Having recently returned to planet earth from a ten day stop-over in Washington, it would appear as though Barack Obama is on the cusp of being a shoo-in not just for the Democratic nomination but for the presidency as well.
That’s unless Hillary does something dramatic, Senator McCain manages to make a party that couldn’t beat a paper bag electable, as someone said. Or some act of god should befall us all.
Major caveats admittedly, but none have stifled a new game in Washington, which is to treat President Obama as a given, and to start to plan for life under him.
This game is most entertainingly played in foreign policy discussions – where the consensus would broadly seem to be that while Presidents Hillary Clinton or McCain would both provide a much needed change of set dressing from the reviled George W, Obama could offer the breath of fresh air that could revitalize America’s image of itself as the “shining beacon on the hill” and further persuade the rest of us to believe this to be the case as well. Naturally, this is a consensus that is seen more from the Democratic perspective than on the Republican side, but even they privately admit that it will be tough to overcome the Obama zeitgeist.
Republicans have not of course given up, and one Republican friend harangued me about the personality cult developing around the senator from Illinois, citing the recent Frank Shepard Fairey – he of the Obey Giant fame) – poster campaign that openly evokes totalitarian propaganda. On the more controversial end of the scale, prominent academic Edward Luttwak attracted a storm with an article about the candidate’s Muslim heritage in the New York Times that ran under the title “President Apostate?”
From a foreign policy perspective, however, it seems to hard to deny the potential that, if elected, Obama will offer the opportunity for the US to reach out across the world and to actually find partners willing to work with them. (This FT story shows the impact he is able to have without any apparent effort in the world’s most populous Muslim country).
This is not to say that the world will suddenly be inverted, but more that such a clean break with the aggressive Manichean rhetoric of the Bush administration can only offer positive potential.
Some may query the sagacity of openly agreeing to meet with dictators without preconditions, but one cannot deny that offering some potential forum for discussion seems preferable to the many foreign quagmires that the Bush administration has let the United States sink in to. And the potential face-lift that President Barack Hussein Obama will offer his country in the Muslim world is hard to calculate.
However, young and excessively optimistic presidents have had a tendency to be pushed around by their tougher national security types in-house, but also by opportunistic foreign leaders. The most prominent historical example is John F Kennedy who was pushed by domestic actors into the ill-judged Bay of Pigs debacle, and who was then tested by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev with the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Recognising this comparison and his oft cited weak national security credentials, Senator Obama has taken some pretty hard lines on the stump, most prominently stating that “if we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and [Pakistan’s] President Musharraf won’t act, we will”. His opponents leapt on this, immediately accusing him an even deeper naiveté in being willing to bomb an ally and sovereign state (amusingly, in private conversation, most in Washington would agree that this would of course be the American reaction to such a situation).
One Democrat academic put it to me in a most mischievous manner when he stated that what Obama would need early on is a “small war.” A short, sharp and constrained conflict with high popularity ratings at home could immediately strengthen an Obama administration both at home and abroad – think Ronald Reagan and the American invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada in 1983, or the revitalising impact the Falklands had upon Margaret Thatcher’s fortunes.
None of this, however, detracts from another key element which might let down the potential that Obama offers – and that is a hand to reach back. While the senator would undoubtedly offer an outstretched hand, he will need the world, and particularly Europe, to reach back. Nowhere is Obamamania more pronounced than in Europe, but at the same time, there is scant evidence that Europeans have begun to think through what exactly they are going to do if the rhetoric in the White House changes sharply.
America’s prestige and power have undoubtedly been tarnished, and it will take some work to bring their lustre back, but in the meantime, very real problems exist in the world that it will take both sides to fix. Afghanistan cannot simply limp on – if we really think it is a just war, then resources must match intentions.
And while it is easy to avoid dealing with Iraq at all at the moment it’s not a situation that will simply resolve itself.
As German academic Guido Steinberg has put it in Der Spiegel , “the next US government will demand greater support from Germany on the international stage” – a statement which is equally applicable across Europe.
There is a crucial need for leaders and citizens the world to start to think through what they are willing to contribute to fix Bush’s terrible legacy. If Obama is elected, high expectations will only be met if he gets tangible international support.
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