Obama's Foreign Impact

Many progressives and people around the world scoff at an Obama presidency. In a recent article, Arundhati Roy says that Obama will rule as a white man and won't be able to make decisions on his own because of the complexity of the system that's in place. An article in Pakistan's Dawn notes that it doesn't matter to the rest of the world who the American president is. The implication is American Imperialism is beyond presidential control:

It really does not matter to us which party is in power in the US. American interests — or at least the perception of American interests — is what drives American policy towards Pakistan, or anywhere else in the world. We would do well to remember that it was under Bill Clinton that American cruise missiles hit Afghanistan for the first time, and a most crippling economic embargo was imposed on Iraq that reportedly led to the death of hundreds of thousands of children. The differences between the Republicans and Democrats are limited to their domestic arena, and at best to the style of international diplomacy. Yes, Obama being quite possibly the first black president does send a good message to the world about America. Yes, his early schooling in Muslim lands may give him a better understanding of cultures other than American.

But to believe that his ethnicity, his parentage or his party affiliations are going to fundamentally alter real American geopolitical interests with regards to places such as Russia, China, the Middle East or Central Asia is to live in a make-believe world. It’s time Pakistan’s media woke up, and as Americans are fond of saying, ‘smelled the coffee’.

God knows that its been decades and generations since the U.S. military industrial complex started calling the foreign policy shots. Let's face it, the complex system that Roy talks about and what makes presidential foreign policy impotent is the Pentagon and the corporations that serve it.

While ideological progressives dis Obama, the more practical of us champion him - but with reservations. The Nation, for example, endorsed Barack Obama but its editors also issued an open letter that urges him to stand his ground on key, progressive issues. Those same editors also emphasized recently, in Democratic Vistas, the potential of an Obama presidency:

Barack Obama has a different vision of democracy, focused on enlarging the electorate and encouraging citizens to play an active role in shaping the country's policies and ordering its priorities. Our open letter to Barack Obama, which was signed by nearly 25,000 people ("Change We Can Believe In," August 18/25), described the most inspiring principles animating his campaign while also noting the dissonance between his stances and ours on such issues as the escalation of the US military presence in Afghanistan and the death penalty. On the Letters page of this issue appears the response from his campaign, which welcomes not only our support but also our pledge to challenge him when we disagree with his stands. This response reminds us that, vital though an Obama victory is, it is only the beginning of what's needed to roll back the policies of the Bush years and begin to enact a progressive agenda. If elected, Obama will face massive entrenched power whose writ runs large in Washington. Such pressure can most effectively be countered if the raised expectations of his presidency are channeled into a movement that stands up for those without wealth and power--a movement that works for and wins a central place in the engaged and expanded democracy that Whitman envisioned a century ago.

An Obama presidency has the potential to chart and set a new course for the United States. Though this new direction may not immediately take us to a new and more progressive destination, given time, a new course that's consistently pursued will diverge further and further from our old, conservative track. This is an important point and possibly the type of change that will make a difference to U.S. foreign policy.