[Oe List ...] OBAMA and Reinhold Niebuhr

[Paula Philbrook]

*My daughter Rebekah at NYU forwarded this article*:
*Obama, Gospel and Verse David Brooks New York Times Op-Ed Page April 26,
2007 *
Sometimes you take a shot.
Yesterday evening I was interviewing Barack Obama and we were talking about
effective foreign aid programs in Africa. His voice was measured and
fatigued, and he was taking those little pauses candidates take when they're
afraid of saying something that might hurt them later on.
Out of the blue I asked, ''Have you ever read Reinhold Niebuhr?''Obama's
tone changed. ''I love him. He's one of my favorite philosophers.'' So I
asked, What do you take away from him?
''I take away,'' Obama answered in a rush of words, ''the compelling idea
that there's serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should
be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we
shouldn't use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away the
sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging
from naive idealism to bitter realism.''
My first impression was that for a guy who's spent the last few months
fund-raising, and who was walking off the Senate floor as he spoke, that's a
pretty good off-the-cuff summary of Niebuhr's ''The Irony of American
History.'' My second impression is that his campaign is an attempt to thread
the Niebuhrian needle, and it's really interesting to watch.
On the one hand, Obama hates, as Niebuhr certainly would have, the grand
Bushian rhetoric about ridding the world of evil and tyranny and
transforming the Middle East. But he also dislikes liberal muddle-headedness
on power politics. In ''The Audacity of Hope,'' he says liberal objectives
like withdrawing from Iraq, stopping AIDS and working more closely with our
allies may be laudable, ''but they hardly constitute a coherent national
security policy.''
In Chicago this week, Obama argued against the current tides of Democratic
opinion. There's been a sharp rise in isolationism among Democrats,
according to a recent Pew survey, so Obama argued for global engagement.
Fewer Democrats believe in peace through military strength, so Obama argued
for increasing the size of the military.
In other words, when Obama is confronted by what he sees as arrogant
unilateral action, he argues for humility. When he is confronted by what he
sees as dovish passivity, he argues for the hardheaded promotion of
democracy in the spirit of John F. Kennedy.
The question is, aside from rejecting the extremes, has Obama thought
through a practical foreign policy doctrine of his own -- a way to apply his
Niebuhrian instincts?
That question is hard to answer because he loves to have conversations about
conversations. You have to ask him every question twice, the first time to
allow him to talk about how he would talk about the subject, and the second
time so you can pin him down to the practical issues at hand.
If you ask him about the Middle East peace process, he will wax rhapsodic
about the need to get energetically engaged. He'll talk about the shared
interests all have in democracy and prosperity. But then when you ask him
concretely if the U.S. should sit down and talk with Hamas, he says no.
''There's no point in sitting down so long as Hamas says Israel doesn't have
the right to exist.''
When you ask about ways to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, he
talks grandly about marshaling a global alliance. But when you ask
specifically if an Iranian bomb would be deterrable, he's says yes: ''I
think Iran is like North Korea. They see nuclear arms in defensive terms, as
a way to prevent regime change.''
In other words, he has a tendency to go big and offer himself up as Bromide
Obama, filled with grand but usually evasive eloquence about bringing people
together and showing respect. Then, in a blink, he can go small and
concrete, and sound more like a community organizer than George F. Kennan.
Finally, more than any other major candidate, he has a tendency to see the
world in post-national terms. Whereas President Bush sees the war against
radical Islam as the organizing conflict of our time, Obama sees radical
extremism as one problem on a checklist of many others: global poverty,
nuclear proliferation, global warming. When I asked him to articulate the
central doctrine of his foreign policy, he said, ''The single objective of
keeping America safe is best served when people in other nations are secure
and feel invested.''
That's either profound or vacuous, depending on your point of view.
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