TWQ: The Limits of Audacity - Winter 2010

The  election of Barack Obama—rich in symbols, uplifting in rhetoric, and fraught with expectations—created a magical moment for the indefinable ways the new president appeared to touch, inspire, and seduce people everywhere. Compared to his most illustrious predecessors, Obama assumed  his potential for greatness even before he had assumed office, with a Lincoln-like humility and a Roosevelt-like facility reinforcing a soaring rhetoric designed to restore confidence at home and reintroduce the nation abroad.

Now, one year later, Obama’s magic is facing exposure. Admittedly, a daunting Bush legacy gave Obama little time to correct the bearings of a  nation that had gone off course while its people mostly fell silent. After the pall cast over the U.S. image the previous years, Obama’s call  for audacity was not a choice; for his administration to just wait and do nothing, or even little, was not an option. There were ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but even those demands aside, there were also pressing crises—with Iran and in the Middle East, with Russia and in some parts of Europe, with North Korea and elsewhere in Asia, over climate change and other planetary concerns including fears of a global economic depression that denied the new administration the ability to set priorities of its own. This is the United States’ second chance to regulate a global order for the first half of the twenty-first century, and it is essential to make it work, for there may not be another.

In an attempt to heal the scars left by George W. Bush and Iraq, as Jimmy Carter had hoped to close the wounds left by Richard M. Nixon and the war in Vietnam, Obama has shown a dangerous predilection for the desirable over the feasible, and for the juggler over the architect. In his haste, he raises the risks that a foreign policy of aroused expectations might be turned into a foreign policy of self-defeating accommodation, lest it become a foreign policy of unwanted confrontations.