[Vision2020] Barack Obama and Reinhold Niebuhr

[Sue Hovey]

I really appreciate any policy maker who sees the world in post national 
terms; but sadly, such a vision is unlikely to get him or her elected 
President of the United States...

Sue
----- Original Message ----- 
From: <nickgier at adelphia.net>
To: <vision2020 at moscow.com>
Sent: Thursday, April 26, 2007 9:55 AM
Subject: [Vision2020] Barack Obama and Reinhold Niebuhr


> Greetings:
>
> It is possible that America will elect a president who can talk 
> intelligently and deeply about fundamental issues, even the theology of 
> Reinhold Niebuhr??!  With the prospect of the Senate going heavily 
> Democratic in 2008, it looks like America may soon be turning a 
> ideological corner.
>
> Nick Gier, intellectual mutant
>
> April 26, 2007, The New York Times
> Op-Ed Columnist
> Obama, Gospel and Verse
> By DAVID BROOKS
>
> Sometimes you take a shot.
>
> Yesterday evening I was interviewing Barack Obama and we were talking 
> about effective foreign aid programs in Africa. His voice was measured and 
> fatigued, and he was taking those little pauses candidates take when they’re 
> afraid of saying something that might hurt them later on.
>
> Out of the blue I asked, “Have you ever read Reinhold Niebuhr?”
>
> Obama’s tone changed. “I love him. He’s one of my favorite philosophers.”
>
> So I asked, What do you take away from him?
>
> “I take away,” Obama answered in a rush of words, “the compelling idea 
> that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we 
> should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. 
> But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take 
> away ... the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, 
> and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism.”
>
> My first impression was that for a guy who’s spent the last few months 
> fund-raising, and who was walking off the Senate floor as he spoke, that’s 
> a pretty good off-the-cuff summary of Niebuhr’s “The Irony of American 
> History.” My second impression is that his campaign is an attempt to 
> thread the Niebuhrian needle, and it’s really interesting to watch.
>
> On the one hand, Obama hates, as Niebuhr certainly would have, the grand 
> Bushian rhetoric about ridding the world of evil and tyranny and 
> transforming the Middle East. But he also dislikes liberal 
> muddle-headedness on power politics. In “The Audacity of Hope,” he says 
> liberal objectives like withdrawing from Iraq, stopping AIDS and working 
> more closely with our allies may be laudable, “but they hardly constitute 
> a coherent national security policy.”
>
> In Chicago this week, Obama argued against the current tides of Democratic 
> opinion. There’s been a sharp rise in isolationism among Democrats, 
> according to a recent Pew survey, so Obama argued for global engagement. 
> Fewer Democrats believe in peace through military strength, so Obama 
> argued for increasing the size of the military.
>
> In other words, when Obama is confronted by what he sees as arrogant 
> unilateral action, he argues for humility. When he is confronted by what 
> he sees as dovish passivity, he argues for the hardheaded promotion of 
> democracy in the spirit of John F. Kennedy.
>
> The question is, aside from rejecting the extremes, has Obama thought 
> through a practical foreign policy doctrine of his own — a way to apply 
> his Niebuhrian instincts?
>
> That question is hard to answer because he loves to have conversations 
> about conversations. You have to ask him every question twice, the first 
> time to allow him to talk about how he would talk about the subject, and 
> the second time so you can pin him down to the practical issues at hand.
>
> If you ask him about the Middle East peace process, he will wax rhapsodic 
> about the need to get energetically engaged. He’ll talk about the shared 
> interests all have in democracy and prosperity. But then when you ask him 
> concretely if the U.S. should sit down and talk with Hamas, he says no. 
> “There’s no point in sitting down so long as Hamas says Israel doesn’t 
> have the right to exist.”
>
> When you ask about ways to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, 
> he talks grandly about marshaling a global alliance. But when you ask 
> specifically if an Iranian bomb would be deterrable, he’s says yes: “I 
> think Iran is like North Korea. They see nuclear arms in defensive terms, 
> as a way to prevent regime change.”
>
> In other words, he has a tendency to go big and offer himself up as 
> Bromide Obama, filled with grand but usually evasive eloquence about 
> bringing people together and showing respect. Then, in a blink, he can go 
> small and concrete, and sound more like a community organizer than George 
> F. Kennan.
>
> Finally, more than any other major candidate, he has a tendency to see the 
> world in post-national terms. Whereas President Bush sees the war against 
> radical Islam as the organizing conflict of our time, Obama sees radical 
> extremism as one problem on a checklist of many others: global poverty, 
> nuclear proliferation, global warming. When I asked him to articulate the 
> central doctrine of his foreign policy, he said, “The single objective of 
> keeping America safe is best served when people in other nations are 
> secure and feel invested.”
>
> That’s either profound or vacuous, depending on your point of view.
>
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