![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
So we wake up into what in what might be a significantly changed world.
It's easy to be cynical and say that if voting changed anything they'd etc, financial crisis ties hands, in pocket of donors, and so on. And I wouldn't argue with any of that. It may well be that many of the policies we see from President Obama are not all that different from those we would have seen from President McCain. But as a non-USAian, for me that's not the point.
The point is that this is a massive overhaul for the position and image of the USA in the world. Although other countries are rising fast to challenge it, it is still the most powerful, wealthy and wide-reaching nation. And the vast majority of the world resents it, seeing it as an arrogant, greedy, hypocritical, patronizing bully -- with reason. That slate has now been temporarily wiped clean, because the person and fact of a President Obama forces the rest of the world to look at the USA in a different way. There's a huge opportunity to write a new script -- to return the USA to the respect and friendship of other nations and peoples that its potent status and noble ideals ought to earn.
In foreign policy terms it's not always possible to say that Presidents of one party or the other are more or less likely to rapproche with the world. It was Kennedy who took us closest to nuclear war, and it was Nixon who went to China. The national interests of the USA will always be served by whoever's in the office, and rightly so: that's one of the things that they were elected for. But the difference now is that with the arrival of a President who's from quite a different background to any previous one, the understanding of what those national interests are, and how they are best served, will widen and deepen.
The USA can be a positive force in the world without harming its own strength, and that can be achieved now, by inspiring and rallying other nations alongside it. Not "against" anything -- one of the most poisonous doctrines of recent years has been the belief that a whole bunch of malevolent Others must be identified, in order to divide into Them and Us -- but "for" something -- for the future of humanity and of the world.
It's easy to be cynical and say that if voting changed anything they'd etc, financial crisis ties hands, in pocket of donors, and so on. And I wouldn't argue with any of that. It may well be that many of the policies we see from President Obama are not all that different from those we would have seen from President McCain. But as a non-USAian, for me that's not the point.
The point is that this is a massive overhaul for the position and image of the USA in the world. Although other countries are rising fast to challenge it, it is still the most powerful, wealthy and wide-reaching nation. And the vast majority of the world resents it, seeing it as an arrogant, greedy, hypocritical, patronizing bully -- with reason. That slate has now been temporarily wiped clean, because the person and fact of a President Obama forces the rest of the world to look at the USA in a different way. There's a huge opportunity to write a new script -- to return the USA to the respect and friendship of other nations and peoples that its potent status and noble ideals ought to earn.
In foreign policy terms it's not always possible to say that Presidents of one party or the other are more or less likely to rapproche with the world. It was Kennedy who took us closest to nuclear war, and it was Nixon who went to China. The national interests of the USA will always be served by whoever's in the office, and rightly so: that's one of the things that they were elected for. But the difference now is that with the arrival of a President who's from quite a different background to any previous one, the understanding of what those national interests are, and how they are best served, will widen and deepen.
The USA can be a positive force in the world without harming its own strength, and that can be achieved now, by inspiring and rallying other nations alongside it. Not "against" anything -- one of the most poisonous doctrines of recent years has been the belief that a whole bunch of malevolent Others must be identified, in order to divide into Them and Us -- but "for" something -- for the future of humanity and of the world.
