In May 2009, Barack Obama delivered a speech in Prague about global threats that required, he said, "action coordinated across borders." This not-so-ringing phrase he intended to apply to "a global economy in crisis, a changing climate, the persistent dangers of old conflicts, new threats and the spread of catastrophic weapons." To address the global economy, he called for "investments to create new jobs ... [and] a change in our financial system, with new rules to prevent abuse and future crisis. "We must confront climate change," he said, "by ending the world's dependence on fossil fuels, by tapping the power of new sources of energy like the wind and sun, and calling upon all nations to do their part." He declared that the United States would lead the world away from nuclear weapons and "seek a new treaty that verifiably ends the production of fissile materials intended for use in state nuclear weapons." Most of these imperatives emanated from an agenda of the American left -- albeit one that was not inclined to give him much credit for these words.
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When President Obama spoke at Cairo's Al-Azhar University one month later, much of his rhetoric, again, derived from the American left. He deplored colonialism and the former habit of treating Muslim-majority countries as "Cold War proxies." (Later in the speech, he specifically deplored the fact that during the Cold War "the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically-elected Iranian government.") Addressing Islam, he invoked "common principles -- principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings," along with the rights of women. He declared that the United States would hold to a presumption against the use of force, quoting Jefferson: "I hope that our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us that the less we use our power the greater it will be." He spoke of withdrawing American troops from Iraq, closing the Guantánamo prison camp, and ending torture. He declared Holocaust denial "baseless, ignorant, and hateful" and denounced "vile stereotypes about Jews." In the next breath he spoke of the "humiliations -- large and small -- that come with occupation," declared that "the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable," opposed Jewish settlements, and affirmed a Palestinian state. The tone was modest; the hand was outstretched; the finger hit RESTART. Little of this won him points from neoconservatives.
Not that these were the speeches that Noam Chomsky would have delivered. In Cairo, Obama defended a continuing war role for the United States in Afghanistan. He did not call for cutting America's military budget, or winding down American bases, or discontinuing drone attacks; nor did he promote international treaties to improve the lives of the poor billions, or do much to reverse the galloping power of global finance, or announce major initiatives to reduce the world's dependency on fossil fuels and therefore the scope of the carbon dioxide excreted into the atmosphere. Still, he did not shake the big stick. His tone was conciliatory. He displayed some awareness that America's troubles in the world were at least in part of its own making. If he did not proclaim a doctrine of his own, he brought George W. Bush's unilateralism and his preventive war doctrine to a screeching halt. He seemed to take seriously the proposition that negotiations with Iran, combined with smart sanctions, could dislodge Tehran from its pursuit of nuclear weapons.
Yet Obama's post-Prague and post-Cairo policies have proved anticlimactic. In the early stages of the Arab spring, he seemed to waffle about democratic commitments. (It was no secret that Tunisia's Ben Ali and Egypt's Mubarak were staunch U.S. allies who were cut loose only reluctantly.) Moreover, Obama had rejected withdrawal from Afghanistan before he supported it, deferring the actual event until 2014. (If it does materialize, it will still have been preceded by a "surge," the installation of hundreds of military bases, and a thousand American deaths, more than twice as many as took place under Bush.) After Obama's Cairo speech, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu successfully faced him down on Palestinian questions (although at this writing the United States seems to have restrained him from attacking Iran). Guantánamo still harbors prisoners under dreadful conditions, if only because of vehement objections to sending them stateside, Obama having judged it unwise to invest political capital in overriding them. The military budget remains a gargantuan drain. The security-industrial complex rides high. Drones have come to symbolize the impunity with which America resembles a sort of Death Star, meting out punishment from afar -- often enough against innocent targets, whatever precautions are taken. America ranks high in emissions of carbon, yet Obama takes only minor steps to reduce them. He deferred a final decision on the Keystone pipeline but refused to stop it. Fossil fuels still reign supreme. Global financial regulation is stalled. All in all, from a left-wing point of view, the magnitude of Obama's failures is considerable.
The question is why, then, his foreign and energy policies meet with so little resistance from the left. Why so few demonstrations against ongoing and impending wars? As fracking divides New York's Southern Tier and adjacent Pennsylvania, Governor Romney blithely promotes a drill-and-gouge plan on behalf of a chimera called energy independence, while the Obama campaign skirts the energy and environmental issues which, in truth, amalgamate into a single issue. There are no sizable attempts to inject military or environmental questions into the elections.
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