The concept that really sold Obama to me, and I have alluded to this before, is that I think he has the first 21st century worldview of any candidate to seriously run for president. I don’t think that John McCain has truly yet transcended the Cold War security paradigm and the biases that come with it. On the contrary, Obama understands the new world in which we live and seeks solutions that are germane to them – and he believes that America must actively fill the role of leader of the free world in order to achieve those solutions.
This is a long post so enjoy below the jump.
He says often that his story of a “kid with big ears and a funny name could only happen in the United States of America.” I think, for him, American exceptionalism is true and deeply personal. Demonstrably, I witnessed him offer the following to a rapturous crowd in Washington, DC two summers ago at Take Back America:
We are America. We are the nation that liberated a continent from a madman, that lifted ourselves from the depths of Depression, that won Civil Rights, and Women’s Rights, and Voting Rights for all our people. We are the beacon that has led generations of weary travelers to find opportunity, and liberty, and hope on our doorstep. That’s who we are.
Deeply influenced by his WWII survivor grandfather and his grandmother’s memories of the Depression, as an Africa-American, and a community organizer and activist, Obama’s words are grounded in a very real place. When he argues that America “is the last, best hope of Earth,” he does so because that has been the narrative that has defined his life. This idea – a fundamental faith in American goodness and the American exception and a belief that America should be the leader on the world stage – is the driving force behind his foreign policy. Despite the protests of other progressives, I too believe in American exceptionalism and American leadership. Although his rhetoric on this point has been toned down big time because the economy has been more important, I think his comment that “the American moment is not over” but that “it must be seized anew” is even more salient now than ever.
This idea of American exceptionalism is not new – it served as the cornerstone of the Clinton years and the driving force behind the regime change philosophy of W. What makes Obama different is that his post-Cold War worldview encompasses also a post-9/11 conception. His belief in American leadership is galvanized by an understanding of transnational threats. That is what attracted me to him from the very beginning.
In many speeches, he repeats an anecdote from the Horn of Africa’s Combined Joint Task Force at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti. When visiting a humanitarian mission in Ethiopia with Africom director Admiral Hunt, Hunt suggested that if the United States can provide dignity and opportunity to the people in the region (quoting Hunt) “the chance of extremism being welcomed greatly, if not completely, diminishes.” As Obama explicated, a “relatively small investment” in fragile states can be one of the most effective ways to prevent the terror and strife that is far more costly – both in men and money – in the future. “In this way, $50 billion a year in foreign aid – which is less than one-half of one percent of our GDP – doesn’t sound as costly when you consider that last year, the Pentagon spent nearly double that amount in Iraq alone.” “The forgotten challenges” of transnational security threats “operate freely in the disaffected communities and disconnected corners of our interconnected world.” Thus, weak states become “the most fertile breeding grounds” for terror, pandemic disease, and weapons smuggling. Obama leaves a door open for humanitarian intervention because “humanitarian” endeavors are critical to Obama’s idea of protecting national security, the conception of national security that sees poverty as a national security issue because it leads to state instability, failing states, and the inoculation of transnational threats. (See his first major foreign policy address, Remarks to the Chicago Global Affairs Council, for the original quotes.) In addition, think of his work in the Senate on arms proliferation issues with Dick Lugar and the rumors of Lugar’s potential appointment to Secretary of State if DOD changes head. He was not an extremely productive first-term Senator but he did much work on loose conventional weapons in upoliced weak states or ungoverned regions, another strong indication that he understands the role of complicated transnational threats.
I will note that most of these quotes come from earlier speeches and are hashed from a paper I wrote for EPIIC last year. As such, it is possible that they do not reflect certain developments that have transpired more recently and Obama’s general post-primary move to the center. For instance, a critical part of his foreign policy strategy involved doubling foreign aid to $50 billion and he was committed to full achievement of the Millennium Development Goals; these goals have been tabled by the economic crisis. But I don’t doubt that the same driving strategy remains because the thinker behind much of this rhetoric is still his go-to security advisor, Susan E. Rice. Rice has been named to his transition team and, as far as I understand, is the most expert member on national security and foreign policy.
As a primer on Rice: Most famously, she served in the Clinton administration Undersecretary of State for African Affairs. Before becoming an early member of the Obama team, she was at Brookings cementing her reputation as the foremost scholar-advocate for the new national security paradigm. To demonstrate my point, it was Rice who said, “If there was once doubt that the definition of a threat to U.S. national security had changed after the Cold War, September 11, 2001 effectively ended the debate,” who produced Brookings’ Weak State Matrix, and who has written extensively on the subjects of transnational threats, poverty, and weak states. If you want to learn more and to see Rice’s influence on Obama, I suggest reading Obama’s “Renewing American Leadership” for Foreign Affairs and then reading Rice’s “Poverty Breeds Insecurity.” See how much they overlap?
It will be interesting to me, above all, to see how he is forced to adapt these ideas to the world that we began living in after the financial crisis. The understanding outlined above reflects a United States capable of expensive investments in the rest of the world, money that we either don’t have or can’t muster the political will to dedicate to this cause. How will his security team adapt? For one, we will not have to go it alone. Rumors suggest that Susan Rice might be appointed his Ambassador to the United Nations. I think it’s fair to conjecture an Obama administration very much with human rights and human security on the radar that leads international institutions.
How refreshing, lest we forget the last eight years.
— Shana
Red, Brown, and Blue 