The Ever So Inspiring Vexing Obama
How many times did we hear it said around the world, in 2008,
that Barak Hussein Obama is the new president of the new America?
It isn’t just the fresh African-American heritage and its mix
of Christian and Muslim blood that had the crowds rhapsodizing in ecstasy. It’s
that he harks from the old colonies and yet inhabits Rome so comfortably; the
education, the worldliness, the sophistication, the very sharpness of him and—here
comes the whopper—that he’s so self-satisfied and superior. Unnerving as that made
Obama to many Americans, it actually added that extra halo over him among his
foreign admirers.
Once sold on the résumé, it was very easy for his partisans to
make the leap from profile to policy. For them, the compelling logic went, Obama’s
style of leadership and conduct were bound to be as transformational as his
person.
It was thought, who better than this American president to
refashion the purpose and use of power in a world that seems to be walking
briskly towards a radically different era. It isn’t just that emerging centers
of influence—all non-western—have been giving the old club a run for its ideas
and money. Technology’s innovations also have been chipping away at the
deep-set walls between center and periphery. Civil societies have been bypassing
their governments, forging transnational links and making robust common cause. Even
capitalism itself, already sullied by the IMF and its neoliberal agenda in the
league of developing nations, was taking a battering in much of the West by
2008. To boot, the US was finally showing the serious strains of its military
and financial excess.
It helped, of course, that, in the endless battles between
imperium and its foreign dominions, indigenous grit, facing overwhelming
military might, stood its ground and occasionally won. In this movie, Vietnam
ran like a preview of things to come.
And so came Obama on the heels, we must never forget, of a
frighteningly insular man called Bush, with a frighteningly adventurous troop.
Thus the hope, the clamor and the Nobel Prize. The expectations of many Americans
(and otherwise) were that the change would be dramatic, loud enough for us to
hear the crusts of international politics shift.
Truth be told, plenty were the skeptics, none more than
President Obama himself, enumerating the constancies that belied the fast-moving
trends. His very own Oslo speech,
upon receiving the Nobel peace prize, waxed eloquent about the seductiveness of
lofty ideals once tempered by the irresistible logic of power politics.
Amongst us Middle Easterners there’s always been fury—as there
should be—at an atrocious US track record that could stretch as far back as
President Woodrow Wilson’s failure to offer more than lip service to the
constructs of democracy and self-determination that graced his famous 14 points.
President Dwight Eisenhower’s warning to England, France and Israel to withdraw
from the Sinai in 1956 is a very lonely moment when American interests
coincided with Arab ones.
And yet, however deep our outrage, it’s not every day that we
get to hear a politically savvy thinker, like Hamid Dabashi, bemoaning
an American president thus: “Oh, how deeply did he betray that hope! He coulda
been a contender!" We are very much in the habit of taking offense at
American violations of our national integrity or disregard for our political
yearnings, or, worst of all, its collusions that tear at the very fabric of our
lives. Rarely do we criticize an American president for disappointing our hope
in him, since we were conditioned a long time ago not to entertain such silly
sentiments.
It took an Obama to rekindle the poetry. So, going back to
Dabashi: Obama “coulda been a contender” for what exactly?
Although he doesn’t quite say it, I suspect Dabashi was hoping
that this American presidency might usher in an age of imperial enlightenment
of a sort, watershed achievements like a juridical withdrawal from Afghanistan,
a palatable peace treaty in Palestine, a more balanced policy towards Iran…
Overall, a concerted effort to shorten the distance between the US’s high
minded Jeffersonian principles and its hard-edged interests.
Just to be clear, as mindful as I am of the absurdity of
pairing imperialism with enlightenment, my tongue was nowhere near my cheek
when I was writing the above paragraph. The proposition that a retrenching US
must reimagine itself in the region—to show more suppleness and farsightedness
in pursuing its interests--is one that has been made by policy makers and
critics alike. Leaving the very fundamental but elusive matter of justice
aside, the rationale is that, notwithstanding blunders like Iraq, it might seem
like the US has not done too badly over the past century, standing as it does
now alone, with all its previous rivals nearly vanquished or snapping at its
coattails. But the cumulative effect of its connivance with and/or indulgence
of the Middle East’s most reactionary and predatory countries (Israel included)
has been ruinous to the prospects for stability that the US needs most today as
it retreats and pivots towards more pressing spheres.
Judging by the hyperbole in Dabashi’s lamentations, Obama’s
record so far—at least for his betrayed fans--is more than disappointing. The kill lists, the soaring number of drone-strikes and other
such like loathsome prerogatives of empire shock, while “servility” to Israel
infuriates. Needless to say, the US’s reliance on multiple yardsticks in
navigating the current Arab uprisings—quick uptake in Tunisia and Egypt,
firepower in Libya, silence on Bahrain, studied reluctance on Syria…—have
invited the usual cries of foul play.
But the truth is that Obama’s tactics point to tentative
departures from old policies and new frictions with longstanding allies that
have translated into openings for those of us playing on the opposite side of
this perennially dirty game of geopolitics. He predictably gave way on Yemen
and Bahrain, but rebuffed Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah on Egypt’s Husni Mubarak,
moved swiftly on Tunisia and is still derailing Qatari and Saudi efforts to arm
Syrian insurgents, quite a few of whom are extremely unattractive Islamists.
He has yielded to Israel, as any American president would, on Palestine,
but he has stubbornly and effectively resisted it on Iran. One could argue that
Israel’s unusually audacious efforts to manipulate great power interests on an
issue much bigger than its size—even if it is such a “special” friend--were
bound to fail. But the art of Obama’s diplomacy, which publically mined Israeli
dissent as much as it capitalized on the US’s sheer heft is not lost on
Netanyahu and his camp—it certainly shouldn’t be lost on the rest of us. And double
standards do pervade the cocktail of sanctions against Iran, but I’d be
interested to hear a serious counterargument on the better path of war from other
than those whom history has already proven insane.
Clearly, Obama is not thinking of the good people of the Middle
East when he insists on flexibility in this very uncertain climate. And he
might well be embracing alliances with forces, such as the Muslim Brotherhood,
which might be as averse to a freer, more democratic politics as the old
regimes. But precisely because of the fluidity of the times and the US’s
dimming star, Obama has had to listen harder and watch carefully the swing of
the pendulum. We should all remember that one of his more intriguing qualities is
how well he manages to unsettle his supposed friends.
And since Dabashi himself describes the man as a mere
opportunist, the hint for our opinion leaders to quit the outrage, take the
opportunity, catch up with the grassroots and help make irreversible and
resounding our newfound vibrancy.
In one of the more lucid takes
on the “bewilderingly diverse and ferocious energies” recently unleashed in the
Arab region, Pankaj Mishra, one of the more robust public intellectuals seguing
between East and West, posits that the revolts are but the latest manifestations
of a century-long struggle by the people of Asia to wrestle themselves free of
Western domination. The US, no less than the colonial powers of old, has long
resisted, at a huge cost in resources and lives, this trajectory. Even now
Republicans calling for President Obama to ‘grow’ a ‘big stick’
seem to think they live in the world of Teddy Roosevelt. Liberal
internationalists arguing for even deeper American engagement with the Middle
East inhabit a similar time warp; and both have an exaggerated idea of
America’s financial clout after the biggest economic crisis since the 1930s.
If the main question
before us is whether the final push towards a “post-Western era…will be as
protracted and violent as Europe’s mid-20th century retreat from a newly
assertive Asia and Africa,” it is certainly arguable that an opportunist at the
White House is all we need to manage the transition with the least damage
possible. When we breathed a sigh of relief at the reelection of Obama, did we
not phew with that in mind?
