Why Has Obama Let Us Down?

There are two reasons for the disappointment that grows in Europe as fast as Obama’s prestige and authority increase among Americans. The first is because he is the president, and the second is because he is the U.S. president. The president of this autocratic republic is the executive chief with extraordinary powers in defense and foreign policy and direct responsibility for the security of his fellow citizens and for the leadership of his country in the world. The U.S. is the oldest military superpower in history. Its annual defense spending is equivalent to 40 percent of the world defense budget, and it has stationed troops and bases in every continent.

In these two reasons for disappointment we find things in common with his predecessor, a president like him and from the same country dominated by the military industrial complex denounced by General Dwight Eisenhower in 1961, just before leaving the White House — Eisenhower, a predecessor to both, who was also victorious in World War II.

Europe has fabricated an idealized image of Obama, which it expressed very well in the granting of the Nobel Peace Prize when he had not been a year into his presidency. It was not only a premature prize, but also an unwise one, because he had not done anything to merit obtaining it. He will deserve it if he succeeds, for example, in making peace and mutually recognizing Israelis and Palestinians as sovereign peoples with their respective states in the territory between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.

Obama has not misled, at least in this chapter of war. He has broken promises because he does not know how to measure his forces. He has not closed Guantanamo. He promised to finish with bin Laden. In Oslo, upon receiving the Nobel, he expressed his positions about the just war. He is not, nor has he ever been, a pacifist. But the Obama imagined by the Europeans has great appeal for the American right. The neoconservatives have criticized him because they consider him the president of his country’s decline, the man who is going to negotiate with enemies, put up with the Europeans’ multi-lateralist legalisms, betray Israel in favor of the Arab Muslims and turn over the world hegemony to emerging nations — especially China.

An Obama like this would not be able to aspire to get another term and would have lost all ability for domestic and foreign action. For a very short time, until 2012 at the latest, he would make a few Americans and many fantastic Europeans happy, but he would be immediately substituted for a Republican like Bush — or somebody worse — who would reestablish the tough and conservative order of things.