by Cheryl Rofer
I was so pleased this morning with the news and op-eds that I think I’ll do a post in the spirit of Phila’s Friday Hope Blogging.
First, a warning to those who are determined to see no change in Barack Obama’s presidency from George Bush’s: this is not the post for you, particularly if you tend toward high blood pressure. It may even seem soppy to other readers.
I am delighted by the return of real diplomacy. I want to do some verbal leaping and singing here, but I will try to keep it down. For a while, I was baffled by George Bush’s bald-faced statements of his personal feelings about world leaders and the world situation, as well as his open threats. These were things that, as a middle manager, I had learned were counterproductive. There must be something I wasn’t seeing, there must be a pony in there somewhere… But I never did find that pony and gave up. There was very little followup on the threats, thank goodness, or the good things he said. I had learned not to do that, too: you fritter away your authority. Surely somewhere in his career the President of the United States had similar opportunities to learn, or advisors who knew better…?
I tried analyzing these strange moves in terms of the global situation, game theory, and they still didn’t make sense, so I stopped trying. The media also stopped doing serious analysis and took up cheerleading or unabridged criticism. Sometimes suggestions of alternative courses showed up, but not much. It’s been a long eight years.
Now we have a president who puts his personal baggage aside (and doesn’t seem to be carrying as much of it) and who is enlisting people who know how to do diplomacy. He is giving us some very interesting actions to analyze. We have to remember, of course, that smart diplomacy is never all on the surface, so part of the challenge is to figure out directions, intentions, and negotiations when we don’t have all the information. But I love a puzzle, particularly this kind.
So the President of the United States greets the Iranians on their holiday of Nowruz, just a few days after the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom put Iran’s nuclear program into a context of the nuclear weapon states’ need to move toward disarmament. And the President of Israel even sent a Nowruz message to the people of Iran! It’s preachier than the one from the United States. Puzzle: is all this coordinated? Hard to believe the first two aren’t, and probably some hint was dropped to Israel that this was coming.
That’s certainly a change in tone from George Bush’s hectoring and constant insistence that Iran give up its enrichment program. There’s lots more that could be said; the BBC works through Obama’s statement line by line. But I want to move on to some other good stuff.
Henry Kissinger, James Baker, George Schultz and Sam Nunn in Russia! With a matching armchair shot of Kissinger and Putin! This is being well-received in Moscow! (Many thanks to Princess Sparkle Pony for the deeper meanings of the stylized matching armchair shot.) And we might note that ex-President Putin doesn’t seem to feel he needs an interpreter.
The four will be meeting with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. They are the four who have been proposing that the US and Russia move toward nuclear disarmament.* Baker worked very closely with the Russians as the Soviet Union was breaking up. Quite a delegation for President Obama to send. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov offered some good words in response.
Finally, President Obama is changing the tone of the discussion within the United States. This may be the biggest diplomatic challenge, but it does indicate that patience and a calm approach can win people over. I was impressed by the sheer number of commentators who chose a different emphasis from Jake Tapper and our local tv stations on their early morning news.
Hardly any coverage at all of Obama’s one small misstep in his Jay Leno appearance, which had a lot of good stuff in it. Check out the transcript.
Steven Pearlstein says let’s put down the pitchforks and concentrate on cleaning up the mess, which is slightly self-serving for the financial community, but, unfortunately, most likely true.
David Brooks takes on Perverse Cosmic Myopia, an inability to focus attention on the most perilous matter at hand. And he is actually talking about the serious stuff.
Also in the New York Times, Simon Johnson and James Kwak argue in an op-ed that we need new bankers.
Charles Krauthammer takes on the triviality of Congress’s ire against the bonus babies. This is not entirely outside Krauthammer’s usual set of bad guys, but he’s not going into trivialities himself.
Eugene Robinson would like Timothy Geithner to separate himself more definitively from his former occupation as Master of the Universe.
William Greider sees the people returning to politics.
Jeffrey Korzenik, in the Boston Globe, explains how the skewed structure of Wall Street pay has contributed to our problems.
Joe Klein, who has even gotten accustomed to people disagreeing with him in the comments on his blog, counsels patience.
Could it be that Congress and Wall Street are the only two groups that are still operating on the distraction principle? That even the media are coming around to taking their job seriously?
I’ll admit that I’m giving Barack Obama all the credit. It’s possible that, in the case of the media, they’ve finally figured out, as their jobs become more precarious, that the problems are real. But it’s Obama who’s directing the diplomacy toward Iran and Russia.
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Update (3/21/09): In my enthusiasm, I got this wrong. Baker is not one of the WSJ four; William Perry, Bill Clinton's Secretary of Defense, is.