of the middle, the Goldilocks apocalypse.”
This article on the dangers of a status-quo foreign policy came out roughly halfway through my tenure as co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. FPIF is a think tank without walls that brings together nearly a thousand analysts, activists, and academics who share a progressive critique of U.S. foreign policy. Our home, IPS, is a Washington-based institute that puts ideas into action for peace, justice, and the environment. Both institutions aspire not only to speak truth to power, but to push power in the direction of truth. In service of these ambitions, I’ve written a column every week for more than five years called World Beat that has assessed the state of U.S. foreign policy and global affairs. In those first years, I surveyed the wreckage perpetrated by the George W. Bush administration. Then, after the election of Barack Obama, I chronicled the years of failed promise.
We are, unfortunately, still on track to suffer a Goldilocks apocalypse. The Obama administration didn’t effectively reform the financial sector or pull the U.S. economy out of recession. It didn’t lead the world in dealing with global warming. It promised nuclear abolition but ended up pouring billions of dollars into the modernization of the very weapons it was supposed to eliminate. Even in the midst of a prolonged economic crisis, it didn’t cut Pentagon spending.
Perhaps the most distressing example of muddling through was on counterterrorism. “We all thought that closing Guantanamo, ending renditions, and renouncing torture would be enough to salvage America's reputation in the world,” I wrote in my apocalyptic thought experiment. “And, for a brief time, the polls showed an uptick in global feelings toward the United States. But the president never challenged the deeper framework of the Global War on Terror. He simply promised to prosecute it more effectively.”
And indeed, that’s precisely what the president did. He failed to close Guantanamo. He simply replaced extraordinary rendition with targeted assassinations, culminating with the cross-border killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011. And he expanded the operations of U.S. Special Forces to a much wider swath of the world.
Strangely, the Obama administration's continuation of the global war on terror under a different name has not produced the kind of outrage that his predecessor generated. Partly that's because the American public remains transfixed by domestic woes. Partly it's because the president quieted many of his critics on the left when he pushed through the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and placated his critics on the right when he killed bin Laden. And partly it's because foreign policy is not a sexy topic for Americans. It’s not the focus of presidential debates, and the media devotes less and less newsprint and TV time to what’s happening overseas. As a result, Americans tend to be rather parochial.
“We Americans think we live in the greatest country on earth,” I wrote in a World Beat essay from summer 2008. “We think this because we never go anywhere else to test this proposition, except to places like Club Med or on cruises to the Caribbean. Because we're the greatest country on earth, we have the right to disregard the opinions of other countries, which aren't as great as we are. And we can impose our values on everyone else — after all, why should anyone complain about having greatness thrust upon them?”
Even though President Obama is exceptional in many ways, not least because he is America's first president of color, he still operates in a tradition of exceptionalism that puts the United States in a category of its own. In my World Beat columns, I’ve tried to pop this bubble of collective self-satisfaction by pointing out the fallacies of U.S. foreign policy. Where possible, I’ve tried to maintain a light touch. I’ve even indulged in satire, such as my three letters from an imaginary CIA agent and my doggerel about the foreign policy of the 2012 Republican candidates for president.
I’ve also tried to bring in a cultural dimension, for this is how most Americans connect to what’s happening globally. We might not know much about Thailand, but we sure like Thai food. Nigerian politics is not everyone’s cup of tea, but the hit Broadway musical Fela has everyone up in the aisles dancing. In my World Beat columns, I’ve talked about human rights in China through the artwork of Ai Weiwei, the politics of division on the Korean peninsula through the conflict between cold noodles and Chocopies, and the trauma of child soldiers through a remarkable dance therapy project. By adopting a cultural lens, I've sought to emphasize that foreign policy is not the province of the experts alone. In our globalized world, we must all be global in our outlook.
The essays in this collection are, almost literally, all over the map. I see that as a strength. The United States, after all, is a global power, and we conduct war, trade, and diplomacy in every corner of the world. To understand and critique U.S. foreign policy, we must similarly look at the entire world. But as you will see in the ensuing pages, I do have my preoccupations. There are a slew of articles that address the scourge of military spending. I have a particular expertise in Northeast Asia, so you will see a bias toward the Korean peninsula, Japan, and China. Because I traveled on a number of occasions to Europe over the last five years, there are pieces on Albania, Bosnia, Ireland, and Turkey.
And, because of the huge gap between the rhetoric and the reality of the Obama administration, I have devoted many columns to the president and his policies. I’ve evaluated his inaugural speech, his first 100 days, his first two years, his State of the Union address, his Nobel Prize. I’ve dissected his drone policy, his stance on trade, and his approach to Africa. I offer praise where praise is due. But Obama fans beware: this collection is no love letter.
As my 2008 article on the Goldilocks apocalypse suggests, I’ve had low expectations for Obama from the beginning – not because I doubt his talents as an individual, but because I fear for the health of our political institutions and I recognize the power of our economic elite. Obama lacks the leadership skills, the political intention, and the congressional backing to transform institutions and challenge entrenched economic power. U.S. foreign policy remains on the same perilous trajectory. And so we are still the sick man of North America, dangerous in our relative decline.
Dean Acheson, secretary of state in the Truman administration, titled his memoir Present at the Creation. He meant to emphasize his pivotal role in the creation of the post-war world order. Sixty-five years later, we are all present at the apocalypse. It's not a fiery affair. Rather, it's a Goldilocks apocalypse happening in slow motion.
Hope was the watchword of the 2008 elections, and it propelled Obama into office. We must still hope. Quoting a famous African proverb, Hillary Clinton is fond of saying that “it takes a village to raise a child.” Similarly, it takes an electorate to raise a president. We can still push Obama – and subsequent presidents – in the direction of democracy, equitable prosperity, and environmental sustainability. Because it is happening in slow motion, we can still stop this apocalypse.
Let's be clear, though: our leaders will not save us. That job falls to us: ordinary, unelected citizens. That's whom I dedicate this book to: the people who rose up in Tunisia and Egypt, who occupy Wall Street, who struggle for justice and dignity all over the world. These brave souls, who translate outrage into action, can help all of us stop this slow-motion apocalypse in its tracks. They represent a very different future, one of real hope and of real change.
The Obama Era
April 12, 2011
Zoologists get pretty excited when they discover an unusual animal. They happily devote many hours to the task of classifying the beast and, if it qualifies as a new species, giving it a name. A great deal of money and prestige rides on these scientific endeavors.
The same applies to the political sphere, where new and unusual creatures frequently turn up. When it comes to Barack Obama, however, political zoologists remain undecided whether he is a new kind of political animal and if his foreign policy represents a unique departure from the same old, same old.
Complicating classification, of course, is that President Obama is literally all over the map when it comes to foreign policy. U.S. forces are still fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the president has called for drawing down troops in both conflicts according to established time tables. Although Obama formally retired the phrase "global war on terrorism," CIA drone attacks continue to rain down on Pakistan and aggressive counter-terrorism operations are taking place in dozens of countries. The United States, along with NATO, has bombed Muammar Gaddafi's forces in Libya even as the Obama administration assures the American public that this isn't a war but a "kinetic military action."
For the political zoologist, the equivalent of finding a new species is identifying a new Doctrine. Do all the zigs and zags in U.S. foreign policy in the last two years add up to a coherent Obama Doctrine?
Even before Obama made it to the White House, he stood accused of possessing such a Doctrine. Rival Hillary Clinton suggested during the presidential debates that Obama embraced a kind of Chamberlain Doctrine by naively promising to sit down and talk with any adversary of the United States. James Kirchick of the The New Republic upped the appeasement ante by predicting that the president-to-be would "remain impassive in the face of genocide." For liberals, meanwhile, Obama offered up the I'm Not Bush Doctrine: Obama's campaign brain trust told Spencer Ackerman in The American Prospect that "they envision a doctrine that first ends the politics of fear and then moves beyond a hollow, sloganeering 'democracy promotion' agenda in favor of 'dignity promotion,' to fix the conditions of misery that breed anti-Americanism and prevent liberty, justice, and prosperity from taking root."
It turned out, of course, that Obama was neither appeaser nor dignity promoter. He used force (in Afghanistan, in Pakistan) when he deemed it necessary, and those aerial attacks did nothing to promote dignity. The debate over doctrine, in Obama's first couple years, boiled down to either "multilateralism with teeth" (The Atlantic) or "multilateralism without teeth" (The Heritage Foundation). In Oslo, the president deliberately mixed his messages by accepting the Nobel Peace Prize with a speech about the necessity of war. This modest baring of teeth did not, however, satisfy a right wing that suspected Obama of rejecting exceptionalist tradition of the United States: the right to do whatever we need to do whenever we need to do it.
The Libya War has revived this search for a doctrine. The pundits have tried to identify a middle ground for Obama's foreign policy: "more of a hawk than Bill Clinton and more of a dove than President Bush," according to Aaron Blake and Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post. In other words, as Politico put it, the Obama Doctrine consists of stopping massacres, getting in and out quickly, ensuring effective military action, and getting other countries to take the lead. In Foreign Policy, Daniel Drezner sees the Obama Doctrine as focusing on the essentials (the global economy, China, Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine, nuclear nonproliferation) and letting the rest slide: "the United States suffers from an overextension of its foreign policy obligations. With a weakened economy and a drop in U.S. standing, it is both costly and fruitless for the administration to continue policy conflicts that yield little beyond pleasing those invested in the policy status quo."
Thus have the political zoologists spoken. Obama has a Doctrine, but they can't quite agree on what it is. The president hasn't helped matters by refusing to boil down his foreign policy positions to a pithy or precise slogan.
But here's another possibility. The pundits are wrong, and the president has no big doctrine.
Administrations proclaim doctrines as a way to frame U.S. power in the world. The United States can’t intervene everywhere. It can’t declare everything to be a national interest. Doctrines are essentially formulas for determining how, when, and where the United States throws its weight around. Obama's failure to articulate a formal doctrine is characteristic both of the president’s political psychology and the vexed position of the United States in the world today. Obama is fundamentally unsure about the use of military force — he will back its use, in some cases more often than his predecessor, but not in a programmatic way. This ambivalence coincides with a relative decline in U.S. power overall.
So, for instance, Obama has not articulated a corollary to the Carter Doctrine, with the United States applying force to insure access to energy in the Persian Gulf. The war in Libya is not really about oil. It’s more about sending a message to leaders who defy their own people, the international community, and the United States. Nor has Obama favored the Bush Doctrine of preventive war and establishing full-spectrum dominance. The Obama administration was initially reluctant to intervene in Libya, and the Pentagon was perhaps the most reluctant of the parties to the decision. And, unlike Kennedy, Obama has not committed the United States to the spread of liberty. His administration was actually quite slow in endorsing the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt and has crafted a much more ambiguous message about uprisings in Bahrain and Yemen.
If there is a Doctrine lurking somewhere in the president's brain, it's probably the Gorbachev Doctrine. The Soviet leader did whatever he could to minimize Soviet involvement in overseas entanglements — withdrawing from Afghanistan, cutting loose East European liabilities, negotiating arms control treaties — in order to focus on domestic concerns. So, too, has Obama tried to reduce U.S. exposure abroad to repair the damage that the Bush years inflicted on the American economy. Gorbachev took a look at the Soviet Union's relative strength and decided that a cooperative foreign policy was not a matter of choice but of necessity. So, too, has Obama applied the same calculus. The United States simply doesn't have the resources to change facts on the ground through military force (even where Washington has applied very serious resources, as in Iraq, we have also largely failed.
Libya, unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, was not an intervention that flowed from an organic plan for preserving or expanding U.S. power in the world. The Libya War is about hesitation, failure to anticipate, reluctance to take major risks. As such, Libya reveals the lack of a doctrine about the use of U.S. power. The Obama administration is not likely to use Libya as a precedent for intervention anywhere else — not Ivory Coast where a bloody standoff just ended with former President Laurent Gbagbo's capture, not Syria where Bashar Assad continues to crack down on demonstrators, not Zimbabwe where Robert Mugabe clings to the presidency. A single case does not a Doctrine make.
No Drama Obama, then, turns out to be No Doctrine Obama. If he manages to win a second term, he could turn that around. Imagine a president that took concrete steps toward nuclear abolition, actually reined in the military-industrial complex instead of waiting until a farewell speech to bemoan its influence, and helped build authentic international institutions that could, for instance, address the threat of climate change.
If he did all that, the president would prove a rare bird indeed, and worthy of his own Doctrine.
January 25, 2011
One of Washington's favorite guessing games is: "What's the president really thinking?" Is Barack Obama a former community activist pushing a progressive agenda, a Goldilocks centrist aiming for the perfect bi-partisan porridge, or a reluctant militarist who's been forced to adopt key portions of the Bush agenda only to discover that he rather likes them? Perhaps he is simply all three. But he's not likely to show his cards during this year's State of the Union (SOTU) address.
The president has learned the hard way to be careful with his words. When he spoke during the campaign of "bitter" people who "cling to guns and religion" because of economic adversity, he was savaged for being elitist. Even if the president were to say what he's really thinking at this point, it would certainly not be in a SOTU, which is usually an opportunity for what one speechwriter has called "forgettable dissembling." It's also possible that after years in politics, the president no longer knows what he really believes and has so interwoven pragmatism with principle that, in the presidential calculus, what's right always equals what works.
Nevertheless, here's an attempt to look behind the speech's words to the speaker's thoughts. I've never met the man, never been invited to any White House confabs. I've never even been able to sit through one of his speeches. But my office is about six blocks away from the White House. So, like any good Washington pundit who imagines that proximity translates into perceptiveness, I feel entirely qualified to look into the president's eyes to get a sense of his soul. Here's what I believe President Obama will be thinking as he reads off the teleprompter:
I stand before you tonight to say that in my next two years in office I will focus like a laser beam on the economy, to make sure that America is competitive, that we are growing, and that we will create jobs not just for today but for the future
Well, I had to say that, didn't I? Frankly, I wish the unemployment rate was not at 9.1 percent, that Congress had passed a larger stimulus package followed by a job creation bill, and I didn't have to stand before the American people and pretend that I can change the economy during the rest of my term. The Republicans don't want the economy to improve over the next two years because that would kill them at the polls. The more people suffer, the more they vote tea party. So the next two years, on the congressional side, will be all about deficit reduction rather than preventing the economy from going into a deflationary spiral. Don't look to Congress for help with jobs, people! Trying to create jobs with no federal money is like fighting a gun battle with a knife.
Honestly, I'd rather talk to you all tonight about foreign policy. That's where I can excel. I don't have to deal with crazy Republicans or back-stabbing Democrats. I can just behave like an executive should behave – decisively. Look how I handled the recent state visit with Chinese leader Hu Jintao. Sure, there was lots of blah-blah-blah, but in the end I extracted $45 billion in Chinese investments, which translates into 235,000 jobs. It's a sad comment on American politics that it's easier to enlist Beijing's help for job creation than to get Congress to pony up the funds.
What I really like doing is going abroad, meeting with foreign dignitaries, and making landmark speeches. People in other countries don't ask me about jobs, don't treat me like I'm some glorified employment counselor. As soon as I leave the country, I can talk about the big picture. I can talk about the abolition of nuclear weapons. I can talk about new engagement with the Muslim world. It's a shame I can't do that in a State of the Union address. I have to stick to the economic numbers, like I'm the Accountant-in-Chief.
What really gets my goat is that when I do go abroad, the U.S. press can only focus on the little things – did I bow correctly, whose hand did I shake. I scored a deal with Medvedev on arms control. I managed to improve relations with India without upsetting Pakistan. We were able to put together a government in Iraq. I won the Nobel Peace Prize, for crying out loud! And the press goes after Michelle for touching the Queen of England's shoulder? Tell me: if we were white, would they pull that nonsense?
The world's people are hungry for a new kind of American leader. But back home, a quarter of all tea party sympathizers think I'm the anti-Christ, literally! I've continued almost all the major elements of the Bush counter-terrorism policy. We increased drone attacks in Pakistan. We surged in Afghanistan. We kept in place extraordinary rendition and endorsed military tribunals. And somehow, all of this translates in the minds of an appalling number of Americans into my being…Muslim.
Then there are the progressives. I never promised to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan. They greeted my surge plan as if it were some great betrayal. I said all along that we were fighting the wrong war in Iraq and we should shift our attention to the right war in Afghanistan. Sure, I prefer diplomacy to war. For one thing, it's cheaper. But I'm no pacifist. We'll start pulling out troops from Afghanistan in July, and I'm emphasizing that in this speech. But as any strategist knows, you have to put down cover fire before withdrawal, and that's what the surge is all about.
Meanwhile, we haven't gone to war with Iran or North Korea. True, relations with those countries haven't exactly improved. But I haven't given any easy ammunition to the right by "appeasing" those countries or risked overextending our military capabilities by attempting more aggressive measures.
I'd love to talk about climate change and renewable energy and trade policy. I'm a wonk at heart. But I learned during the campaign that Americans are not interested in the details. They're like consumers who buy complicated electronics, don't bother to read the instruction manuals, and then complain that things don’t work. They want me to fix the economy like they want the plumber to fix the leaky faucet or the electrician to repair the porch light. At our December press conference after the tax deal, I let Bill Clinton handle all the details of the package with the press. Bill's better at that, anyway. People don't feel he’s lecturing. Maybe it's his accent.
After the attack in Tucson, some Democrats and Republicans are sitting side by side tonight in the chamber. Don't be fooled by this show of temporary affection. The next two years are going to be ugly. So, even though I'm not getting into the weeds with foreign policy in this speech, look for me to focus on international relations in the second half of my term. Like I said, I like to travel. And frankly, Afghanistan and Pakistan are looking a lot safer these days than Washington.
Thank you. I'd better add that God bless stuff or else even more Americans will think I'm Muslim. And good night.
November 2, 2010
Even before the polls opened for voting in the U.S. midterm elections, the finger-pointing had already begun. The Obama agenda, instead of coming to term after four years, was suffering a miscarriage halfway through. The potential culprits were many and diverse.
President Barack Obama was to blame because his populist attempt to rally the economically disgruntled was too little and too late. The Supreme Court was to blame because it decimated campaign finance reform and allowed record amounts of money to distort the political process. The Democratic Party was to blame because it moved to the center in a misguided effort to win over independents. The Republican Party was to blame for arguing that "big government" is responsible for all of America's ills even while making government grind to a halt with obstructionist tactics. The tea party was to blame for, well, being itself. The media was to blame for focusing on trivia instead of the critical issues. The economy was to blame for not rebounding more quickly. The American people were to blame for turning certifiable nut jobs into viable political candidates.
Even comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were to blame for distracting hundreds of thousands of people from doing critical get-out-the-vote work and then failing to mention the election at all on the day of their rally on the Mall last weekend.
These fingers, however, were all pointed inward. Foreign policy played almost no role in this election. This is rather strange. After all, the United States is still involved in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The gargantuan military budget, even at this time of economic crisis, barely merits a mention in the news. (Check out this short film clip from director Iara Lee for information on military spending, featuring me and other Foreign Policy In Focus colleagues that the TV news won't give you). Critical treaties, such as New START, hang in the balance. Negotiations with Iran and North Korea might be in the offing. We're coming up on another round of climate change negotiations in Cancun at the end of this month.
And yet, the elections will likely have a huge impact on U.S. foreign policy. A realigned Congress will alter how the United States engages (or doesn't) with the world.
The first likely victim of the elections will be New START, our latest arms control agreement with Russia. Senate Democrats have so far been unable to guarantee the 67 votes needed for passage. The one Republican who has promised to vote yes, Richard Lugar (R-IN), doubts the treaty will even come up for a vote in the lame-duck session if the Republicans pick up enough seats.
Although the arms control community is battling hard for New START, others are more skeptical of the agreement. The deals cut in the Senate to win passage, writes FPIF contributor Darwin BondGraham, "ensure that the military and its contractors will receive huge budget increases, including funding for a new plutonium bomb pit factory, a growing the missile defense program that is already as large as the NNSA nuclear weapons program, the conversion of nuclear-capable missiles into conventional strike weapons under the prompt global strike weapons program, and a new generation of submarines and jets to deploy the nuclear arsenal." Still, it could be worse. More Senate Republicans will give Jon Kyl (R-AZ) the leverage to push for even more money for nuclear modernization.
A second potential victim is the Obama administration's commitments on climate change. You might ask, what commitment? The administration backs a controversial market-based solution by which governments issue pollution permits. "The $127 billion global carbon trading market has become a lucrative marketplace for turning planetary salvation into business deals," writes FPIF columnist Laura Carlsen. "The upshot is that the polluter is allowed to keep on polluting."
But more Republicans in the Senate will give tea party favorites Jim DeMint (R-SC) and James Inhofe (R-OK) more opportunities to voice their climate change denial. Both received significant campaign contributions from BP.
And then there's Obama's more diplomatic approach to various conflicts around the world. True, I find the administration's way of dealing with North Korea — lots of sticks, no carrots — too reminiscent of the early Bush years. But a Republican takeover of the House means that Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) will take charge of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Known for her UN-bashing and unqualified support for Israel, Ros-Lehtinen prefers regime change strategies to the current containment approach the U.S. favors with North Korea. Led by the Florida hardliner, Congress will likely take more extreme positions toward China, Iran, Venezuela, and other nations.
Some might argue that Obama missed his golden opportunity to push through all the vital pieces of legislation on his agenda — including a jobs stimulus bill and a climate change bill — when he had a clear majority in both the House and Senate. But the Republicans used the arcane rules of the Senate to block as much as they could.
Bringing a bill to the floor of the Senate requires a cloture vote. According to this rule, adopted in 1917, 60 Senators have to agree to end debate before the body can vote by a simple majority on most bills. To block Obama, Michael Tomasky points out, Republicans have threatened a filibuster roughly twice as many times since 2007 as the Democrats did when Republicans controlled Congress during the Bush administration between 2003 and 2007.
Of course, the tilting of the playing field begins even before the senators take their seats. As FPIF contributor Caleb Rossiter argues, our electoral rules have long supported our imperial foreign policy. "Members of the U.S. House, by state laws, and the Senate, by a constitutional amendment in 1913, are chosen under a winner-takes-all rule," he writes in Is Obama a Turkey or an Eagle? "This reduces the representation in government of the anti-imperialist minority that would be present under a proportional election rule."
In many ways, the Obama administration's foreign policy has been a major disappointment. Even where he has achieved some success — negotiating with the Russians on arms control, putting climate change on the table — these have been very qualified victories. But after a few whiffs of the alternatives proposed by the newly ascendant Republicans, and those hawkish Democrats who consistently fall in behind them, we'll be waxing nostalgic about the good old days of Obama's first two years. It might not have been a golden age, but it sure beats the dark ages to come.
August 31, 2010
Except for a few residual Know-Nothings, Americans wouldn't think twice about voting for a Catholic president. In the last election, President Obama abolished the presidential race taboo. And we're likely to have a woman president in the next decade or so. Of course, we haven't elected a Catholic since Kennedy, we might not break the race barrier again for a while, and let's hope our first woman president isn't Mama Grizzly herself, Sarah Palin.
But just try and imagine a Muslim president. Imagine a U.S. president fasting during Ramadan, turning toward Mecca five times a day for prayer, invoking Allah in the Oval Office. Of course, nearly 20 percent of Americans believe that we already elected a Muslim president — despite all evidence to the contrary. I'm not sure why this bit of willful ignorance surprises anyone. After all, only 40 percent of Americans believe in evolution (which suggests that, in their case, evolution doesn't in fact apply). We are a credulous nation that nevertheless makes fun of the citizens of other countries for their bizarre beliefs, like the divinity of Kim Jong Il or the usefulness of universal health care.
Frankly, I look forward to having a Muslim president. That would truly expand our understanding of what it means to be an American living in a society founded on "Judeo-Christian" values. There are a couple million Muslims in the United States and two Muslims in Congress, Keith Ellison (D-MN) and Andre Corson (D-IN). But judging from the anti-Islamic sentiment that bubbled to the surface during Obama's run for office, and continues today around various controversial buildings and threatened book-burnings, a Muslim president isn't yet on the horizon.
Since we're on the topic of long shots, how about a weak president? Or, to put it more accurately, a president who is courageous enough to appear weak: a president who ends wars as decisively as others have started them.
Obama will give a speech tonight about ending combat operations in Iraq. It won't exactly be a clean break. We're leaving behind 50,000 combat troops that have been rebranded as "advise and assist brigades." These troops, plus another 4,500 Special Ops, can stay until the day before 2012. And while their mission is train Iraqi officers, they will likely engage in combat duties as well. Iraq is, after all, a volatile country, full of guns and anger. On the eve of the U.S. military's departure, the situation in Iraq is so desperate that after a suicide bomber struck an army recruitment center in Baghdad in mid-August, killing over 60 people, the surviving applicants scrambled back in line for the jobs they desperately need.
Still, it's important to acknowledge that the president is honoring his 2007 promise to end the Iraq War, however many asterisks must accompany the fulfillment of that pledge.
Afghanistan is another matter entirely. Obama, even as a presidential candidate, always promised to focus on this war. And now, after committing to a surge of U.S. troops and spending, Afghanistan has become his war. Regardless of his promise to surge and withdraw, tens of thousands of U.S. troops will still likely be fighting in that country when his first term runs out. "Although an anxious Congress may push him to withdraw, the fear of seeming weak on national security will probably pull at least as firmly in the other direction," writes Michael O'Hanlon in the latest Foreign Affairs.
Weak on national security: This is the curse of the Democrats — even though they have waged wars at least as assiduously as Republicans. Alas, Obama has been weak on national security in the same way that he's been a Muslim: not at all. In fact, Obama has practiced the art of compensation. He deferred to the generals on Afghanistan, upped the drone attacks in Pakistan, and spread counterinsurgency to other countries, such as Yemen. And now he's stuck with the strong man's dilemma: He can't go forward or backward without generating intense criticism, without being labeled Jimmy Carter 2.0.
In this country, we like our leaders the way we like our whisky and our chins: strong. And by strong, we generally mean martial. Only former military men are permitted to stand up to the Pentagon, like Ike on the military-industrial complex or Colin Powell on quagmires.
And indeed, one of the most effective anti-imperialist voices today comes from a former army officer: Andrew Bacevich. The Boston University professor is not exactly a peacenik. He doesn't rule out military intervention on ethical grounds. He simply maintains, as he does in this Foreign Policy In Focus interview with Andrew Feldman, that although military expansion enhanced U.S. power in the previous eras, "roughly since the 1960s and very much so since 9/11, expansionism has an opposite effect. We're not enhancing our power; we're squandering it. We're not building our prosperity; we're going bankrupt." In his new book, Washington Rules, Bacevich argues that "the United States should employ force only as a last resort and only in self defense."
It's hard to imagine Obama, or any viable presidential candidate, making this argument for the strategic redeployment of the U.S. military (i.e., retreat). Instead, our imperial presidents even inject militarism into diplomacy. We must, therefore, "negotiate from a position of strength" in Afghanistan by shooting first and asking questions later. But what about negotiating from a position of intelligence? In general, we have a president who is not afraid to be smart. But, like his presidential predecessors, he is careful not to be too smart in anti-intellectual America. And thus he falls back on the default position: When in doubt, be strong.
Someday we might have a Muslim president of the United States. In so doing, we would help end the confrontation between Christian and Muslim that has long shaped the identity of "Western civilization." In the meantime, I'm hoping for a president who's not afraid of appearing weak, of ending wars and bringing troops home, of closing bases and cutting back on the Pentagon, of redefining American power. Obama won't be our first Muslim president, but he still has an outside shot at the latter.
July 27, 2010
President Obama, who played on a high school team that claimed a state championship, knows basketball. He famously sank a three-pointer during a 2008 campaign visit to U.S. troops in Kuwait. He continues to play at the White House, where he has installed a basketball court on the South Lawn. And he has imported some of his basketball moves into the policy world. With his stimulus package and health care reform, the president faked right and feinted left before driving down the center of the court for a lay-up. He scored his points, but his critics called foul.
Now, on immigration reform, the president is again faking right. To determine his ultimate destination, don't be fooled by what the president does with his mouth. Pay close attention to his hands to figure out which way he'll move.
In its head fake to the right on immigration, the Obama administration expects to deport 400,000 undocumented people this year, 10 percent more than the 2008 total of the Bush administration. More critically, the government has quadrupled the number of audits conducted on firms to make sure that they're not hiring undocumented workers.
The administration has tried to spin these efforts to sound more appealing. The government argues that it's targeting people who commit crimes and will try not to separate families. But immigration advocates contend that the reality is very different, as zealous local officials and police apply a full-court press. These advocates recently brought their message to the White House, where they say that the president "was surprised by evidence that thousands of ordinary illegal immigrants continue to be targeted and deported, often for minor violations, despite the official focus on criminals."
The right wing is certainly making enough noise to force the president to fake right. Illegal immigrants are pouring into the country, the Big Wall supporters claim. The border areas have turned into war zones, and the English-only movement worries that a future president will deliver a State of the Union speech in Spanish. But it's not just Latinos that kindle the racism of the uber-patriots. The organization Americans for Immigration Control goes out of its way to praise the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882: "Today, the violent criminal activities of the Chinese Tong gangs, the widespread criminal activities of Chinese alien and drug smugglers, and the espionage at the Los Alamos Research Labs proves the wisdom of our ancestors."
Say what?
Wenho Lee, the Los Alamos physicist accused (and ultimately acquitted) of selling top secrets to a foreign country, received over a million bucks in compensation plus a judicial apology for government misconduct in its legal suit. And it's not the FBI that's worried about the wave of Chinese immigrants, but America's top universities that are overwhelmed by applications from those overachieving Tong members and drug smugglers.
The arguments made against Latino immigrants are just as absurd. In fact, illegal immigration numbers are down, largely as a result of economic crisis and fewer jobs available in el Norte. As for the wave of violence sweeping through the Southwest, it's just not happening. "Violent crime, though rising in Mexico, has fallen on this side of the border: in Southwestern border counties it has dropped more than 30 percent in the past two decades," writes William Finnegan in The New Yorker. "According to FBI statistics, the four safest big cities in the United States — San Diego, Phoenix, El Paso, and Austin — are all in border states."
The right wing is by no means unified on this issue. Indeed, several conservative evangelical leaders have supported the need for immigration reform. They base this support in scripture — love thy neighbor, etc. — but demography is really the driving factor. By opposing immigration, the church would be cutting off its nose to spite its base. "My message to Republican leaders," Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the evangelical National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, told The New York Times, "is if you're anti-immigration reform, you're anti-Latino, and if you're anti-Latino, you are anti-Christian church in America, and you are anti-evangelical."
You don't have to be an evangelical Christian to realize that immigration reform is in U.S. self-interest. According to a report earlier this year from the Campaign for American Progress and the American Immigration Council, an amnesty program affecting the more than 11 million undocumented people in the United States would add $1.5 trillion to the GDP over a decade. That's a lot more folks generating government revenue and keeping U.S. businesses afloat.
With a bumper sticker like "It's good for God and country!" immigration should be an easy win for the administration. If only politics were so sensible.
Obama has pledged to remake the U.S. relationship with the global community. Such global engagement begins at home since we are, increasingly, the world. I'm not happy with the president's feints to the right in an attempt to please the anti-immigrant lobby: the law-and-order rhetoric, the support of free-trade agreements that ultimately push people into leaving their countries. But if Obama manages to drive to the basket — and win amnesty for millions of hard-working de facto Americans — I'll cheer the victory. We just have to make sure that the president doesn't fool us all by faking right and dribbling right. It's our responsibility to close down that lane and make sure he drives to the left.
January 26, 2010
One year ago, Barack
Obama was elected captain of the Titanic — er, I mean, president of
the United States.
It's an understandable slip. Last year,
the waters seemed to be rising on all sides. The U.S. economy was in
a mess, and the government was rolling in debt. We were involved in
quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as an open-ended "war
on terror." Our image in the world was about as low as you could
get. And if that wasn't bad enough, because of climate change the
waters were quite literally rising all around us.
Many of us
were rooting for the new president. But we also had a sneaking
suspicion that, like other handsome leading man Leonardo DiCaprio,
Obama might go down with the ship.
During the last year, the
president rolled up his sleeves and got to work on the ship of state.
He went down to the engine room to try to get the economic engine
working again. He organized the infirmary staff to provide emergency
health care to more of the ship's passengers. He tried to enlist the
able-bodied in the necessary jobs of fixing the ship's
infrastructure.
Many passengers have taken heart from the
hard work of the new, sober captain. But others fear that he's done
little more than rearrange the deckchairs. Columnist and economist
Paul Krugman, for instance, is "pretty close to giving up on Mr.
Obama, who seems determined to confirm every doubt I and others ever
had about whether he was ready to fight for what his supporters
believed in." And indeed, if you look out the porthole, the
situation still looks bleak: economic mess, unprecedented debt,
climate change unabated, and that great sucking sound still coming
from those quagmires.
Same shipwreck, different captain.
On
Wednesday, our captain will address the passengers. Many of us still
have that sinking feeling, particularly after the recent election in
Massachusetts. What can the captain say to give us hope and believe
in change once again?
First things first: The president has to
change the metaphor. Titanic was so 1990s.
Barack Obama needs a new blockbuster.
At his upcoming State
of the Union, as I recently told Eleanor Clift of Newsweek
and which she published in Four Ways Obama Can Win Back Liberals, the
president needs an Avatar Moment. He can't
go with the same old, same old. He has to transform his presidency as
profoundly as James Cameron has shaken up the movie industry with his
film Avatar. He needs to reenergize his
base, get people excited again.
Of course, it would be great
if the president borrowed from the themes of Avatar
as well. Just imagine if Obama announced that we were closing all
overseas military bases because they wreaked havoc on indigenous
people, that we were redirecting money from the military into a green
economy that could prevent the Earth from becoming a lifeless rock,
that we would stop ruthlessly extracting underground resources
(unobtainium, oil) regardless of the consequences.
Oops,
sorry, I was wearing those rose-colored 3D glasses. When I take them
off, I see that Obama never was that radical, alas. Reports of the
president's proposed three-year freeze on domestic programs —
without touching the Pentagon lockbox — indicate just how Blue Dog
he can be. How on earth does he think that such a freeze will get
people excited again?
There's still time for Obama to change
course. Within the tight navigational limits that he observes, here's
what the president could do.
He should take the fear factor
away from the tea-baggers by clearly identifying the great threats we
face: unemployment, a broken health care system, crumbling
infrastructure. He must steal their populist fire by singling out the
bankers, insurance company executives, and unresponsive bureaucrats
as the obstacles in our way. He must mobilize a wide range of
resources — public, private, Pentagon — to address the threats
and equalize the burden. He must reorient the debate by being bold,
confident, and transformative. The Republicans under Bush didn't need
a filibuster-proof Senate majority to run America into an iceberg,
and Obama doesn't need one either to keep us all from drowning.
And
foreign policy? Most Americans want their country to be a number-one
box-office smash: rich, powerful, successful. It's not easy to sell
them on modesty and restraint (as Jimmy Carter famously discovered).
The president should at least focus on the Oscars that matter —
best economy, best health care system, best environmental standards —
rather than the dubious honors of heftiest military spending or
number of overseas bases. It's not only Americans who worry about the
health of this country. Billions of people who didn't vote in the
U.S. elections are nonetheless affected by U.S. policies. They, too,
have hopes and want change. The president should remember this global
audience as he prepares his State of the Union address.
As
with Avatar, the whole world is watching.