Seven Days of Obama

Obama is being praised or kissed on his seven-day tour. Even the demonstrators do not aim for the president personally, but against abstractions such as ‘globalism’ and ‘imperialism’.

This reception is reminiscent of the enthusiasm with which Gorbatsjov was greeted in the satellite states of the Soviet Union at the end of the eighties. Where Gorbatsjov was the personification of a coming liberation, Obama now is the embodiment of a new multilateralism full of expectations, and it’s not just an image. In London, Obama mediated between China and France, who disagreed on the approach to tax havens. In strasbourg he reconciled the Turks with Rasmussen, the new Secretary General of NATO.

But, like Gorbatsjov, Obama has little time, now that the once self-evident economic leadership of America is fading. His plea to accept Turkey into the EU was immediately waved aside by Sarkozy who was and will remain against a Turkish entry.

This was only a small indication that the relations, behind the mask of enthusiasm, are less cooperative than pretended. Obama is challenged all over. Shortly before he was scheduled to speak in Prague about the necessity of disarmament, North Korea launched a rocket. The rocket failed, but a condemnation in the Security Council also failed because of the resistance of China and Russia.

Obama himself seems to be very well aware that the proliferation of nuclear weapons has become uncontrollable. But ‘fatalism is a lethal enemy,’ he said in Czech Republic, which houses the anti-rocket shield. Obama has said that he will continue to build this shield (like his predecessor Bush) in case Iran continues with their nuclear armament. Bush announced that he would pressure the Senate in Washington to ratify the treaty against nuclear tests, but the Senate refused in 1999. Now, America is in line with countries like China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran and Israel.

This step shows good will and is a positive signal. But the reality of the world order that is revealing itself is a bit more complex. Obama did announce yesterday that he wants to host a kind of broad, multilateral nuclear summit in the U.S. this year. And he may have agreed last week with the Russian president Medvedev that both countries will revive the weapons control talks, which were not addressed since 2001. But the fate of a new nuclear disarmament round is no longer in the hands of these two old nuclear powers. A power vacuum exists in an economic sense and in a political sense, and there are no indications yet of more balanced relations.

The seven-day trip of Obama is therefore no genesis of a new world order. The tour marks a new orientation. The American president offers perspective, but no otherworldly hope. Saviors simply do not exist.