A word that we hear less and less today is ‘statesmanship’. Statesmanship is after all the quality of a politician who could utilise the legitimacy accorded by the state and his/her charisma to achieve ends selflessly and impartially. In the 20th century, what the eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm termed ‘the Age of Extremes’, the milieu produced a number of statesmen. The struggle against colonialism produced an M.K. Gandhi, a Ho Chi Minh and a Mao Tse-tung; the post-colonial nation state produced a Jawaharlal Nehru, a Fidel Castro, and many others. Even in the developed countries, exceptional situations produced exceptional leaders. The U.S.’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr. and France’s Charles De Gaulle come to mind. What of the 21st century?
In a globalised world, where nation states are on par and in many cases, subordinate to global, financial/industrial enterprises in terms of power, it has been difficult to find a statesman or a stateswoman. For a statesman to emerge must mean the subordination of the interests of finance/enterprise to those of the democratically elected state. It is pertinent here to refer to the hub of global capital and military/industrial power — the U.S. to explain this.
Noble promises, great expectations For years since the 1970s, when the era of deregulation and the age of finance-led globalisation began, nation states such as the U.S. have seen their leaders acting in the interests of the elite, rarely rising above them. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis in the late 2000s — itself a consequence of the deregulated nature of finance capital — President Barack Obama came to power, heralding hopes for change. At that time, the world expected a statesman. The Nobel Committee, in fact, awarded President Obama the Nobel prize merely on the hope of change despite no actual achievements by him.
Seven years hence, has Mr. Obama lived up to those expectations? Has he lived up to the hopes of those among his domestic constituency, and also among the international community, both of whom watched with awe when, for the first time, an African-American became the most powerful person in the world?
Mr. Obama’s first four-year term was a case of belied expectations. Domestically, in his endeavour to ‘triangulate’ his support base and his opposition while enacting policy, Mr. Obama only managed to alienate both to varying degrees. His signature achievement — the Affordable Care Act — was a compromise. It was a legislation that mandated market provisions for health insurance, as opposed to more robust arrangements such as the single-payer health insurance system or the presence of a public option in providing health care insurance. The latter alternatives, which could have lessened the healthcare cost burden on U.S. citizens were abandoned in order to garner Opposition support, but the Republican party, which had moved far to the right wing space, was in no mood for reason.
Mr. Obama finally managed to pass the Act despite the strident opposition from the Republicans. Three years hence, the Act has ensured that a large chunk of those who were uninsured in the U.S. are no longer so. However, health costs have remained high. Other policy moves such as stimulus programmes to lift his country out of recession were indeed somewhat successful. But, the malaise of deregulation having been left largely uncorrected, the next financial crisis seems to have merely got postponed.
On the foreign policy front, Mr. Obama did move away from the rashness and the imperial world view of his neo-conservative predecessor George W. Bush. Mr. Obama withdrew troops from a devastated Iraq and promised to reduce the military presence in Afghanistan, but the stigma of interventionism persisted. An ill-advised North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led- bombing campaign in Libya devastated and later plunged that country into anarchy. Covert interventions in Syria aimed at bringing about a regime change only played into the hands of extremists who paved the way for Frankensteins like the Islamic State (IS) to emerge. Relations with other world powers did improve to some extent.
Surprisingly, Mr. Obama has come into his own in his second term, especially on what could betermed as lame-duck years of a two-term presidency. Domestically, his ability to further a liberal democratic framework of governance and economic policy has remained constrained by a strident Republican-controlled Congress. Unlike other Democratic predecessors such as Lyndon B. Johnson, he has been unable to use the art of negotiation (a euphemism for pork-barrel politics) to break the united opposition to his efforts. That said, his administration has pushed the frontier of social liberalism further by arguing for causes like women’s emancipation, LGBT rights, and greater diversity through executive decisions and appointments to important judicial posts.
There have been black spots too. The Obama presidency’s response to whistleblower revelations of many large-scale intrusive surveillance programmes by the National Security Agency (NSA) has been to demonise whistleblowers and to offer a defensive posture. Six years of relentless use of drones against perceived and real insurgency has only brought about more civilian casualties, with little moderation forthcoming from the President. These drone attacks have not moved his domestic constituency much as U.S. citizens are more concerned about loss of their fellow citizens’ lives in over-seas conflicts.
Yet, in foreign policy, the U.S. government has made significant progressive changes. Rapprochement between the U.S. and its longstanding neighbour-cum-adversary Cuba was encouraged by the Pope and brought to fruition by Mr. Obama. The Iran nuclear deal, under the aegis of the P5+1 (a grouping consisting of U.S., U.K., Russia, France, China and Germany) could not have been possible without Mr. Obama’s commitment. This deal has the potential of transforming geopolitical equations in a volatile West Asia for the better. His administration is now leaving no stone unturned to achieve a consensus with China and India on fruitful steps to mitigate climate change. Relations with Latin America have improved; there is a bit more of realism in the U.S.’s West Asia policy and, despite frosty relations with Russia, there are some avenues which could broaden engagement in between the Cold War adversaries, such as in finding a solution to the Syrian crisis.
Towards a multi-polar world order Mr. Obama has followed a truly liberal-internationalist, outcome-oriented approach toward foreign policy recently. If the initiatives taken by the administration continue, it will only benefit the world by bringing in a new multi-polar world where competition will be subdued and avenues of cooperation will increase. It could be said that Mr. Obama has finally lived up to the expectation that the Nobel committee placed upon him by pre-emptively awarding him with the Nobel Peace Prize.
But has he proven to be a statesman? Has he decisively advanced the U.S. state apparatus to be a truly democratic institution that is responsive to the concerns of the electorate and the world at large rather than to select special interests and the powerful military-industrial-finance complex in that country? The substantive answer is ‘No’. That said, his presidency has definitely moved the needle in raising public consciousness about the power of the elite. The hold of the right wing power establishment in the U.S. has been made possible through the unleashing of a culture war that paints liberals and progressives as dangerous agents out there to subvert the superpower’s edifice.
It is this culture war, being played out by media establishments such as the Fox News network; a commentariat featuring social conservatives; and the new McCarthyists that feeds into the native bigotry among the U.S. citizenry. Mr. Obama has tried in his own way to rise above the fray and promote constitutional values of secularism. This was recently exemplified by a prompt tweet that invited a young Muslim student, arrested in a Texas school for making an electronic clock that was mistaken for a bomb, to show his creation in the White House.
These and other efforts and proclamations in his second term have emboldened the dormant left wing in the U.S. to finally assert its presence. A long-serving senator, Bernie Sanders, who openly proclaims himself as a “democratic socialist”, is running an effective and popular campaign in the Democratic presidential primaries, posing a strong challenge to the presumptive and powerful candidate Hillary Clinton. His ascent is surely an outcome of the shifts in the U.S. political spectrum made possible due to interventions by the Obama presidency. These were in response to an upsurge that resulted in Mr. Obama coming to power. In a recent Democratic primary debate, the candidates were discussing progressive solutions to issues such as climate change and curbs on Wall Street, including radical solutions such as breaking up of big banks, considered anathema to the interests of the plutocratic class in the U.S.
In sum, President Barack Obama will go down in the U.S. history as a remarkable person, who did his mite to bring about progressive changes to a regressive state apparatus. His qualities as a leader, especially as a speaker and a communicator, will be remembered forever. Perhaps, if he was born in another era and in different circumstances, he would have had the institutional wherewithal to be a statesman.
srinivasan.vr@thehindu.co.in
