Most of the recent attacks leveled at Barack Obama for his trip abroad are damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t attacks.
For example, the McCain campaign attacked Obama for cancelling a visit with wounded troops in Germany — but if Obama had visited the troops, I believe his enemies would have attacked him for trying to exploit their suffering for his campaign’s benefit. Obama’s enemies have also attacked his Berlin speech for being too general — but if Obama had offered up more concrete proposals, I’m guessing his enemies would have attacked him for presumptuously acting as President before he’d been elected.
However, Obama’s Berlin speech has prompted some honest-to-God criticism from his ideological opponents, and I think these criticisms are worth examining closely, because they provide a window into what makes right-wing ideas so misguided and so dangerous for the long-term national security of the United States.
A major theme in the speech was the tearing down of walls, with the fall of the Berlin Wall as his primary example. Here is a key excerpt:
Yes, there have been differences between America and Europe. No doubt, there will be differences in the future. But the burdens of global citizenship continue to bind us together. A change of leadership in Washington will not lift this burden. In this new century, Americans and Europeans alike will be required to do more – not less. Partnership and cooperation among nations is not a choice; it is the one way, the only way, to protect our common security and advance our common humanity.
That is why the greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another.
The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.
We know they have fallen before. After centuries of strife, the people of Europe have formed a Union of promise and prosperity. Here, at the base of a column built to mark victory in war, we meet in the center of a Europe at peace. Not only have walls come down in Berlin, but they have come down in Belfast, where Protestant and Catholic found a way to live together; in the Balkans, where our Atlantic alliance ended wars and brought savage war criminals to justice; and in South Africa, where the struggle of a courageous people defeated apartheid.
So history reminds us that walls can be torn down. But the task is never easy. True partnership and true progress requires constant work and sustained sacrifice. They require sharing the burdens of development and diplomacy; of progress and peace. They require allies who will listen to each other, learn from each other and, most of all, trust each other.
I believe this speech helps explain a lot about Obama’s worldview, including his approach to the “War on Terror.” This approach is based on the fact that the terrorists represent a very tiny minority of the world’s population, while those who oppose terrorism — those who want peace and prosperity — represent the vast majority, not just in Europe and the United States but all over the world. If all those who favor peace and prosperity — starting with Europe and the United States — can cooperate, terrorism will inevitably be defeated. But if we are divided into antagonistic factions, the terrorists will find ways to exploit our divisions and persevere.
However, conservatives hate this idea of the civilized world uniting to fight the terrorists, or uniting for any other reason. Consider, for example, what John R. Bolton, Bush’s former ambassador to the United Nations, had to say about the part of Obama’s speech where he describes the walls (between Jews, Christians and Muslims, etc..) that must be torn down.
This is a confused, nearly incoherent compilation, to say the least, amalgamating tensions in the Atlantic Alliance with ancient historical conflicts. One hopes even Obama, inexperienced as he is, doesn’t see all these “walls” as essentially the same in size and scope. But beyond the incoherence, there is a deeper problem, namely that “walls” exist not simply because of a lack of understanding about who is on the other side but because there are true differences in values and interests that lead to human conflict. The Berlin Wall itself was not built because of a failure of communication but because of the implacable hostility of communism toward freedom. The wall was a reflection of that reality, not an unfortunate mistake.
Tearing down the Berlin Wall was possible because one side — our side — defeated the other. Differences in levels of economic development, or the treatment of racial, immigration or religious questions, are not susceptible to the same analysis or solution. Even more basically, challenges to our very civilization, as the Cold War surely was, are not overcome by naively “tearing down walls” with our adversaries.
As I read it, Bolton is rejecting the idea that international conflicts, even at the level of the mild conflict between the United States and Europe, can be overcome without one side “defeating” the other side. He writes “there are true differences in values and interests that lead to human conflict” – which doesn’t sound like a very controversial thing to say, but it sounds quite controversial when we remind ourselves that Bolton is saying this in an effort to paint Obama’s speech about U.S.-European cooperation as naive. In effect, Bolton is suggesting that Obama’s strategy to forge unity between the United States and Europe — our “adversary” in Bolton’s view — is naive because it doesn’t acknowledge the “true differences” that separate us from them.
Obama’s argument that we should listen to each other, learn from each other, and trust each other sounds naive to Bolton because in Bolton’s warped worldview, there can never be any real trust. That’s because the “true differences in values and interests” are insurmoutable, as he sees it. As Bolton sees it, the prospect of Europe and the United States bridging their differences in order to work more effectively for the common good is comparable to the Patriots and the Giants working together on the football field.
Presumably, Obama and Bolton share the same long-term goal: a world where all human beings coexist peacefully to the greatest possible extent. The difference is that Bolton sees this lofty goal coming to fruition only when one side — our side — has “defeated” all competitors, thereby uniting the world under one set of values and interests — ours. Bolton sees international power politics as a zero-sum game: we won’t win until everyone else has lost. Obama, on the other hand, envisions a process where all nations can forge bonds that will enable us all to be winners, defeating the terrorists who by their very nature are a threat to national security everywhere.
It’s safe to assume that Bolton, like Dick Cheney and John McCain, sees a lot more war in America’s future. War, in their view, is the only route to a safer world. It’s Orwellian, but it’s how they see things.
Here’s another interesting conservative take on Obama’s speech, this one from columnist Tony Blankley, who spoke on KCRW’s radio program “Left, Right and Center.”
BLANKLEY: I thought his language in Berlin when he talked about (how) we need to tear down the walls between wealthy nations and poorer nations, well, we’re the wealthy nation. I’m not so sure that most Americans want to have the wall that separates our wealth from the rest of the world’s poverty torn down, and share in the world’s poverty. That may not be a nice thought, but most Americans don’t feel they need to share all of their wealth with the poor people. He talked about tearing down the wall between natives and immigrants, the suggestion being illegal immigrants. There’s another issue that most Americans would like to prefer to maintain their own soverignty on their borders. It’s not a question of being internationalist. There’s nothing wrong with — I mean, Eisenhower was an internationalist. It’s a question of whether you see the nation, your nation, as the first loyalty, the first thing to protect, and then, beyond that, how can we help the rest of the world. Or whether we think that we should be sacrificing important parts of our wealth to level the unfair world in which we find ourselves. I think Eisenhower was an internationalist who protected America. The question is, where is Obama.
Blankley is admitting here that we live in an unfair world. He also acknowledges that Obama’s speech reflects a desire to make the world more fair. Blankley then mischaracterizes Obama’s intentions as a desire for Americans to ”share all of their wealth with the poor people,” suggesting Obama would turn America into the economic equivalent of Ethiopia. Obama has said over and over again that his goal is to improve the American economy and to improve conditions for America’s poor — but Blankley, like many Obama critics, is feeding the idea that Obama has a secret agenda to hurt America and Americans.
Blankley doesn’t acknowledge that Obama’s interest in narrowing the gap between the world’s richest and the world’s poorest isn’t merely a moral crusade — it’s a matter of national security.
I am reminded of the famous quote of George F. Kennan, a U.S. State Department official credited with being the architect of the United States’ “containment” policy at the start of the Cold War.
In a 1948 report entitled “Policy Planning Study 23,” Kennan wrote:
… we have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population … In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction… We should cease to talk about vague and — for the Far East — unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.
Can America afford to continue in the vein Kennan articulates above? Does it make sense, from a national security standpoint, to try to preserve the status quo — where America’s wealth is so disproportionate to our population, even when that will lead to “envy and resentment,” as Kennan puts it? In my opinion, terrorism is inevitable in an unfair world, in a world where the existing order isn’t morally justified. Purely from a national security standpoint, it would make sense for us to preserve our own wealth while at the same time working to improve conditions for the world’s poorest people. Our goal should be a world that is more fair, and therefore less vulnerable to the ideology of humiliation, victimization and oppression that drives terrorist recruitment.