Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany

It’s Getting Lonely Around Obama


By Christian Wernicke

Obama could become one of the true greats – or a total failure.

Translated By Ron Argentati

30 November 2009


Edited by Laura Berlinsky-Schine


The American President wants more war and more environmental protection. He is straining America’s powers to the maximum and inviting opposition, protests, and possibly even riots.

It’s lonely at the top, as America’s president will discover over the next few days. On Wednesday evening, Barack Obama will announce that he will escalate the war in Afghanistan by sending in more than 30,000 young Americans.

Just one week later, he will demand that his country renounces “the American Way of Life.” At the U.N. Climate Conference in Copenhagen, Obama will promise that the United States will reduce carbon dioxide emissions, abandoning a lifestyle considered around the world as ignorant waste and global self-destruction.

With both decisions, Obama is straining America’s powers to the maximum. The President will mobilize, in the strategic jargon formulated by his security advisors, the last reserves of military “hard power” and all the “soft power” of the largest and most innovative national economy on earth. In doing so, he is inviting opposition, protests, and, yes, perhaps even rioting.

Obama could become one of the true greats – or a total failure.

Obama’s double-track, decided in his eleventh month in office after weeks of often solitary pondering, will stir up the American people. The military escalation in the Hindu Kush, as well as the ecological rearmament at home, may well be the determining factors in the President’s fate. He could become one of the true greats. On the other hand, he could fail completely.

First, let us consider the Afghanistan War. Despite the fact that it began more than eight years ago, it is Obama’s war. During his election campaign, Obama repeatedly emphasized that the war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban was the “right war,” the “necessary war,” and even the “good war.” Afghanistan, at the time, was merely considered America’s second front, while the true battles were raging in Iraq.

Candidate Obama’s constant praise for righteous American power in the Hindu Kush served to show him as a tough guy whose career began in 2002 with a brief speech opposing then-President Bush’s plans for Iraq. Not everything he said in that speech was as critical for Obama the Senator as it would become for Obama the President. Now the casualties are occuring elsewhere: Kabul, Kandahar, and Khost are now the locations from which the flag-draped coffins are shipped back home.

“Finish the job.”

Obama now intends to send even more soldiers into this hell. More than 30,000 of America’s sons and daughters are supposed to win a war that is becoming increasingly unpopular at home. The Commander-in-Chief’s own party is deserting him. Three out of five Democrats demand the beginning of the end to all U.S. military engagements; on the home front, only the Republicans support the President’s war efforts, though they support none of his other proposals.

That is Obama’s first challenge: his speech must convince his once-ardent supporters – the leftmost one-third of the population - to stay the course. He will attempt to do so by convincing the people that under his leadership, he will “finish the job.” This rhetoric in itself is dangerous because he reinforces the impression that the world’s only superpower intends to pursue a policy of indefinite war.

He still has not won anything.

That fuels the Taliban and worries the NATO allies – and thus involves the risk that Obama will lose Republican support on Capitol Hill, something he absolutely needs in order to get his defense budget through Congress.

While America wages war in the Hindu Kush, the nation at home threatens to sink into a culture war. While it is true that Obama’s chances of getting a watered down version of his healthcare reform package through Congress before Christmas have improved, he still has not won anything, and he is already sounding the trumpets for the next battle.

At the end of next week, Obama will announce that by the year 2020, the U.S. will decrease its greenhouse gas output by three to four percent compared with emissions in 1990. That might sound pretty inconsequential, especially to European ears, but in the United States, it will cause a deafening echo.

Frustration is fermenting in suburbia.

America’s right wing will mobilize for battle, and it has a good chance of driving the President into a corner. Since Obama’s victory one year ago, public sentiment has done an about face: many of his supporters are becoming increasingly outraged that the government continues to pile debt upon debt while bailing out banks and automobile manufacturers.

Nearly everyone in America’s suburbs, the political center of the country, personally knows someone, a father or son, friend or neighbor, who has lost a job. Frustration is fermenting in suburbia along with mistrust of the government. Nowhere outside America has the percentage of people concerned about a threatening environmental collapse sunk lower than it has in the United States, where it now stands at about one in five.

To try to force new environmental laws through Congress under such conditions is, to put it mildly, courageous. It may even be political suicide. The left is annoyed, and the center is rebellious; Europe’s favorite American may soon become a very lonely President.