President Barack Obama’s speech on receiving the Nobel Peace Prize has been the subject of as much critical attention as was the award itself. The President, noting the surprise with which the award was received, conceded that he viewed it not as a reward for achievement of efforts contributing to world peace, an impossibility since he has only recently acceded to the presidency, but as a “call to action” in the service of world peace and encouragement to persevere. However, strong criticism in certain circles has come as a reaction to Obama’s decision to increase the number of American troops in Afghanistan in pursuit of the Taliban, a decision taken just before his journey to Norway to accept the prize. As Fidel Castro has put it, “Why did Obama accept the Nobel Peace Prize if he had already decided to fight the war in Afghanistan to the very end? His cynical action was uncalled for.”
Yet few can be genuinely surprised at Obama’s decision on Afghanistan. Heavily critical of the American intervention in Iraq during his electoral campaign, he chose at the same time to describe the intervention in Afghanistan as a “war of necessity” – a stance interpreted by some as a political balancing act designed to ensure that he would not be accused from the right of being ‘soft’ or as engaged in appeasement. But the length of time which the President took to decide on the exact number of troops to be sent to that country suggested first, that he was taken aback by the large number of troops which General McChrystal (a kind of war hero of the Iraq intervention) had requested; and secondly, by the dispute that broke out among some of his advisers on the legitimacy of the General’s request, with a leaked memo from the US representative in Afghanistan indicating opposition to a substantial increase.
In turn, this contention induced a wider discussion among the American public and commentators on the legitimacy of the intervention in Afghanistan, particularly as there has been substantial criticism of the presidential election process in the country, and suggestions that Vice President Biden was inclined to a relatively small increase, pending pressure on President Karzai to indicate measures to reform the manner in which he has been attempting to govern the country. Those with long memories will recall that a not dissimilar situation faced John Kennedy on his assumption of the presidency in 1960, when he found plans already in existence for American material support for an invasion of Cuba, already deemed beyond the pale after Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution.
So it can, in our view, be argued that the President’s Nobel speech was yet another attempt at creating a political and diplomatic balancing act to meet, in the first place, persistent criticism at home from liberals for giving serious consideration to the McChrystal proposal, and from the right, for dilly-dallying on making a decision and showing himself unable to make the kind of decisions about peace and war required of an American president. Secondly, however, the speech was designed to appease international liberal opinion in particular, which is characterized by a particular opinion of what decisions merit the Nobel Peace Prize.
The balancing took an extremely well known and historical approach in international diplomacy and discussions on war and peace to the justification for choosing war as against peace in global relations. In effect, the President characterized the decision to pursue the Taliban in terms of the “just war” doctrine, buttressing this by another well-known theory or argument about the necessity for maintaining an appropriate balance of power in the relations among states, particularly among the larger and militarily superior powers of the globe.
The President, however, has been well aware, and has shaped much of his speech-making on international relations, within a context of his understanding that the balance of power among states, justified by this latter thinking during the long period of the Cold War, has been changing. He devoted much attention, during his campaign, and then during his recent visit to Asia to this theme of change. And he has focused on the necessity for all powers, including the United States, to recognize it – in both relations of peace and war and relations involved in the changing nature of international production and trade. From his perspective and that of many of his advisers who speak of the effect of globalization and the increasing interdependence of states’ economies, the importance of subjecting the conduct of international action to these changes is critical. And it is in this context that he has, it would appear, taken decisions to reverse George W Bush’s decision to place strategic missiles in Eastern Europe directed evidently at Russia, though justified by Bush as aimed at blunting Iran; and over many months taken a ‘jaw-jaw’ rather than ‘war-war’ approach to his dealings with North Korea, Iran and the Israel-Palestine issue.
The President does not yet seem, however, to have converted a wide swath of American public opinion to acceptance of the detail of this new approach to American diplomacy and its strategic implications for America’s long-term geopolitical location in the world. In other words – and we must recall that he is still in the very early period of his presidency – he has not created a persuasive ‘Obama Doctrine’ similar, say, to the Truman Doctrine that came to define a lot of the Cold War period, or even a Reagan Doctrine that combined strong language and armament with an approach to the Soviet Union proposing recognition of equality of armaments, the destructive power of such armaments and the necessity for a combined approach to peace.
The circumstances in which Obama seeks to push his new approach to international diplomacy appear, again, to have placed his political and oratorical efforts on the political back foot. The economic crisis, viewed as emanating from the US and partly crippling American economic growth, has had its implications for the relations which he has wished to define with China, including the opening of the issue to widespread criticism from those who feel that he has been yielding too much to that country.
Similarly, the combination of the economic crisis and Obama’s efforts to balance increasing domestic unpopularity of the Afghanistan intervention with what he feels constrained to recognize as the necessity to avoid a cut-and-run conclusion to it, has given the Republicans, including the recently defeated Senator McCain, fodder to throw the accusation at him of inexperience, which they originally, though unsuccessfully, fielded during the election campaign.
As is often the case in political and diplomatic balancing, the justification for which he sought to give in his Nobel speech, the risk that the President runs is, on the one hand, of not satisfying a reasonable majority of the camp generally favourable to him and therefore of weakening his support base; and, on the other, emboldening his critics on the right, anxious to prove in the next congressional elections, that the public now perceive that they were always right about him.
Obama, like most of his predecessors, knows that in America, all politics (including international politics) is local. The rest of the world, in spite of admiration for what was perceived as his idealism, will come to recognize this too.