Obama, the Most European

Compared to his predecessors, Obama was destined to be the least European president. Europe was always the reference for the white males who arrived at the White House. However, Obama was going to be different. As he notes in his two biographical books, life references of his childhood are scattered between the streets of Jakarta and a secondary school in Hawaii, where there was a hodgepodge of ethnicities and cultures. With a Kenyan father and an anthropologist for a mother — the latter who passed down a very wide outlook regarding religions and cultures — it was difficult for Obama to really feel he was from one place. If anything, his other, more intense life experiences, above all living as a volunteer in the rough neighborhoods in Chicago, together with the impact made by the family of his wife, Michelle, increased his identification with his African-American side, as he assumed as his own that community’s narrative of the long fight from slavery to civil rights.

Nothing has remained from his first visit to Europe in April of 2009, barely even a speech in Prague proposing a substantial reduction of nuclear weapons. There is not much to say about the rest of his trips to Europe either; Europeans’ inability to agree upon the euro crisis, as well as international politics, has been a source of irritation that Obama has never hid. He has even allowed himself to be publicly ironic regarding the institutional complexity of the European Union; recently, when David Cameron stumbled referring to the president of the European Council and that of the European Commission, Obama wasted no time saying: “I have now been president for five and a half years, and I’ve learned a thing or two about the European Union, the European Commission, the European Council. Sometimes I get them mixed up.”

However, ironies of history aside, the critiques that Obama receives depict him as a typical European president, namely, worried only about social questions and reluctant to take on any international commitment. And for good reason. Obama has used almost all of his political capital on a healthcare reform called Obamacare, which puts an end to an incredible anomaly: that the citizens of the most powerful nation in the world lack universal health care. If allowed to do so, he would follow with schools, the environment and immigration.

He has used the rest to put an end to inherent military commitments (Afghanistan and Iraq) and to avoid letting himself be pulled into other conflicts that have arisen. Although criticized for his Nobel Peace Prize speech, in which he accepted the use of force as a legitimate instrument in international relationships, he refused to bomb Iran, which Israel asked him to do, and he adopted a secondary role in Libya. He also chose not to intervene in Syria, and he is thinking of doing that in Asia, Ukraine, and once again, Iraq. Is this not a European president, perhaps more European than the Europeans?