●Obama may just be an interlude_自考专本|专升本|高升专|高升本|在职研究生-学历教育网

“How’s that hopey-changey thing working out for you?” jeered Sarah Palin earlier this year – in a dig at the soaring rhetoric that helped Barack Obama win the presidency in 2008.专科

As the Democrats’ brace themselves for big losses in Tuesday’s midterm elections, Ms Palin’s mockery will sting. But her gibe applies just as acutely to President Obama’s fans outside the US, as to his supporters inside America. It is hard to exaggerate the emotions invested in the “hopey-changey thing” around the world.

Just think of the cheering crowds at Mr Obama’s open-air speech in Berlin in the summer of 2008; the rave reviews given to the newly-elected president’s Cairo speech on Islam and the west; the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Mr Obama, when he had barely had time to arrange his pens on the Oval Office desk.

Now a nasty thought is occurring to the foreigners who invested so much hope in the new president. Perhaps Mr Obama represented not a new beginning in American relations with the rest of the world, but a temporary aberration? Maybe, after a brief stab at internationalism and engagement with the rest of the world, the US will revert to a more unilateralist and nationalist foreign policy?

Of course, it is important not to exaggerate the role of foreign policy in the travails of Mr Obama. Throughout the campaign, the Republicans have hammered away, above all, at economic issues: the deficit, the debt and unemployment.

And yet, the difficulties that Mr Obama has encountered in foreign affairs also matter. Back in 2008, the polls suggested that his promise to improve America’s standing in the world swayed many voters. But now Mr Obama is being portrayed as a man who has failed to deliver – abroad as well as at home. On the contrary, his opponents claim, the president has specialised in grovelling to foreigners, snubbing allies, frittering away American prestige and pursuing chimerical peace initiatives.

Most of that critique is unfair. And yet what is true is that Mr Obama’s stress on a foreign policy of engagement and “reaching out” has delivered fairly meagre results.

The biggest success of this approach has come in a markedly improved relationship with Russia. But, after that, it is difficult to tick off many achievements. There has been no rapprochement with Iran, no breakthrough in the Middle East peace process, no victory in Afghanistan, no confirmation that a willingness to engage with the world in multilateral negotiations will yield better results than the muscular unilateralism of President George W.Bush.

So what has gone wrong? In part, the Obama administration may have been guilty of believing its own publicity. Mr Obama’s people hoped that he could change the world simply by not being Mr Bush.

In fact, there are certain realities that will constrain and channel US foreign policy whoever is sitting in the White House: the intransigence of Iran, the broken nature of Afghanistan, the increasing assertiveness of a rising China, the financial constraints on US power.

However, the “realist” argument that objective circumstances are likely to push all American presidents in similar directions is also not quite right.

The personality and beliefs of the commander-in-chief still matter in foreign policy – as the world may rediscover, if Mr Obama loses power to a Republican in 2012.

At present, the Republican party has no settled approach to the rest of the world. Even the Tea Party caucus, within the Republicans, contains some elements that want a more aggressive and militarised foreign policy, from Iran to Afghanistan, and another wing that is more isolationist.

But one belief that seems to unite most American conservatives is a belief in America’s exceptional virtue and unique role in the world. Mr Obama’s “on the one hand, on the other” answer to a question about whether he believed in “American exceptionalism” (posed to him by the Financial Times’ Edward Luce, some 18 months ago) is still remembered and regularly denounced by Republicans.

Ms Palin recently took to Facebook to bemoan the fact that: “We have a president, perhaps for the very first time since the founding of our republic, who doesn’t appear to believe that America is the greatest earthly force for good the world has ever seen.”

The problem with a foreign policy grounded in a belief that America is uniquely powerful and virtuous is that it assumes that the rules that apply to other nations do not apply to the US as well. As a result, the Tea Party people are not well adapted to cope with the inexorable rise of new centres of power around the world. They are liable to interpret setbacks and frustrations, at home and abroad, not as a consequence of the inevitable and growing constraints on American power – but as a result of some sort of “stab in the back”, whether by “liberal elites” in Washington, or conniving foreigners overseas. That, in turn, risks leading to an unstable foreign policy that is aggressive, self-righteous and self-pitying in equal measures.

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