By Arnon Adams
I can still remember the sense of anticipation that preceded the swearing in of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth President of the United States of America on January 20th. For us in the Caribbean the significance of the event lay not so much in the fact that America had passed judgment on a failed Republican administration, but rather, in the fact that the United States was about to have its first ‘President of color’ and, moreover, that he had declared that under his presidency the region could anticipate a historic shift in the posture of the United States.
Here in Georgetown various public places had mounted ‘big screens’ – a facility usually reserved for ‘big name’ World Championship Boxing matches and entertainment concerts – on which their patrons could watch the swearing-in ceremony. The same would have obtained elsewhere in the wider Caribbean; people would have viewed the event from homes, offices, bars, board rooms and wherever else they happened to be at the time. Here we were, I thought, savouring Obama’s moment as thought it were our own, too, in circumstances where such ceremonies to inaugurate our own regional leaders invariably go unnoticed by the people who elect them to office. Such is the impact that the Obama presidency had on the Caribbean.
After the swearing-in ceremony myself and a handful of colleague journalists stood up an applauded and I expect that throughout the region there was a simultaneous cheering – a salute to a new era in global politics that was being led by a transformed United States. But we were cheering for much more. We were, in our applause, rooting for the realization of our own expectations of Obama’s presidency, hopes that had to do with the promise he had made to change the face of his country’s relations with the region.
I remember raising with one of my colleagues whether, perhaps, our collective euphoria may not have been a trifle overdone; whether our expectations of the Obama presidency may not have reached a point where we were running the risk of terrible disappointment. I related to him a story that I had heard –though I cannot vouch either for its truth or for its accuracy – of a young Guyanese man whom, upon learning that Barack Obama had been elected President of the United States, reasoned that his chances of securing the United States visa that had been denied him over a protracted period of time had now improved considerablty.
Even allowing for the fact that that may well be an anecdotal story, it, nonetheless, makes the point about our exalted expectations of rhe Obama administration. He had, after all, expressed a desire to change the traditional face of intra hemispheric relations, to slay the ghost of ‘Yankee Imperialism’ that had come to symbolize Washington’s relations with much of Latin America; and we in the English-speaking Caribbean, the peripheral states in the hemisphere, may well have come to expect that the sovereignty of equals, the removal of the notion of “senior” and “junior” partners to which President Obama referred in Port-of-Spain would completely transform the relationship between Washington and the Caribbean.
Any student of foreign policy would know, of course, that the United States is and is always likely to be the “senior partner” in this particular relationship and that President Obama’s pronouncements in Port-of-Spain were no more than indications of a desired US foreign policy posture that still had to pass the acid test of America’s vital interests.
That apart, I continue to remind myself that Barack Obama may be President of the world’s most powerful country but that under international law America is still only one country. My point here is that I doubt that President Obama seriously envisages being everybody’s President and that America has expectations of its President. When those expectations are not in sync with those of us who would wish that he were our President too but who had nothing to do with his election to office, Obama will have to be, first, America’s President.
The Fifth Summit of the Americas provided Barack Obama with his first direct engagement with the Caribbean and that engagement has been a sobering one. What we have learnt, among other things, is that Obama is no maverick-in-the-White-House, that he has a clear sense of his obligations to the American presidency to the American people and that his promise of the dawn of a new era in relations between the United States and the rest of the hemisphere will hit hurdles along the way, After all there is a United States foreign policy paradigm which even Obama cannot be unmindful of. The chiding he received from the Republican right over what one American journalist described as “cosying up to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez” may not have amounted to much; still what it suggests is that while Obama may be his ‘own man’ there will be times when he will not have his ‘own way.’
The paradox of the Summit’s failures and Obama’s successes in Port-of-Spain are outlined in considerable detail in Norman Girvan’s article – Port-of-Spain Declaration or Port-of-Spain Debacle – which makes the point that for all his good intentions Obama cannot walk on water and that there will be moments of disagreement, like – as Girvan put it – the fact that the rest of the hemisphere “were not going to sign a Declaration (of Port-of-Spain) that was acceptable to the United States but not to them.” What the disappointment of the Declaration of Port-of-Spain proved is that Washington and the region are – at least for the time being – still both constricted by some of the old rules pf their relationship.
Cuba was a sticking point in Port-of-Spain and in the final analysis the disagreement between the United States and much of Latin America over Cuba clearly indicated that the Obama administration’s foreign policy vision for the hemisphere remains a a work in progress. Even if we accept that there has been a significant shift in relations between Havana and Washington and that there has been an uncharacteristic PR outbreak of civility between the two capitals, Obama has still made it clear that Cuba will have to do more on issues like political prisoners if the trade embargo is to be lifted. Obama is America’s President and Cuba is still, in America’s eyes, the old adversary.
But Port-of-Spain had its successes. The Fifth Summit of the Americas marked the frst time that the event was hosted by a Caribbean Community state and that can hardly be taken for granted given what has long been a continental conviction that Caribbean Community states are still too poor and too inefficient to stage events of this nature on the sort of grand scale of say a Brazil or a Mexico. Trinidad and Tobago’s triumph was Caricom’s triumph.
That apart, the Summit served as the timeliest of fora for a start to the process of redefining the new Obama administration’s relations with the rest of the hemisphere – both from the standpoint of arriving at a clearer understanding of what constitutes US foreign policy under Obama’s presidency and from the perspective of determining how the Caricom states and the continental hemisphere can work together to render the relationship more complete. This latter point is all the more important since Port-of-Spain also brought into sharp focus the common challenges confronting the hemisphere – – drug trafficking, security, terrorism, the environment. If the Summit served to create a common awareness of the shared challenges and the need for shared responses, that would have been a not inconsiderable success.
Obama triumphed too. He laid down new and significant markers upon which his administration hopes to build the foundation for a radically tranformed United States’ relationship with the Caribbean and Latin America. Normalizing relations with Cuba is negotiable and while it is too early to wholeheartedly embrace Professor Girvan’s view that “President Obama and President Castro are singing from the same hymn sheet,” the new United States President has already left his predecessors light years behind in terms of moving towards normalizing relations with Havana.
No less significant than his administration’s shift on Cuba is his declaration in Port-of-Spain that the days of Washington’s military interventions to topple disliked governments in Latin America are over. The implications of this pronouncement for changing the face of Washington’s relations with Latin America, particularly, given the poignant memories of a succession of US military interventions in that region, can hardly be overemphasized.
What Obama succeeded in doing in Port-of-Spain is extracting much of the pus that has, for decades, infected Washington’s relations with Latin America and the Caribbean. The wound remains, raw and sore but what Obama’s surgical intervention has done is to give that wound a chance to heal.
Still, in the final analysis those of us who stood up and cheered after PresIdent Obama was sworn in would do well to remind ourselves that he is not everybody’s President and that his promise to write a new chapter in hemispheric relations must, of necessity, be tempered by his obligation to his own country’s interests which, ever so often, are bound to cut across those expectations for which so many of us stood up and applauded just over three months ago.
