▶ Can Obama Win Over the World?
President Obama is realistic in dealing with less democratic governments but still tries to stir the hopes and aspirations of ordinary citizens. In March, a taped video message to Iranians was seen in Manama, Bahrain.
President Obama has been careful not to provoke foreign governments. A protest in Cairo in 2007.
JAMES TRAUB
ESSAY
DURING THE PRESIDENTIAL campaign, Barack Obama spoke eloquently about democracy at home and abroad, and before taking office asserted that the promotion of democracy “needs to be at a central part of our foreign policy.’’
But he has recoiled from the kind of missionary rhetoric that President Bush so often deployed in his own campaign to spread democracy worldwide.
As president, he has mixed the language of the realists, who typically address the behavior of regimes, with that of idealists, who, at least since Woodrow Wilson’s time, have sought to speak directly to the aspirations of ordinary citizens.
Mr.Obama has tried to re-knit frayed ties by opening new lines of communication with Cuba and Iran, by not directly confronting human-rights concerns in China, by remaining respectful toward Russia despite the occasional provocation.
On Thursday, he spoke in Cairo, addressing the Egyptian people, who live - like the citizens of virtually all Arab countries - in an authoritarian state, and who have grown increasingly restive as President Hosni Mubarak has snuffed out flickering hopes for change. “I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world,’’ he said.
But President Obama has already stirred listeners abroad with the clarion language of hope. In an April speech in Prague, he invoked the Prague Spring of 1968, when “the simple and principled pursuit of liberty and opportunity shamed those who relied on the power of tanks and arms to put down the will of a people.’’
This duality has as much to do with geopolitical reality as with Mr.Obama’s own temperament. In a recent speech, David Miliband, Britain’s scholarly foreign minister, observed that, in the face of “threats from climate change, terrorism, pandemics and financial crisis,” global security can be guaranteed only by “the broadest possible coalition of states and political movements,’’ including undemocratic ones. At the same time, he added, “we need the consent of citizens.’’
Both objectives were realist ones, in the sense that they further common national interests. But they were inevitably, Mr.Miliband acknowledged, in tension with one another.
That tension is much more acute for President Obama than it might be for another statesman. America has played a central role in the establishment and guidance of global bodies, from the League of Nations to the Bretton Woods institutions, which set international monetary policy during and after World War II.
But President Bush preferred ad hoc “coalitions of the willing’’ to standing institutions, and in any case did not agree with many of his allies on the substance of the threats. The nuclear nonproliferation regime is thus in tatters; climate change policy is in disarray.
Mr.Obama, who believes that global institutions enhance rather than constrain American power, has a vast and urgent work of rebuilding before him. And he cannot, as Mr.Miliband observed, limit that effort to democratic allies. Without China, there can be no solution to climate change; without Russia, nonproliferation is a dead issue.
Both the president and his chief aides have steered clear of the language of democracy. In China in March, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said bluntly that America’s concern about human rights “can’t interfere’’ with progress on the global economy, climate change and other issues.
Just a few weeks ago, President Obama sought to harvest the fruits of his realpolitik by assembling a united front of states, very much including China and Russia, in the face of North Korea’s nuclear test.
Egypt occupies an important place in Mr.Obama’s strategic calculus, which aims to lay the groundwork for peace in the Middle East by shoring up “moderate’’ states while coaxing Iran and Syria into the fold.
Egypt was the central target of President Bush’s Freedom Agenda, his campaign to spread democracy worldwide.
Mr.Mubarak initially responded by allowing an unprecedented degree of political freedom. But when an opposition Islamist party did well at the polls, Egypt’s security apparatus cracked down. The Bush administration, concerned about pushing a key ally too far, responded meekly. And that, arguably, marked the end of the Freedom Agenda.
In his “realist’’ mode, President Obama has accommodated President Mubarak by eliminating American funding for civil society organizations that the state refuses to recognize, and by stating publicly that neither military nor civilian funding will be conditioned on reform. This has provoked alarm from liberals, scholarly experts and activists in the region.
But consensus-seeking has its limits. You can demonstrate deep respect for both the state and its people in a democracy like the Czech Republic - but not in a place like Egypt, where the people feel crushed by the state.
The problem is particularly acute for Mr.Obama, who is seen throughout the world as the incarnation of American democracy. Does he want to be seen as the architect of a policy that gives a dictator unquestioning support in exchange for strategic cooperation? Would that even be a “realist’’ choice?
At a symposium in early May sponsored by the Project on Middle East Democracy, Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, said he thought the Obama administration was struggling with the issue of democracy promotion, and had not yet found an answer with which it was comfortable.
“My guess,’’ he said, “is that Obama wants to be forced to fight this out himself.’’
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