At the very least, the rest of the world seems to like Obama. If you’ve been following the news over the course of the last week, you can’t help but have noticed the crowds of Chinese people parading the streets, the swarms of French guys partying like its May 1945, throngs of African families celebrating the victory, all because some guy on the other side of the world won some election.
This is probably because much of the world views the America of the last eight years as a somewhat temperamental, aggressive beast with a less-than-stellar economy and a fondness for heightened carbon emissions with the occasional denial that global warming exists. Barack Obama is promising to turn all that around. I can’t wait.
The thing is, there are an awful lot of Americans who seem to think that approval from the rest of the world is the last thing that a U.S. president should have, because if you aren’t constantly trying to max out your list of enemies then you aren’t being tough enough. Besides, you can only fit five people into your “Fave 5” and you don’t want anyone to feel left out, right?
The fact that much of the world generally likes Obama means a lot. Take, for example, the Sith Lord Ahmadinejad, president of Iran. There are a lot of Muslims in that part of the world who, at least on some level, look to Ahmadinejad for guidance, and that’s besides the fact that Iran may soon be a nuclear power. Ahmadinejad warmly congratulated Obama on his victory, meaning that Ahmadinejad might like him even if he hasn’t actually done anything yet. If he likes Obama now, it means that Obama has a head start on any upcoming diplomatic talks that will probably occur between the U.S. and Iran, talks that may serve as an example for the rest of the Muslim world. The bottom line is that Ahmadinejad takes Obama seriously, which is already altogether different than the way Ahmadeinjad percieves President Bush. Turns out the extremist Iranian president has something in common with the average American after all.
Even if it turns out that Ahmadinejad really does hate the West that much and seeks to continue construction of his Death Star, we will be able to build a much stronger case for tough action if we can demonstrate that we first wholeheartedly attempted a diplomatic resolution of our differences and if we have the rest of the world on our side. Pursing a clear-minded approach to foreign relations could have allowed us to avoid, at least in part, the messy, poorly-planned, unilateral foreign policy catastrophe called the Iraq War.
Another side of this issue is the simple fact that when you’re the most powerful nation in the world and a bunch of other nations seem to like you, it means that a bunch of other nations will also like you, to avoid being the odd man out. As I have discussed in a previous column, this was Nixon’s approach to the China-Russia situation in the ’70s. While the situation is different today, if we can make friends with a few key nations in key regions, it will work wonders for our foreign policy capabilities. It’s about gaining leverage, so the more people we’ve got on our side of the seesaw, the more leverage we’ll have.
But we also can’t forget about the economic impact of having friends. The global economic system is based on one thing — confidence. If an investor is not confident about the direction of a particular asset, then he will be reluctant to invest in it. When over 80 percent of our own population thinks that the direction of our country is on the “wrong track,” according to a RealClearPolitics polls, and global opinion of the United States has worsened significantly over the last eight years, according to an analysis from the Pew Center, it’s not difficult to see why all the high-rollers have put their chips on other games. If you don’t like how your horse has been performing lately, you put your bets on someone else — like a Chinese or an Indian horse.
The bottom line for me is that when you’ve got a bunch of enemies, it seems pretty childish to respond by trying to blow them all up. Perhaps we’re not on great terms with Russia right now, but it makes no sense to use our already bad relationship with them as an excuse to make it worse.
It may be true that the entire Islamic world hates us, but we have to decide to act like adults here. When someone makes fun of me and calls me names, I hope that I’d have the maturity to talk to them and figure out why they feel that way, rather than attempting to solve our differences by making fun of them right back, thereby escalating a resolvable and petty conflict.
