Barack Obama Winter book club, part eight: the world beyond our borders.

01.16.2008 | 10:37 pm | Obama for Prez

As someone who’s birth would just happened to have occurred on September 11th, I have a particularly acute interest in how the world has come to see America in the six-plus years since my birthday forever took on new meaning. As we as a nation have descended into a lurid, cautionary parable about the dangers of xenophobic paranoia driving foreign policy, one has to wonder what world we will indeed find on the outside when we finally have the courage to pull back the curtain and look it in the eye again.

One distinct possibility is that American esteem in the court of public opinion has been damaged more heavily than we might want to believe, and that the rebuilding process could take years or even decades. And with massive swaths of the world’s population struggling against a comprehensive type of poverty that few Westerners ever see, much less experience, we scarcely know what kind of anger our relative privilege might engender.

Well, this begs an interesting question. How best to restore the luster of America overseas in the wake of a presidency that is near-universally deemed disasterous with regard to same? While we know that Barack Obama is not the most experienced candidate when it comes to the nuts and bolts of foreign policy implementation, we also know that it wasn’t Hillary who was managing the American image overseas during the Clinton administration, but Madeline Albright. Nonetheless, it’s a given that Hill has more seat time in the company of foreign dignitaries and affairs of state. But, is this, in fact, even the real issue?

Because there is also something else. And the rest of the world knows it too. This blog has received more traffic on the Barack Obama thread this month than it has on all of the basketball- and Bay Area-related posts combined. And this is not by a small margin, but a vast one. And why so many visits? And why so many from all over the world? Well frankly, a great number of visitors are coming to link to to an image that is posted here, an image that shows a stately Barack, elegantly photographed in black and white. This image now graces blogs from Brazil to Berlin.

The interest in Barack Obama is indeed global.

So, how then could an Obama presidency restore America’s virtue in the eyes of the rest of the world in a way that couldn’t be matched by another candidate? Well, here’s where the third rail of race lurks, poised right next to it’s fraternal twin, religion, at the absolute apex of Obama’s potential worldwide appeal. Make the jump to see how Andrew Sullivan in the Atlantic Monthly would have it and to get the rest of my take.

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man–Barack Hussein Obama–is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

Obama knows this, and this truism has become part of his stock and trade. He doesn’t need to play the race card because it generally “plays itself” on his behalf–this week’s tiff with the Clinton camp and the rambling dyspeptic Bob Johnson (of BET and Charlotte Bobcats-ownership fame) notwithstanding. Part of the tacit understanding that would come with electing Obama is understanding that the intimation of this soft race card would play favorably in an increasingly yellow, brown and beige world. Coupling this quiet strength with the rhetoric of global action makes the message–as noted earlier–logarithmically more potent. But, this isn’t an empty play. He’s putting the language of change in global terms as well. Here’s Obama in “The Audacity of Hope.”

Our challenge, then, is to make sure that U.S. policies move the international system in the direction of greater equity, justice, and prosperity–that the rules we promote serve both our interests and the interest of a struggling world. In doing so, we might keep a few basic principles in mind. First, we should be skeptical of those who believe we can single-handedly liberate other people from tyranny.

But beyond this sentiment, Obama seems to know that the factorial powers of his visage, message and prospective platform provide the leverage to create real and meaningful global change across a number of key pressure points. Sure the promotion–but not the unilateral imposition–of democracy can have real value. But the bigger battles don’t necessarily involve voting rights. Iraq has already had two national elections, but nonetheless teeters on the brink of civil war. What then of the rest of the world? And would the aggregated powers of Obama the messenger and Obama the statesman be enough to make the change reality? Either way, the ambition is big.

For half of the world’s population, roughly three billion people around the world living on less than two dollars a day, an election is at best a means, not an end; a starting point, not deliverance. These people are looking less for an ‘electocracy’ than for the basic elements that for most of us define a decent life-food, shelter, electricity, basic health care, education for their children, and the ability to make their way through life without having to endure corruption, violence, or arbitrary power. If we want to win the hearts and minds of people in Caracas, Jakarta, Nairobi, or Tehran, dispersing ballot boxes will not be enough. We’ll have to make sure that the international rules that we’re promoting enhance, rather than impede, people’s sense of material and personal security.

That may require that we look in the mirror. For example, the United States and other developed countries constantly demand that developing countries eliminate trade barriers that protect them from competition, even as we steadfastly protect our own constituencies from exports that could help lift poor countries out of poverty. In our zeal to protect the patents of American drug countries, we’ve discouraged the ability of countries like Brazil to produce generic AIDS drugs that could save millions of lives. Under the leadership of Washington, the International Monetary Fund, designed after World War II to serve as a lender of last resort, has repeatedly forced countries in the midst of financial crisis like Indonesia to go through painful readjustments (sharply raising interest rates, cutting government social spending, eliminating subsidies to key industries) that cause enormous hardship to their people-harsh medicine that we Americans would have difficulty administering to ourselves.

Obama goes on to question the merit of the World Bank, endorse the purchase of three-dollar mosquito nets that prevent the spread of malaria and name check a good number of worthy international objectives too. But he also goes on to impugn the passive detachment that has poisoned the American reputation in too many developing nations throughout the world.

Moreover, we fool ourselves in thinking that, in the words of one commentator, ‘We must learn to watch others die with equanimity,’ and not expect consequences. Disorder breeds disorder; callousness toward others tends to spread among ourselves. And if moral claims are insufficient for us to act as a continent implodes [regarding Africa], there are certainly instrumental reasons why the United States and its allies should care about failed states that don’t control their territories, can combat epidemics, and are numbed by civil war and atrocity. It was in such a state of lawlessness that the Taliban took hold of Afghanistan. It was in Sudan, site of today’s slow-rolling genocide, that bin Laden set up camp for several years. It’s in the misery of some unnamed slum that the next killer virus will emerge.

As we move inexorably toward Super Tuesday, can it be that this mixture of visage and vision can emerge as the great multiplier? Can Obama be the man to galvanize the potential of America with its power? And can he do so in a way that has an exponential effect in enhancing our collective reputation around the globe? In the wake of a disastrous eight-year governance, I hope that the answer is a profound “yes.” Because saying yes to this proposition would not only reaffirm the core values that are supposed to be the cornerstone of the democratic ethos, but quite possibly give us a type of worldwide leverage and credibility not seen since the end of the second world war. We, as Americans should want nothing less than the profundity of this external valedictory.

As always, in hope,

Turman