Right Wing Nut House

Savior, messiah, redeemer - conservatives use these epithets to describe President Obama in a derogatory manner (liberals occasionally get carried away and are serious about those terms when they use them.) More often, I and others on the right use the terms to poke gentle fun at liberals who are quite enamored with our president and his policies.

But looking at Obama’s foreign policy, it is hard not to wonder if this is indeed, how the president sees himself and his role as the planet’s most popular leader.

Let me be clear. Obama does not have a God complex nor does he wish to set himself up as some kind of spiritual guide. In fact, if he does indeed see his role as a redeemer of America, it would be perfectly in keeping with our history and in line with at least one school of thought among historians who see the United States as a pivot around which most of the evils of this world revolve.

Redemption has always been a powerful spiritual and religious theme in America going back to the Puritans who believed that America itself was the word made flesh - a place to redeem mankind from all of its evils. The Great Awakening swept the colonies with a fervent revivalism that sought to redeem the people and the country from having strayed from the true path.

Our unique social movements from abolitionism to temperance, to women’s rights, and especially progressive politics — all sought to employ redemptive imagery and themes to move society in the direction they believed was necessary to save us from spiritual and moral decline.

Nor is there anything new in a president wishing to be a redeemer. Ronald Reagan’s biographer Edmund Morris believed that one could explain The Gipper’s passionate desire to bring conservative principles to government while taking on the Soviet Union by examining his youthful incarnation as lifeguard along the Rock River in Illinois. Morris saw this part of Reagan’s life as a defining moment - a personae RR adopted because of the adulation and recognition he received for having saved so many lives. The experience gave him a life mission and set him off on the road to the presidency.

We could do worse than have a president who looks at America and wishes to redeem her — to force her to come to grips with a sometimes checkered past, while putting in place policies that attempt to right past wrongs.

The problem with Obama, is that we have done worse because we have a president who has crafted policies that subsume American interests to those of other nations and supra-national bodies like the OAS and UN, done in the name of this redemption (i.e., the “restoration” of respect for the US in the world and what Obama sees as the necessary rhetorical nods to past “errors”), but without any apparent understanding of America’s role as the world’s sole superpower and traditional defender of freedom.

Many on the left (and some on the right) see nothing wrong with abandoning America’s superpower status. They believe that the temptation of “empire” has caused problems both at home and abroad by threatening civil liberties at home, human rights abroad, and has saddled us with a tendency to force our will on other nations in order to prevail in international relations.

I sympathize with some of this line of thinking but realistically, we can hardly be anything else. I reject the term “empire” to describe our commitments overseas or our actions relating to thuggish states like Venezuela, Iran, and Syria. There are some very bad actors in this world and to give them the benefit of the doubt by acknowledging that their critique of America’s policies past and present have any validity is to make conflict a likelihood.

Here is where Obama’s high minded, redemptive foreign policy crashes on the shoals of reality and where trying to exercise “moral authority” by granting friend and foe alike the same legitimacy in their complaints about our past bad behavior is so dangerous. For example, accepting the mullahs version of history about the Mossedegh coup will not assuage the Iranian government’s virulent and paranoid anti-Americanism. Two American presidents have already apologized for it and yet, the mullahs still insist that this 50 year old event is the proximate cause for Iran’s suffering.

Obama’s redemptive approach does not allow for the aggrieved party being wrong - about anything. Because of our past actions, any old lie, half truth, or outright exaggeration they wish to use is legitimized because the president has validated some of their grievances. “Give an inch and they take a mile” has been the reaction in unfriendly capitols to Obama’s carefully crafted rhetoric to date.

The same holds true in his reaction to the Honduran ousting of Zeyala where past US misdeeds in Latin America give Chavez, Castro, and their acolytes a ready made hammer to pound on the US because of our support of the banana republic dictators and clumsy interventions over the years. The problem is, their critiques - that Obama is ostensibly using not to support the restoration of democracy in Honduras - are laughably one dimensional and mostly without merit. But the president’s childlike belief that if he agrees with these thugs enough, they will agree to talk about substantive issues of mutual concern, may actually be making it harder in the long term to come to an agreement that would be favorable to US interests.

If we saw any softening at all in these government’s reactions to Obama’s attempt to redeem us in the eyes of the world, I might be inclined to praise the president’s courage and foresight. But the world has never worked the way the president is wishing it would and he is placing US interests in danger as a result.

In essence, if Obama wishes his redemptive approach to foreign policy to be a success, he must, by definition, abandon at least some US interests to achieve it. Perhaps an argument can be made that compromising our interests in the name of reaching a settlement with some of these thuggish regimes is a net plus. I don’t agree for the simple reason that by subsuming our own interests, we place friends and allies in danger. There is usually a reason for identifying American interests as important beyond the Chomsky school of thought that it is purely economic determinism that drives our foreign policy. Moral considerations as well as our traditional support for a stable world order play a much larger role in identifying American interests.

But Obama, who promised us “smart power” and “soft power” is giving us “no power.” In situations like Iran and Honduras, we are paralyzed - beholden to the president’s vision of redeeming America in the eyes of the world even if it means (perhaps especially if it means) ignoring our own interests.

This is a recipe for disaster. When a real crisis hits and the world, as it always does, looks to America, Obama will have boxed himself in and limited his options by insisting on America acting as any other nation even if doing so makes the situation worse. I am not a psychologist so I will not speculate if Obama is afraid of power or is ideologically inclined not to use it. But there will come a time when Obama will be forced to assert American power and risk the disapprobation of the world or watch as a vital interest of the US is threatened.