President Obama's speech yesterday interests me on any number of levels, but it's a nice illustration of a persistent problem faced by presidents when they make a major foreign policy statement: Who is the audience? On the one hand, a president needs the support of the American people to pursue his goals abroad. On the other hand, he also needs to persuade key actors abroad to support his goals. These audiences often have little in common or actively oppose one another. Two key tensions/strategies in Obama's address yesterday nicely make this point.
First, as he so often does, the president begins with history. Initially, he briefly recounts the history of his administration, a narrative with a dissociative purpose--he is again differentiating his policy from that of George W. Bush. More important, however, is an early paragraph that leads into a history of the region. Obama argues there "are times in the course of history when the actions of ordinary citizens spark movements for change because they speak to a longing for freedom that has been building up for years." He then notes that, in "America," we "think of of the defiance of those patriots in Boston who refused to pay taxes to a King, or the dignity of Rosa Parks as she sat courageously in her seat. So it was in Tunisia..." From there, he moves into the history of the region and its freedom movements.
A couple of points. Initially, and despite later caveats ("It's not America that put people into the streets of Tunis or Cairo"), the president serially links these moments, implying causation although none exists--the Tea Party (there's our ironic president) to Rosa Parks to the young Tunisian vendor Mohammed Bouazizi. This is the sequential fallacy; sequence does not mean causation or inspiration. Next, and despite his dismissal of Bush, the first line could have come directly from the former president's late and entirely unlamented Second Inaugural, right down to the fire imagery and the "freedom" god term. Ick. Not a good way to dissociate your approach from that of Bush.
My larger point is this: Obama's history in this address is preeminently an American history, designed for an American audience. It speaks of American values and heroes. He leaves out what those in, for instance, the Arab world might consider a more relevant narrative--the story of US interference in or dominance of the region. Simply to limit that to the postwar world, we'd have to include Truman's recognition of Israel, Eisenhower's deployment to Lebanon and management of the Suez crisis, the supply of Israel in various wars, Reagan's deployment to Lebanon, 3 US wars, support for the Shah of Iran and more. I'm not saying Obama should have recounted all of this; I am saying that his use of history reveals a powerful tension. He says he wishes to speak to the peoples of the region, but his use of history reveals a preoccupation with his American audience.
Second, the same tension suffuses issues of what critics would call agency or, in straightforward terms, Obama's implicit construction of US power--are we able to achieve our goals? And, if so, how? On the one hand, the president, consistent with his Neibuhrian leanings, emphasizes the fact that "we must proceed with a sense of humility." Such leanings come through again as he seeks to balance our "core interests" with the fact that "narrow pursuit of these interests will not fill an empty stomach or allow someone to speak their mind." He understands that interests alone will not do because nations "held together by fear and repression may offer the illusion of stability for a time, but they are built upon fault lines that will eventually tear asunder." In short, Right makes Might--we must pursue our interests but those interests are best served through a simultaneous invocation of democratic values. Only democracies are reliable partners in the long run. Such has been the view of liberal internationalism at least since Wilson, with the acknowledgement of evil and hard choices added in during the Cold War by presidents such as Truman and Kennedy and theorists such as Reinhold Neibuhr. The best way to act is with humility, articulating our values but understanding that we cannot impose them on others: "Not every country will follow our particular form of representative democracy, and there will be times our short term interests don't align perfectly with our long term vision." Nothing is simple.
On the other hand, the president feels comfortable justifying violence against Qaddafi and, in quite the imperative paragraph, telling President Assad of Syria just what he has to do over the next few weeks. Bahrain should also shape up and the Iranians are hypocrites. Again, I'm not disagreeing with Obama's positions--I'm pointing out the tension that exists between a call for humility and orders to Assad. The former plays well to the region; the latter plays well at home. President Assad probably doesn't have many friends in the region, but they've also probably had quite enough of the United States imposing its will on various nations.
These two concerns are related, of course. Any narrative history that features American freedom struggles as central to world history will also constitute American choices as the best choices. The president's speech yesterday clearly targeted, whether he meant to or not, an American audience.
I'm not sure that was the best choice, but I also realize that it's rare for a president or a major public figure to balance these concerns effectively, or to constitute democratic values while acknowledging American shortcomings. I think the best example of such an effort was Robert Kennedy's 1966 Day of Affirmation Address in South Africa. The president did not meet that standard yesterday.
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