Barack Obama, the World’s Aromatherapist

From Hong Kong to Iraq and Africa via Ukraine, the U.S. president’s erroneous belief that noble words can replace strategy is taking its toll.

The world burns while the president golfs: If you’re looking for a symbol of Barack Obama’s loss of political flair, then it was the round of golf that the president played two weeks ago, directly after the release of the video of the beheading of American journalist James Foley by Islamist murderers in Syria. The suggestion from his followers that other U.S. presidents − most notably Woodrow Wilson − spent a lot more time with bat and ball in their own terms in office is not particularly reassuring: Wilson, who like Obama, moved from his university professorship to the White House without a great deal of practical political experience, lit the fuse in Paris in 1919 for the explosion of World War II with his ill-informed and miserably implemented reorganization of Europe and the Middle East.

You have to rub your eyes when you hear and see Obama speak today. The virtuoso of public speaking, who was able to move 200,000 Germans in Berlin in collective ecstasy with his words six years ago and who restored his people’s faith − or at least a majority of citizens − in politicians, stutters and stammers and loses himself from time to time in the undergrowth of platitudes.

His interview on Sunday with NBC’s “Meet the Press” demonstrates the need for clarification and the president’s inconsistency: Part of his job as president is “the theater,” Obama replied when asked about the public impact of his golfing session. “It’s not something that always comes naturally to me.”

Amazing! The president, who twice moved into the White House thanks to masterful control of Twitter and Facebook, cannot cope with political image building. Last week in New York, at an event with sponsors of his party, he declared that the world has always been messy, but that we are only really noticing it today because of social media.

So, things aren’t so bad? The war in eastern Ukraine? The savagery of the murderous gangs of the Islamic State? The extinction of democracy in Hong Kong by the Beijing regime? The chaos caused by Ebola in West Africa? Of course not. Obama knows it. The United States imposed the first sanctions against the organizers and promoters of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Without pressure from Washington, the Europeans would hardly have moved. On Wednesday, the president will announce a strategy in the fight against the Islamic State, and no country is investing more money and medical expertise in the fight against Ebola in Africa than the United States.

But this all comes too late. Obama is now cursed by sticking to a naive worldview, in which one can sensibly talk about everything, even with hardened cynics like Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping. This deliberative style was once part of Obama’s appeal − finally a politician who does not just tell people what they want to hear, but is well-informed and weighs the pros and cons. However, the professorial style has turned against him in political practice. Coaxing achieves nothing with power-hungry people like Putin, Xi or Assad − not to mention the nihilists of the Islamic State.

The liberal democracies of the West are dealing with an opponent, which Michael Ignatieff, like Obama, a Harvard professor who failed in the political arena, describes in The New York Review as “authoritarian in political form, capitalist in economics, nationalist in ideology.”

Based on this analysis, Obama should have made a strategy of containment six years ago. Instead, the U.S. president has attempted a strategy of good humor. In dealing with the crises of our time, this policy is as effective as aromatherapy is for bone fractures: namely, not at all.