Too Good to Be Good?
Loutraki, Greece, November 27, 2009.
Salaroche

Barak Obama, the guy who made a good majority of Americans and the best portion of the world’s population dream about real change. The man who made hundreds of millions of individuals across the world think that each and everyone of us could make a difference if we only had the audacity to hope, and then act upon that hope.

That guy, Barak Obama, the guy I voted for by mail from Malta in November of 2008, the actual President of the United States as I write, he’s a good man. I don’t think anybody in his right mind (this excludes “Birthers,” “Barak is a Nazi,” “Barak is a Muslim,” sheer racists and other such loonies from the category) would doubt that the guy is a good-hearted, honest man.

But my question today is “is Barak Obama too good to be good?” Meaning: is he too good-hearted and honest to do anything meaningfully good for America and for the world? Is his mind too centered on the belief that human nature is mostly good, thereby rendering himself unable to see that there’s a deeply selfish, even “evil” side to it as well?

"Carrots and sticks" is not a foreign-policy term created yesterday. We all know what that term means. Does Barak Obama think that carrots alone will do the trick in trying to change the world for what he believes is the better? Does he think that sticks are out of the question when dealing with China, extremist Israelis or Palestinians, Iran, Hamid Karzai, Vladimir Putin, the Pakistani army and all those other people who seem to hold him (and America by extension) in contempt?

America has been a willing, engaged teacher to the world since the end of World War Two. America has a half century of experience teaching the rest of the planet about how to be a democratic nation, about how to promote free enterprise and about how to pursue equality of the sexes and races.

Above all, America has taught the world a few practical lessons on the benefits that free speech can bring to any nation that enforces it.

But that’s what many of us call “soft power,” meaning the power to influence others by example and by showing them that our way of being and living can be appealing to them as well.

The problem with hard-headed, power-grabbers, totalitarian regimes, and other irrational guys of the fanatic-fringe, be they of the religious, ideological or mixed kind, is that they don’t give a single hoot about how appealing the American way may be to the population of their countries. They just want to push their own personal agendas. Period.

Carrots, therefore, are largely irrelevant when dealing with that type of guys (think of Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity on the domestic field and imagine how they would react to any possible carrots  handed to them by the White House: they would take them as signs of weakness).

America has been a soft-power teacher to the rest of the world for the past half a century, but we could only afford to be the benevolent superpower that we have been for so long because at the beginning of our dominating status we showed the world the might of our resolve and the might of our cunning and technological know-how in military affairs.

Any good teacher can tell you that to have a happy but attentive and disciplined classroom the students first need to know who’s the boss in the classroom. They need to know first hand what the consequences for their misbehaving are. If there’s not a certain level of fear from the part of the students (i.e., fear of a bad grade or of being expelled from the class or school), the teacher’s teachings and the students’ learning will not be as effective as it would otherwise be.

In 1945, for example, sticks came first, carrots came later. First we were victors, then we were good to the vanquished.

But times have changed. The world is nowhere near as polarized as it was in 1943 and hard power of the kind America used during those years is no longer needed, but it’s still needed nonetheless.

Barak Obama shouldn’t forget that the world we live in is directly related to the world that FDR and Truman and Kennedy lived in. Things have changed, but human nature is still the same. He should know that carrots alone won’t do the trick.

Diplomatic sticks always have to be part of the US foreign-policy equation and Barak Obama should carry such big sticks in his diplomatic bag whenever he speaks as softly and eloquently as he does to our partners and adversaries.

Is Barak Obama too good to be good? Let’s hope not.

Salaroche