Obama: From the Dream to the Reality

Can you imagine Julius Caesar saying to the inhabitants of Gaul that he would leave them alone, that Rome would no longer rule over them? Or Queen Victoria telling the inhabitants of India, “See you later! Now I’ll set you free to decide your own future”? It sounds great, but it’s completely unrealistic. In Rome, not even the emperor, Adrian, who was a prime example of showing understanding toward his colonies, would have come up with such an idea.

For the moment, Barack Obama seems to be giving the impression that he wants to be the first leader of an empire to renounce that particular status. His proposal to change from a unilateral to a multilateral stance sounds very nice and and all, and he’s now received the most generously-conceded Nobel Peace Prize that I can remember for just that stance. But at this point, the idea is barely a proposal, and its importance is truly understood by only a very few in the White House or in the State Department.

Proof of that lies in the fact that Obama knows very well that he doesn’t want to repeat the mistakes made by that detestable George W. Bush with respect to foreign policy; instead, what he wants to do is to put forth such contradictory signals as those we’ve seen these recent weeks. The president of the United States went to Oslo to receive the Nobel only a few scant hours after ordering the deployment of 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, to a war that he considers just and that the majority of experts deem impossible to win.

With respect to Latin America, the attitude of Washington toward the crisis in Honduras betrays a kind of comfortable laissez faire: They didn’t like Manuel Zelaya—who became a puppet of Hugo Chávez—but neither did the U.S. like the way he was ousted from power. Now that there have been elections, Hillary Clinton has referred to the winner, Porfirio Lobo, as the “president-elect”, which implies a certain recognition of his legitimacy without commiting herself too much.

But even in this part of the world, is it realistic to think that the U.S. would step aside and allow events to run their course here, as decided by our leaders? During the same speech in which he talked about Honduras, Bill Clinton scolded the “reelectionist” leaders – will that same glove be thown down to Álvaro Uribe? – and he took advantage of the opportunity to send a direct warning to Chávez and to Evo Morales. Clinton said that “flirting with Iran,” as Venezuela and Bolivia had been doing, “is a bad idea” that can lead to “consequences.” That veiled threat doesn’t sound very Obama-like. It seems more like something Bush would say. So, then, where is the multilateralism?

The only conclusion we can come to is that the idea doesn’t apply because, in spite of the pacifistic will of Obama, sometimes you have to make war, as he, himself, declared in Oslo. As in the case of Afghanistan. Or of Iran, if Mr. Ahmadinejad continues to multiply the number of his nuclear facilities. It’s not so easy to say: We’ll act like an empire and like the policeman of the world in Afghanistan and Iran, but not in Latin America. But what if Ahmadinejad, himself, were to make a move toward Latin America? And what if the one who arms himself to the teeth and flirts with the nuclear industry is Chávez? What we can deduce from Clinton’s speech is that multilateralism, in such cases, can have shades of meaning.

And Colombia? For the moment, Obama seems to be quite different from Bush, who was such a great friend of Uribe. But for how long? What if Chávez decides, on some flimsy pretext, to make the jump from delivering threatening diatribes to making war for real? What happens if he goes forward on his nuclear agreements with Iran? Maybe then, even Obama will see himself obligated to bring an end to this idea of multilateralism and make the decision to invade, in his best imitation of a Reagan or a Bush. Maybe then, he will understand that the leader of an empire cannot persuade his country to renounce such a role from one day to the next, solely through the power of his personal will. The U.S. will not cease to be an empire, just because Obama decides that it should be so; it will cease to be so when another power replaces it. And that won’t happen for quite a while yet.