MADRID: Barack Obama’s first year in office has been a sobering exercise in the limits of presidential power. It also carries lessons about how the resilient and impersonal forces of history can constrain any leader’s drive for change. Obama’s current “winter of discontent genuinely reflects the mixed record of his first year. The Massachusetts electoral debacle only highlighted the growing rift between the president’s agenda and popular sensibilities.
Admittedly, Obama inherited a collapsing financial system, a declining world order, and the ever-present threat of global terrorism. In his titanic efforts to stem decline and reform America, Obama has shown vision and talent, but he also learned the hard way that, as Henry Kissinger put it in his memoirs, the pledges of new administrations are almost invariably like “leaves on a turbulent sea. The impossible deadlines, the always ambiguous information the president is fed, and the complex choices that he must make are too frequently bound to clash with political constraints and the resistance to change of both allies and foes.
The president’s domestic agenda is bold and revolutionary, but it clashes frontally with the most fundamental tenets of America’s liberal and individualistic ethos. His health-care reform plan, as the Massachusetts vote demonstrated, is perceived as a personal obsession and an entirely unnecessary distraction from much more urgent and vital concerns, such as the financial crisis and unemployment.
Obama’s priorities in foreign policy are definitely sound. But creating a structure of international relations that will make a more stable and enduring world order is not a task to be completed within one year. Nor is it at all certain that the sacrifices required of a country already stretched beyond the limits of its financial capabilities, together with the resistance of world powers, will allow this to be accomplished even in a single presidential term.
Iraq is showing some positive signs of political and institutional recovery, but the omens for the future remain, in Obama’s own words, “messy. The disintegration of an already fragmented country, the return of civil war, and the shadow of Iran’s power being cast over the Iraqi state are all plausible scenarios.
A man of peace, Obama has become no less a war president than his predecessor. Having seen the harsh realities of the world as it really is, he has become the champion of the “just war. In Afghanistan, he opted for a substantial military surge, but the notion of victory that would allow for a withdrawal of troops remains as foggy and uncertain as it was in the case of Iraq. The solution is ultimately political, not military. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was right to recognize that the Taliban are “part of the political fabric of Afghanistan and thus “need to participate in the country’s government.
But this might not be achieved without involving the major regional stakeholders, including Pakistan, China, and possibly Iran. The Obama administration’s failure in re-launching the India-Pakistan peace talks over Kashmir is one of the gravest weaknesses of its “AfPak strategy. If these two countries’ mutual hostility is not reined in, and a fundamentalist Afghanistan continues to provide the strategic depth through which Pakistan threatens its sworn Indian enemies, the current disaster might still breed defeat.
Obama is right to boast of his success in enlisting China to join serious sanctions on North Korea, but he might be wrong to draw conclusions from this about Iran, a vital strategic partner for the Chinese. Likewise, America’s “reset button policy with Russia has certainly improved relations with the Kremlin, but it remains highly improbable that the Russians would endanger their privileged relations with Iran by joining an economic siege.
Israel’s fear that the failure of sanctions might bring the United States to accept coexistence with a nuclear-armed Iran in the way it did with the Soviet Union during the Cold War is not entirely unfounded. Obama’s administration will not start a war with a third Muslim country while the two others continue to burn. Iran might eventually turn into the graveyard of Obama’s dream of a world without nuclear weapons.
George Bernard Shaw once observed that “in the arts of peace Man is a bungler. Obama has just admitted that in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, a president can also be one. “This is as intractable a problem as you get, he admitted after a wasted year of more error than trial. He naively ignored the harsh lessons of 20 years of abortive peacemaking, and insisted on sticking to the worn-out paradigm of direct negotiations between parties that, when left to their own devices, are bound to come to a deadlock. He was commendably humble to admit that he was wrong “to have raised expectations so high.
With no breakthrough in the Arab-Israeli conflict, Obama is left with the epicenter of the Middle East’s maladies seriously undermining his entire strategy in the region. Yet he continues to be the greatest promise for a better world that this political generation can offer. And he still has time to vindicate Woodrow Wilson’s belief that a “president can be just as big a man as he chooses to be.
Shlomo Ben Ami is an Israeli former foreign minister who now serves as the vice-president of the Toledo International center for Peace. He is the author of Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. This commentary is published by DAILY NEWS EGYPT in collaboration with Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.org).
