Andrew Bast: Obama's Wilsonian Ideals
[Andrew Bast has reported from four continents for several publications, including Newsweek and the New York Times. His weekly WPR column, Under the Influence, appears every Friday.]
In his comprehensively titled tome, "Diplomacy," legendary U.S. statesman Henry Kissinger laid out the two competing schools of thought that have guided American foreign policy in its rise to power. The first was realist, embodied by Theodore Roosevelt, based on power and obsessed with the zero-sum game that guides the core of international relations.
The second, touted by Woodrow Wilson, was idealist, based on cooperation and unflinching in its belief in the power of ideas. To Kissinger's consternation, though he believed that realism was the right way through which to view the world, he says that it was actually Wilson's liberalism that guided the country to its place as an unmatched superpower.
President Barack Obama took to the podium in Egypt yesterday following exactly Wilson's tradition. Talking to the invited audience at Cairo University, he offered no strict policy proposals. No new aid packages. No new American wars in the making. Instead, Obama spent nearly an hour espousing the American ideal, punctuating his speech with citations from the Quran. (The references elicited most of the sparse applause he received.) The obvious question is, Will it work?
The simple answer, in the short term, is no. But there is an upside: Ideas work, they just take time.
An enormous amount of ink was spilled in the run-up to the speech. Obama was helping Iran. Cairo was the wrong place. The American people won't live up to their president's rhetoric. Yet, when Obama began speaking, much of the anticipatory chatter was swept away.
The most striking image to emerge yesterday was a snapshot taken in the Gaza strip by Associated Press photographer Eyad Baba. With his camera, Baba caught two Hamas militants sitting on plastic chairs, their faces covered with black ski masks, rifles laying across their laps, staring intently at a small television set. On the screen, Obama stood behind a red block of Arabic subtitles.
For one of the simplest lines of the speech, however, no translation was needed. Obama introduced himself and said, "I am also proud to carry with me the goodwill of the American people, and a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: assalaamu 'alaykum."
Perhaps the most ubiquitous phrase in the Arabic-speaking world, spoken at the outset of any encounter, it simply means, "Peace be upon you." The overture was followed in the speech by several references to the Quran, among them one that seemed to guide Obama's method: "As the Holy Quran tells us, 'Be conscious of God and speak always the truth.'" More, he cited the holy book's moral principles to argue against indiscriminate killing and for cooperation and peacemaking between nations.
Are the Hamas militants going to be bowled over by an American president addressing them in their own language? Of course not.
But there were encouraging signs. Immediately following the speech, some in the Arab world heaped praise. The Daily Star in Lebanon (where elections in which Hezbollah is likely to make gains are now underway) wrote in an editorial, "Barack Obama's long-awaited address to the Muslim world has proven to be an event of global magnitude, and a dramatic, international projection of the bully pulpit of the American presidency."..
Read entire article at World Politics Review
In his comprehensively titled tome, "Diplomacy," legendary U.S. statesman Henry Kissinger laid out the two competing schools of thought that have guided American foreign policy in its rise to power. The first was realist, embodied by Theodore Roosevelt, based on power and obsessed with the zero-sum game that guides the core of international relations.
The second, touted by Woodrow Wilson, was idealist, based on cooperation and unflinching in its belief in the power of ideas. To Kissinger's consternation, though he believed that realism was the right way through which to view the world, he says that it was actually Wilson's liberalism that guided the country to its place as an unmatched superpower.
President Barack Obama took to the podium in Egypt yesterday following exactly Wilson's tradition. Talking to the invited audience at Cairo University, he offered no strict policy proposals. No new aid packages. No new American wars in the making. Instead, Obama spent nearly an hour espousing the American ideal, punctuating his speech with citations from the Quran. (The references elicited most of the sparse applause he received.) The obvious question is, Will it work?
The simple answer, in the short term, is no. But there is an upside: Ideas work, they just take time.
An enormous amount of ink was spilled in the run-up to the speech. Obama was helping Iran. Cairo was the wrong place. The American people won't live up to their president's rhetoric. Yet, when Obama began speaking, much of the anticipatory chatter was swept away.
The most striking image to emerge yesterday was a snapshot taken in the Gaza strip by Associated Press photographer Eyad Baba. With his camera, Baba caught two Hamas militants sitting on plastic chairs, their faces covered with black ski masks, rifles laying across their laps, staring intently at a small television set. On the screen, Obama stood behind a red block of Arabic subtitles.
For one of the simplest lines of the speech, however, no translation was needed. Obama introduced himself and said, "I am also proud to carry with me the goodwill of the American people, and a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: assalaamu 'alaykum."
Perhaps the most ubiquitous phrase in the Arabic-speaking world, spoken at the outset of any encounter, it simply means, "Peace be upon you." The overture was followed in the speech by several references to the Quran, among them one that seemed to guide Obama's method: "As the Holy Quran tells us, 'Be conscious of God and speak always the truth.'" More, he cited the holy book's moral principles to argue against indiscriminate killing and for cooperation and peacemaking between nations.
Are the Hamas militants going to be bowled over by an American president addressing them in their own language? Of course not.
But there were encouraging signs. Immediately following the speech, some in the Arab world heaped praise. The Daily Star in Lebanon (where elections in which Hezbollah is likely to make gains are now underway) wrote in an editorial, "Barack Obama's long-awaited address to the Muslim world has proven to be an event of global magnitude, and a dramatic, international projection of the bully pulpit of the American presidency."..