He holds press conferences abroad where his words are often aimed at the citizens — particularly newer generation citizens — on the street. His public rhetoric breaks with the recent rhetorical style of most past presidents. He extends what supporters feel are olive branches and opponents contend is the edge of a surrender flag hid by a border of seeming apology to foes. He holds town meetings and uses universities as his backdrop for international speeches. Now the operative question is: can Barack Obama’s global populism work?
Does a President taking his case straightly to people in countries that have differing political cultures — and different degrees of how much the populace can influence policy by their support or opposition to an international figure — work? Can trying to alter a national consensus on a country by explaining differences and common ground, versus stating expectations and foreign policy positions, work? Can you get top political elites in other countries to get out of “us versus them” mind-sets?
If there is a consensus there is this: it’s early in Obama’s term — so it’s too soon to say if this will bare fruit or withered flowers. But what he’s doing is unusual.
The Christian Science Monitor looks at the issue in some detail, and it’s worth examining some of its findings:
Over three days in the Middle East and Europe, President Obama began an ambitious recasting of politics and global perceptions – taking his case for a new beginning directly to the world’s people.
The American president started with a nuanced bid for US-Muslim understanding and Mideast peace at the storied Cairo University – and ended in front of a soaring statue at the American cemetery at Omaha beach in Normandy titled, “The Spirit of American Youth, Rising from the Waves.”
The trip, unusual in its limited time with state leaders in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Germany, and France – was a sweeping bid for the possibility of progress in long-intractable conflicts and standoffs, and a recasting of America’s role in that effort. It was an appeal to reason, history, values, remembrance, and common aspirations of humanity, in a populist fashion rarely seen on the world stage, say diplomats and specialists.
“Obama is going over the heads of elites, attempting to establish moral legitimacy as a leader, turning popularity into policy,” says Charles Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. “What we are seeing is not spin, but a sincere effort to reach out to hearts and minds, appealing to better instincts, to the reasonable nature of others. It is a revolutionary approach.”
But can it work? According to the Monitor, the way in which Obama is conducting his appearances on the world stage can’t be measured yet…since it is in its totality such a break from the past:
Some diplomats say Obama’s foreign policy tactics, similar to those used in the 2008 election campaign to create an improbable and popular grass-roots movement, are so new that they defy definition at this point. While the Bush administration began a strong emphasis on public diplomacy, Obama’s own biography and experience seem to allow him to connect and build bridges that reach hearts and minds among ordinary people in a new fashion. A recent poll conducted in the US and major European countries by Harris International showed that the president was the most popular Western leader, with 70-80 percent seeing him as positive. Two separate polls of Arab public opinion in late May showed him as enjoying less support, but still viewed more favorably than US policy as a whole.
While discretion and privacy has long been a cardinal rule of diplomacy, some specialists say the degree of antipathy built in the Muslim world for both US policy and the image of America in the past decade has reached such a low point, that a new direct “fireside chat” with the Muslim world might help relations.
And its impact? Has it been dismissed as useless and naive ploy? Has it been rejected as going too far and trying to assure Muslims and souring relations with Israel? Has it been fully embraced by Muslims? Or has the reaction from Muslims shown — once again — that it is not a monolithic groups, just as many other groups are not monolithic?
The Monitor notes that it has had a mixed result, but one that probably pleases team Obama and many diplomats:
Spokesmen for the Lebanese militant group, Hizbullah, and Egypt’s banned Muslim Brotherhood offered skepticism, and Osama bin Laden’s No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, flatly opposed Obama and his policies in two audio recordings that coincided with the president’s trip. But Essam Derbala, a leader of Al-Gamaa Al-Islamiya who was imprisoned by Egypt amid the group’s insurrection in the 1990s, said the US president deserved a hearing. He told Reuters: “I call on the Taliban of Afghanistan and Pakistan and Al Qaeda to look at this solution and put the American side to a real test of the extent of its sincerity in achieving peace with the Muslim world.”
“I’ve never seen anything like this on the Middle East,” says a former senior US diplomat who was responsible for Europe and the Mideast. “He’s [Obama] started something for Muslims, Israel, Europe, and the US, and it is something that can grow. He’s legitimizing a new discussion, saying other ways of thinking are possible, that if you change the psychology the policy will follow.
“Obama also seems to understand the need to prepare, to open this slowly,” the diplomat continued. “That’s necessary in the Middle East, if you want people to take risks. You need follow-up and if we don’t move quickly the energy will be vitiated. But you first have to get there.”
At the end of the piece, Kupchan says this:”This is global populism, not in a narrow, but in a progressive sense. The million dollar question is whether it will work.”
Obama is essentially doing threethings in his approach so far to foreign policy. (1)He’s moving away from the Bush administration model which often broke with past administrations — Democratic and Republican (including that of the first President Bush) — which put a premium on international coalition-building on a host of issues, (2) He is appealing to more than the leaders of those countries. (3)By delivering high profile speeches in key settings, he’s maximizing the symbolism of his overall message and (if it plays well) his American domestic support from groups that support him or are open to his trying a new approach (he will never win over talk show hosts or top talk show listeners’ audiences).
One thoughtful reaction to the Monitor piece comes from Nikolas K. Gvosdev, professor in the National Security Decision Making faculty of the Naval War College and a senior editor at The National Interest, who writes on his blot The Washington (Ex) Realist:
We’ll see. First he needs to convince his own elites here to follow. The second is whether or not elites in other countries can counter.
The second deals with my concerns that in expending so much energy to try and expand the Euro-Atlantic world eastward, we lose the ability to consolidate the “Atlantic south”–at a time when a period of reconsolidation might be in order for the Atlantic world.
The cartoon by Adam Zyglis, The Buffalo News is copyrighted and licensed to appear on TMV. All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.