If Barack Obama wins the American Presidency, how would he go about restoring America’s standing and leadership in world affairs? For an answer, read Samantha Power’s new book, Chasing the Flame, a political biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello – the senior UN official in Iraq killed in a suicide terrorist bombing of his Baghdad hotel in 2003. Power was in Bristol (just 3 days before she resigned as a senior foreign policy advisor to Senator Obama, for calling Senator Hillary Clinton a "monster") to speak about her new book and about Barack Obama’s foreign policy principles at a talk hosted by the Centre for Governance and International Affairs of Bristol University and Festival of Ideas in Bristol. Dublin-born and American educated Samantha Power is an award-winning journalist, a Harvard professor and a foreign policy intellectual, all rolled into one. In her own words, she was a “dreamer” before her journalistic life, and she “got into journalism as a means to try to change the world.” Her 2005 book, A Problem from Hell, described by Harvard Professor Stanley Hoffman as “an admirable mix of erudition and passion”, was about genocide, and America’s failure to prevent it. It not only won her a Pultizer Prize, and a chair at Harvard’s Kennedy School, but also an invitation to meet with a freshman Senator from Illinois, named Barack Obama. For Senator Obama the central message of her book was not just to understand why and when genocide occurs, but also the need to fix American foreign policy. This encounter led directly to her third and possibly most important career: as a foreign policy adviser to the man who could become the next president of the United States, and make her realise her dream of “to try to change the world”.
There are interesting parallels between the central character of her new book and that of her current job. Both de Mello and Senator Obama are people who are ‘comfortable crossing boudnaries’. De Mello was a Brazillian who was educated in Europe and distinguished himself while serving the UN in many of the hotspots of the world, including Bangladesh, East Africa, Cambodia, Kosovo, East Timor, and Iraq. Senator Obama was born in Hawaii to Kenyan and American parents and spent four of his formative years in Indonesia. Indeed, Power recommends four principles from de Mello’s character which could guide Obama’s foreign policy.
Perhaps the most controversial of them is the “talking to the enemy” principle. De Mello was a firm believer dialogue with adversaries, including known evils like Slobodan Milesevich of Serbia and Pol Pot of Khmer Rogue. He would talk to insurgents, warlords and rebels. Candidate Obama has been much criticized by his democratic and republican opponents alike for his willingness to talk to dictators like the leaders of Iran and Cuba. We now know where this idea came from. Power defends the principle vigorously. America has to speak to unsavory regimes without preconditions, but that does not mean throwing principles vital principles out of the window. Even if there is no significant progress, it creates legitimacy for the US by creating the impression that it is not the US which is the problem.
The second principle is “freedom from fear”. “Fear is a bad advisor.” As she sees it, there is too much fear-mongering around in American politics and foreign policy these days. The Bush administration has often played up the fear of terrorism after 9/11 for domestic political advantage. When America is afraid, Power argues, it tends to lurch between the extremes of doing nothing or little (Rwanda, Bosnia) and being overly aggressive (Iraq). The other end of this principle is acting through the UN and other agencies to create institutions, such as elections, rule of law, police and courts to create a culture where there is freedom from fear in conflict-prone areas.
Next is the principle of “embrace humility, understand complexity”. Under Bush, US foreign policy is marked by extreme arrogance and meddling in other people’s affairs. This could grow into a crisis of confidence about international action, a danger of retreat from international engagement, if not outright isolationism. Neither extreme is warranted. The US should recognize the complexity of fixing conflict-ridden societies, but should not be paralyzed by the immensity of the task of nation-building.
The final principle is the “doctrine of dignity”. In the international arena, this means showing respect for the opinions of other states and leaders no matter how different or small they might be. The doctrine of dignity is more important than democracy promotion. Imposing democracy through force does not work because it shows a lack of awareness of the indignity people feel about foreign occupiers. Just ask the people of Iraq.
(The author is professor of Global Governance and Director of the Centre for Governance and International Affairs at the University of Bristol)
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