Bill O’Reilly: Let me be very bold and fresh again, do you believe that you are smart enough, incisive enough, intellectual enough to handle the most powerful job in the world?
Sarah Palin: I believe that I am because I have common sense and I have I believe the values that I think are reflective of so many other American values, and I believe that what Americans are seeking is not the elitism, the uhm, the ah, a kind of spineless,
spinelessness that perhaps is made up for that with some kind of elite, Ivy league education and, and a fat resume that is based on anything but hard work and private sector, free enterprise principles. Americans are could be seeking something like that in positive change in their leadership, I’m not saying that that has to be me.
By CARY FRASER
US President Barack Obama speaks in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, on December 24. —Photo: AP
AS Sarah Palin continues her campaign to remain a potential Presidential candidate in 2012 by way of television and personal appearances designed to appeal to obscurantist factions in the Republican party, Congressional Republicans have sought to cripple the health care reform initiative pushed by President Obama and the Democratic party. The Republican campaign was preceded by the effort of former Vice President Cheney to portray Obama as “dithering” over the war in Afghanistan after the President had requested an extended review of American strategy and goals in that country. In effect, the Republican strategy has been aimed at creating an image of Obama as an ineffective and indecisive President, apparently in the hope that such an image would prevent him from being re-elected in 2012. It is, perhaps, a measure of the Republican party’s incoherence that Sarah Palin is being considered as an alternative to Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election.
Cheney’s campaign against Obama reflects an ongoing effort to discredit the new President’s efforts to abandon the truculent foreign policy that had been pursued during the Bush administration. These Republican efforts have done little to reassure either the American public or the wider international community that the hubris and self-destructive tendencies unleashed in American life by the Bush administration have run their course. Of even greater import, the Cheney campaign against Obama has defined the Republicans as a party consumed by the delusion that American military power is a guarantor of American influence in the international system – notwithstanding the failed “War on Terror.” As a party that prides itself on the pursuit of a “muscular” foreign policy, its leadership remains blind to the strategic incompetence that drove it to pursue a two-front war in the Muslim world at enormous political and economic cost. In many ways, the Bush administration had repeated the mistakes of the Lyndon Johnson administration which had embarked upon the quixotic quest to prevent the unification of Vietnam – it assumed that military power could reverse the ideological challenge of anti-Western sentiment.
For Cheney, and others of like mind, the American military defeat in Vietnam was a traumatic revelation of the limits of American power in the wider world. The conflict ultimately had forced the Nixon administration to seek an end to the war by going through Beijing and, in the process, ending its efforts to isolate and contain the People’s Republic of China. Further, the war had led to the radicalization of American politics with the rise of an anti-war movement which helped to discredit both the Johnson and Nixon administrations. In effect, military defeat in Vietnam had created a crisis of credibility in both American domestic politics and its foreign policy. That defeat remains an oppressive shadow over contemporary American politics as every President/Commander-in-Chief since Vietnam has faced scrutiny over the use of the American military in pursuit of American foreign policy. War has become an index of political legitimacy for American leaders – and that development has fed a culture of war including deference to the military in the wider society.
Obama’s turn to engagement with the wider world as a strategy for winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is undoubtedly a bitter pill to swallow for Cheney and his allies. Obama’s policies in Iraq and Afghanistan suggest a very limited commitment to the expansive vision of war held by Cheney and the current generation of Republican leaders who followed Bush and Cheney in the dream of an American imperium in the Muslim world. The occupation of Iraq, and the establishment of a military presence/strategic platform in Afghanistan that could expand American influence in both South and Central Asia, have proven to be counterproductive in both domestic and foreign policy. Like Vietnam, both Iraq and Afghanistan have become symbols of the limits of American military power to reshape other countries to fit the interests of America and the electoral repudiation of the Republican party in 2008 was the harvest reaped for the “War on Terror” in these two countries. Obama is now facing serious questions about his own political judgment for having decided to send more troops to Afghanistan as part of a planned escalation in a protracted war initiated by the Bush administration. However, he has hedged his commitment to the expansion of the American military effort in Afghanistan by offering a date for beginning a military withdrawal should the escalation fail to show progress in laying the foundation for a negotiated political settlement in the country.
Former US vice president Dick Cheney.
For Obama’s generation of Americans, Vietnam is a childhood memory, not a lived experience, and their intellects have not been deformed by the trauma that Vietnam represented for Cheney and other American leaders of the generation that oversaw the war and its multiple failures. As a consequence, Obama’s approach to both Iraq and Afghanistan has emphasized a search for solutions that would allow the United States to reorient American policy to engage with the ideological and political pluralism that defines the multi-polar international system that has emerged in recent years. Cheney’s angst over Obama’s policies suggests a sense of failure that the Vietnam War cannot be refought in other arenas to produce an outcome favourable to the United States. Further, for Cheney et al, the fleeting post-Cold War illusion of an American-dominated uni-polar system has turned to dust in Iraq and Afghanistan and Obama, unfortunately, has become the preferred scapegoat for their own strategic incompetence.
Like the challenges that faced the British Prime Minister, Harold MacMillan, who succeeded Anthony Eden in the wake of the Suez Crisis of 1956 when American and Soviet ascendancy became irreversible, Obama is confronted by the need to redefine the American role in a world where the rise of Brazil, China and India will increasingly reshape the future of the world. It is a challenge that the current Republican party leadership is ill-equipped to manage – both because of the reckless disregard for sound economic and fiscal policies that led to massive increases in public debt and the implosion of Wall Street under the Bush administration, and because of its failure to transcend the culture of white supremacist politics that had defined American domestic politics and foreign policy for much of the 20th century. The Bush administration, and its anachronistic embrace of predatory capitalism and imperial war, opened the way for the decline of the Republican party’s influence. It had suffered a similar fate after the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression. The Republicans were discredited in the 1932 election campaign which Franklin D. Roosevelt won, and the party only returned to the White House in 1952 when Dwight Eisenhower won the Presidency. Given its intellectual disarray since the departure of Bush, the party seems set to enjoy another long exile in the political wilderness.
Obama’s appeal to the wider world is undoubtedly related to the fact that he represents a radical departure from his predecessors—an American of mixed ancestry, born in Hawaii—the only American state admitted to the Union with a majority of people of colour among its population, and gifted with a sensibility that allows him to transcend the politics of ethnic supremacy that has shaped American life. He is a symbol of a changing America, and displays a level of intellectual and cultural sophistication in dealing with cultures outside of the United States – attributes that are critical to his search for ways to reassert a positive American role in an international system badly damaged by his predecessor. In effect, Obama is America’s bridge to a world that has increasingly moved away from the Euro-American dominated international system that emerged after 1492 and his Presidency will be a barometer of the American capacity to adapt to the changing international system. If he proves himself unable to devise a foreign policy strategy that elevates his Presidency above the image and substance of his predecessor, then the erosion of American influence will accelerate across the international system.
However, despite his own recognition of the need to redefine the American role in the world, Obama’s efforts to reorient American foreign policy will inevitably trigger a backlash from a variety of constituencies at home and abroad. The Republican party will seek to benefit from that backlash with appeals to the rabid xenophobia that motivates domestic hostility to any American engagement with the wider world. However, Obama can also be assured that the Republicans will be quite willing to support the war in Afghanistan as a strategy for eventually crippling him. Were he to opt for withdrawal, the Republicans will undoubtedly mount a campaign accusing him of damaging American national security and betraying the military. The legacy of George W. Bush still weighs heavily upon the Republican party and their only conceivable path back to political credibility lies in ensuring that Obama is perceived as a failure. The hysteria that has driven the Republican campaign against the reform of the increasingly dysfunctional American health care system over 2009 is but a harbinger of the tactics and the strategy that the Republican party will pursue against the Obama administration. While Obama came to office emphasizing his willingness to reach out to the Republican party, it has become clear that the Republican party is prepared to support Obama’s continuation of the war in Afghanistan - but very little else.
Obama does not represent the first effort to reorient American domestic and foreign policies after serious foreign policy reverses in recent memory. In the wake of the oil crisis of 1973-74, the resignation of Richard Nixon as the Watergate scandal destroyed his Presidency, and the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975, Jimmy Carter had been elected on a platform of bringing change to Washington and redefining American policies in a changing world in 1976. However, Carter fell victim to a political system which was incapable of confronting the reality that American influence across the international system was in decline and that the United States would have to rethink the terms of its engagement with the world. In a very frank speech to the American people on July 15, 1979, Carter said:
As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning.
These changes did not happen overnight. They’ve come upon us gradually over the last generation, years that were filled with shocks and tragedy.
We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Watergate.
We remember when the phrase “sound as a dollar” was an expression of absolute dependability, until ten years of inflation began to shrink our dollar and our savings. We believed that our nation’s resources were limitless until 1973, when we had to face a growing dependence on foreign oil.
These wounds are still very deep. They have never been healed. Looking for a way out of this crisis, our people have turned to the Federal government and found it isolated from the mainstream of our nation’s life. Washington, D.C., has become an island. The gap between our citizens and our government has never been so wide. The people are looking for honest answers, not easy answers; clear leadership, not false claims and evasiveness and politics as usual.
Carter paid a heavy price for his blunt assessment of the challenges facing America and he lost the election to Ronald Reagan in 1980. In large part, Carter was unable to overcome the perception that he was unable to provide the leadership required to reverse the loss of American influence in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the hostage crisis in Iran.
Thirty years on, Barack Obama confronts the ongoing challenges that Afghanistan and Iran pose for American foreign policy, as well as a dependence upon foreign oil that has compromised America’s national security and its economic competitiveness. The costs of the Bush administration’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have become a crippling burden for the United States and have contributed to the increasing skepticism about the long-term viability of the dollar. Like Jimmy Carter, Obama’s success will be measured by his success in overcoming the failures of his predecessors and the crisis of legitimacy that has followed upon the military misadventures and economic disarray that he has inherited from the Bush administration. And like Carter, Obama is perceived as an outsider to the sub-culture of Washington which has a vested interest in maintaining the “false claims and evasiveness and politics as usual.” However, in 2009 the pace of American decline has accelerated amidst the rise of alternative centers of power in the international system, and the failure of Wall Street and its acolytes to recognize the difference between self-indulgence and self-destruction has done little to reassure anyone about the quality of American leadership of the international economy.
In effect, the challenges to Obama should encourage him to consider the fate that befell Jimmy Carter even as the current crisis is well beyond the context of the latter’s Presidency. As he moves forward to address the long-term erosion of American power and legitimacy, Obama may find useful the recent observations of Paul Volcker who served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board during the Carter administration and serves an advisor to the Obama administration. In a recent interview with Der Spiegel, Volcker – in response to a question about his expectations “in the very near future” – said: “As an American, I have to be an optimist. But we have got a big challenge and we have to face up to it. And as you know, there is a lot of concern about the dysfunction of the political system.”
As Jimmy Carter’s experience revealed – even if an American President recognizes that serious change has to be undertaken, he can easily become a victim of the political dysfunction that has defined American politics in recent decades. Obama’s capacity to transcend that dysfunction will determine the course and success of his Presidency.
