The Weakened Power

No committee would award Barack Obama a peace prize today. The executive management of the world stumbled and threatens to lose focus. And WikiLeaks raises the penalty for the United States.

It was one year ago this week that Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. For the Nobel Committee, it was a wager on the future. The prize winner wasn’t chosen for services rendered. Rather, [it was] for “extraordinary efforts” for disarmament, reconciliation and a new climate of cooperation — consequently, for the daunting hope, which he awakened. For Obama it was, as we know today, the last appearance as a messianic figure-of-light in international politics. Within the space of a year, it could be easily justified that the vote of the Nobel Committee was a mistake. These days the world experiences nothing bold or gripping from the president of the United States. Rather, he’s one who shines over everything in the past. He’s won nothing, stumbled, lost his way. He didn’t really pilot the ship; instead, he was thrown here and there by the waves.

Through it, he hasn’t changed his course. “Today’s world is a crucible of challenges testing American leadership,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently wrote in an article. In the article, Clinton argued that an increasingly confusing world required collective solutions and international cooperation more than ever, and that only one nation lies in that position to mobilize these cooperative efforts: the United States of America. That was and is, to a point, the Obama doctrine. She stands on one side as a clear break from the unilateral all-powerful fantasy of George W. Bush. Also for Obama, the U.S. remains the indispensable nation, like the motor or catalyst of world politics. Finally, the Nobel Committee sought to make a change for the better, as the man in the White House appeared.

That was a pious wish, which the executive leader has not reached, and that can be observed daily. At the G-20 conference, the U.S. was the economic worrywart. At the climate conference in Cancun, Obama’s advisors arrived with empty hands, because the president couldn’t familiarize himself with the problem. The next round of the nuclear arms reduction negotiations with Russia are calculated to fail in Washington, with the opposition of Republicans, who would rather preserve America’s crumbling power through modern warheads.

Even the confidential dispatches — for which we have the dilettantes of American data protectors and WikiLeaks to thank — are evidence of how very flimsy the indispensable nation is. The wheels of U.S. diplomacy churn; of course, they churn through it all. “America lacks the influence,”* analyzed the astute columnist Thomas Friedman acrimoniously. Washington battles with false friends, unwilling allies and insubordinate rivals. Pakistan plays a double game; Saudi Arabia speaks with a forked tongue. Even dwarves like Slovenia or the Pacific island Kiribati can be paid for a favor. And all is now sour because Washington can’t sign on the dotted line.

There are many good reasons not to prematurely silence the swan song of the United States. Militarily there are no equitable rivals in the foreseeable future. China’s military will produce more than the U.S. in half a century. No rival is so dominant in the world. No one has more allies, even when one takes into account intergovernmental agencies. “Many governments … deal with us … because they need us,” says Defense Secretary Robert Gates. That may even be true. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly difficult to combine even Nobel Prize-worthy hopes with the name Obama.

The president is too embattled at home from the dramatic surge of the opposition, which begrudges him success in foreign policy, the goals of which are left to the ailing global power of the international arena. The noble goals are pushed further away: the reconciliation with the Islamic world, the disposal of all nuclear weapons. The Obama doctrine is all that more important to freedom. The president manages to push every network of international relations, with whom the bigger problems of the world can actually be solved. If he succeeds, that would be a historic achievement.

*Editor’s Note: This quote, accurately translated, could not be verified.