Obama Without Delay

Barack Obama has put himself to the task of nothing more than settling into the White House and his first decisions have fitted to the priorities that were defined during the electoral campaign and in his few public appearances as President-elect. Even though he gave a time frame of two years to close Guantanamo, one of his first decisions has been to suspend temporarily the trials against the inmates of this prison. The presidential order has been transmitted to the district attorneys by the Secretary of Defense and supposed the beginning of the end of one of the blackest episodes of Bush’s presidency. The closing of Guantanamo and the renouncing of torture constitutes unprecedented steps for the U.S. towards recuperating in its capacity to be an international leader, and this seems to be understood by the new president.

The promise to pull troops out of Iraq, reiterated by Obama in his inauguration speech, has also received an unequivocal impulse. The agenda on his first day as president includes a meeting with military personnel and those in charge of security to put in effect an exit strategy that should be completed in sixteen months. Not only the possibility of re-leading the situation in Afghanistan, but also of reestablishing the capacity of conventional dissuasion of the United States happens by putting an end to a war in which the boundary between victory and defeat was becoming more and more blurred. If it seems that the new administration contemplates exploring the dialogue in some sealed-off conflicts, like that in Afghanistan, then exiting out of the Iraqi marsh is essential. Only in this will the United States be in a condition to transmit the message that negotiation is a freely assumed strategy, not the implied recognition of defeat.

The economic situation has been the third big issue that Obama has dedicated his first inaugural day to in the White House. The decisions on this terrain are biased, however, for the fact that the plans announced by the new president should be provided with the approval of congress. But Obama and his team do not seem to have interpreted this as a simple step, but as an occasion to reinforce the agreement between Democrats and Republicans around what, without doubt, constitutes the most ambitious economic stimulus plan in the history of the United States. The cautions of the new administration are even more necessary when Wall Street and the principal worldwide stock exchanges reacted negatively to the transfer of power, at least in the first moments.

The paradox that a president like Obama, who has raised so many hopes, faces, is that while his fellow citizens and the rest of the world are determined to grant him the obligatory 100 day grace period, the economic and international problems have not so much as given him the slightest breather. But up until this moment, Obama has also not given signs of wanting to avoid them.