Over the last week a certain American has been adding greatly to his air-miles account and stirring up a full-blown media frenzy telling the Middle East and the EU what he wants to achieve with them when, sorry if, he becomes the next US President in November. Even such a brief foreign sojourn constitutes a sizeable gamble during an election campaign. Some folks at home may deride him for courting the international community, acting prematurely and presumptuously before he has been officially approved back home, and failing to show his homeland credentials in the process. On the other hand, for those American voters who acknowledge the relevance of the outside world, the value of international cooperation to all states, and the harm done to those by the previous administration's sustained contemptuous unilateralism, it no doubt represents 'starting as you mean to go on'.
There can be no doubt that in the past week Obama has demonstrated a refreshing willingness to familiarise himself with the wider world he proclaims to want to get the US amicably involved in. Concorde is no longer a supersonic white metal bird bridging the old world and the new, yet the concept expressed by that word is as desirable in transatlantic relations as before, and as it ever will be in the future. Incidentally, concorde is a French word, and one that might have been applied to the atmosphere exuded at Obama’s meeting with Sarkozy at the Elysee Palace, something of an achievement bolstered no doubt by the renaming of ‘freedom fries’ as ‘french fries’ once again (a crucial matter to us over-sensitive Europeans I'm sure, I know I haven't been able to eat them since the guardians of the english tongue over the pond excommunicated that French connection), of which the presidential contender assured the public at that meeting. However, one might have thought that more time would have been scheduled for Obama to introduce himself to France than was the case, given that the relationship with Paris, a key EU capital, has been one of the White House’s most strained over recent years. But then, election campaigns and all that is related to them are conducted in bubbles, and that’s why the man who is already a celebrity politician in Germany gave his longest and only public European address there. The tour must have been something of an anti-climax for Obama, going from 200,000 supporters in the Tiergarten, to a brief exchange between flights in Paris, to a chat with Brown at an aged London terraced house.
Just what did Obama actually say?
According to the BBC he began his speech by paying tribute to the Berliners who held out against Soviet pressure during the blockade in 1948. On security, the new kid seems to believe in the battles started by the old one. He said it was time to "defeat terror and dry up the well of extremism that supports it", arguing that Islamic extremism could be defeated just as communism had been in its time and sought to prepare European minds for an Iraqi form of Vietnamisation, so there were just a few heavyweight echoes of history resounding down the Tiergarten on Thursday. Europeans are very conscious of their history, and well educated in it, perhaps in employing these almost hackneyed stock references, Obama was seeking to win points by demonstrating a grasp of that history. He also tuned into a topic much maligned by the outgoing administration but lauded unendingly all over the world, especially in Europe, by urging that Germany’s exemplary ‘seriousness of purpose’ on carbon emissions be emulated by all. It remains to be seen what exactly is meant in his urge for a culture of global trade "that is free and fair for all". Recently there has been no small degree of polarisation over the weighting of ‘free’ and ‘fair’ models in this sphere.
Regarding relations between the US and Europe, Obama called for efforts to move away from the derision of the United States by Europeans, and on Washington’s part, to move toward an appreciation of the vital importance of Europe in American and global security.
Picture from the Calgary Herald
mucho
No comments:
Post a Comment