Obama’s first 100 days — The Liberal mugged by reality?
Is Barak Obama going to be the liberal who was mugged by reality? Looking back on his first hundred days as the purveyor of a new pax Americana, it is certainly on the cards. Just take the major issues of the day, and go down the list:
Iran? His attempts to woo the Iranians have been rebuffed in the most humilating terms. President Ahmadinejad’s spokesman Ali Akbar Javanfekr responded to Obama’s video appeal to the Iranian people in March by saying: “The American administration has to recognize its past mistakes and repair them as a way to put away the differences.” In other words, grovel before us and we may start to view you differently. But the sight of the world’s leading democracy being lectured to by the world’s most aggressive sponsor of terrorism was only for starters. The new American president’s overtures were also rewarded with a jail sentence for a an Iranian-American journalist on trumped up spying charges. Tehran gets closer to joining the nuclear club with every day that passes.
As for the other rogue power in former President Bush’s much maligned “axis of evil”, Obama got his reward for a more conciliatory approach to North Korea in April in the form of a highly publicised rocket launch over Japan.
Russia? His adminstration’s pledge to press “the restart button” in relations with Moscow have achieved precisely nothing in terms of softening the Putin-Medvedev strategy of aggressive, authoritarian nationalism towards sovereign nations on the country’s borders. South Ossetia remains occupied. The Baltic states and Poland continue to be vilified. Ukraine continues to be meddled in.
The fruits of Obamamania in Europe? If not nothing then, at least, next to nothing. The president’s forlorn attempts to get NATO allies to stump up more troops for Afghanistan have been all but ignored leaving the prospect of what Defense Secretary Robert Gates last year called a two-tier NATO a distinct possibility .
Sundry other issues? Is China still in Tibet? Yes. Is Darfur still a raging furnace of ethnic genocide? Yes. Is Burma still run by a psychopathic dictatorship? Yes. Has the UN Security Council done anything to actually stop the carnage in Sri Lanka? No. The list could go on.
Of course, it would be absurd and unfair to expect a new American president to have solved the problems of the world in just 100 days. But first indications for the future are not good at all. Perhaps a new world order is just around the corner. Or perhaps not, in which case Obama’s much vaunted multi-lateralism may have to be reconsidered, and then ditched as it was in his administration’s belated but courageous decision to boycott the UN’s farcical anti-racism conference in Geneva last week which opened with an address by none other than the Holocaust denying, anti-Semite president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The shape of things to come with this administration? Quite possibly. US presidents do not like being humiliated. Mindless multilateralism may not be with us for much longer. This then raises bigger questions: what comes next and, rhetoric aside, what will be the cash value of the difference between Bush’s America and Obama’s America as they relate to the outside world ?
May 11th, 2009 at 10:11 am
“US presidents do not like being humiliated” – no but they have become used to it since the exception to this rule of Jimmy Carter.
Great to see a ‘realist’ blog. They are rare.