A Double Risk for Obama

It won’t be “the 9/11 of diplomacy,” as argued by Franco Frattini, the Italian minister of Foreign Affairs, and perhaps it won’t even be “the attack on the international community” as Hilary Clinton refers to it, but the diffusion of State Department files risks producing damage to the United States from an entity not immediately calculable.

The fact that the secretary of state asked her diplomats to collect all sensitive information (including DNA, when possible) of the representatives of the accredited states to the United Nations is not exactly a light matter. They are things out of a James Bond film that perhaps the logic of the Cold War could have justified, but instead these things create chaos between the forces of public diplomacy that Obama’s administration has organized in these past few years. These forces screech blatantly with the same idea of change, a change so central to Obama’s brilliant rhetoric. All the prejudices toward “Yankee hypocrisy” on the cynicism that conceals itself behind pretty words will be inevitably fueled. One will be able to observe that, beyond the caustic opinions on this or that foreign leader and on geopolitical assessments that are frankly, at times, superficial, no traces of abnormal conduct have emerged, such as the renditions or the waterboarding scandal during the Bush era. It is necessary to consider, however, that these recent revelations were taken from the circuit of the Department of State, but they were not encrypted data, like those which would have contained information on “inadmissible” conduct. This double standard, this tension between words and facts, cannot but diminish Obama’s international aura, even with the oratory skill with which he had constructed his reputation. And obviously even Hillary Clinton comes out of this weakened, one of the more serious candidates to his succession.

The second thing that strikes you is the disconnect between the opinions collected from the American embassies and the resulting political decisions from the White House. Our prime minister has been scorned for his too-close ties with Putin. And this writer has always been equally perplexed. ENI has been criticized heavily regarding the issue of the pipelines and their agreements with Gazprom; we hope they will push away the prospect of a European energy policy that would undermine security beyond that of price discounts (but not most of the agreements between the Russians and Germans), and, certainly, they will displease American companies interested in making deals that would be otherwise profitable in the energy sector.

The danger of Russia, according to the State Department files, would be in their being a “mafia state.” So be it. And is it on the strength of this evaluation that at the NATO summit in Lisbon ten days ago, the White House proposed to share with Russia antimissile defense technology? Something doesn’t make sense; it would be careless, it would be commercial arrogance. More than providing a breath of relief for what the files do not contain, we should be concerned for what they reveal, which is the usual old American attitude to overextend itself from leadership to supremacy: That the best presidents know how to position a moral dam, in the name of American interest, to reinforce their international role. It is a prediction all too obvious that from Russia to China, to the Arab world (with regard to the meetings of their leaders, the opinion is very rough), the content of these files (and not only their widespread release) will assist the new anti-Americanism, making the American “soft power” always more evanescent. Nicolò Machiavelli recalled that the power of the prince can derive from love or from fear. Today, Obama risks having to face the worst combination for Washington: An America that is starting to become less loved and that continues to be little feared.