Com base em suas novas memórias, fica claro que Barack Obama acredita que processo é política. Mas nenhuma quantidade de “processo” resolverá os problemas que nos afligem - para isso, precisamos da vontade política que ele jamais teve como presidente.
Daniel Bessner
Resenha de A Promised Land de Barack Obama
Livres da confusão diária que acompanha ser um líder de alto escalão, os funcionários usam memórias para justificar suas escolhas e, eles esperam, reescrever a história de seu ponto de vista. As memórias, portanto, não são especialmente interessantes pelo que revelam sobre os acontecimentos de uma administração específica - a verdade não aparecerá até que os documentos saiam - mas pelo que dizem sobre como uma pessoa espera ser lembrada.
E dado o grande número de memórias lançadas desde que deixaram o cargo, os Obamanautas estão ansiosos para saber como serão lembrados. Você pode ler The Education of an Idealist de Samantha Power; Finding My Voice de Valerie Jarrett; The World as It Is de Ben Rhodes; Tough Love de Susan Rice; Obama: An Intimate Portrait de Pete Souza; Who Thought This Was a Good Idea? de Alyssa Mastromonaco; Yes We (Still) Can de Dan Pfeiffer; ou West Winging It de Pat Cunnane. De várias maneiras, esses livros recontam histórias da Casa Branca de Obama enquanto tentam explicar como um governo que pretendia pressagiar um novo tipo de política pós-partidária pavimentou o caminho para Donald Trump.
Mas, em última análise, esses livros são um espetáculo à parte - o que todo mundo realmente quer saber é o que o próprio grande kahuna pensa sobre as coisas. Finalmente, após quatro anos de espera, podemos começar a responder a essa pergunta lendo o livro de 768 páginas de Barack Obama, A Promised Land, o primeiro livro de memórias planejado de dois volumes pelo qual o presidente recebeu um adiantamento de $ 65 milhões, eclipsando o pagamento recorde de Bill Clinton de US $ 15 milhões por sua autobiografia de 2004.
Para os socialistas, A Promised Land é inegavelmente frustrante. O livro adota uma forma circular: Obama afirma que seu horizonte é a posição de esquerda; detalha como qualquer objetivo específico era impossível de alcançar; e argumenta que sua solução de compromisso foi, portanto, uma vitória pequena, mas necessária no caminho para o progresso.
Como isso sugere, Obama, a quem nunca faltou confiança, está satisfeito com suas realizações no cargo. Ele tem certeza de que fez o seu "melhor", especialmente porque seguiu o processo. E é o processo que fornece a estrela-guia para a presidência de Obama.
Com um processo sólido - aquele em que fui capaz de esvaziar meu ego e realmente ouvir, seguindo os fatos e a lógica da melhor forma que pude e considerando-os ao lado de meus objetivos e meus princípios - percebi que poderia tomar decisões difíceis e ainda dormir tranquilo à noite, sabendo, no mínimo, que ninguém na minha posição, com as mesmas informações, poderia ter tomado a decisão melhor.
Para Obama, processo é política; ele é o sujeito final do "fim da história". Para ele, e para os Obamanautas que o serviram, as questões fundamentais da modernidade - Como organizamos uma sociedade? O que significa democracia? Qual é o melhor sistema de economia política? Os Estados Unidos deveriam “liderar” o mundo? - foram questionados e respondidos. E é por isso que Obama acreditava que seu projeto era restauracionista, no qual seu principal dever como presidente era restaurar a fé em um sistema americano danificado pelos fracassos de George W. Bush. Mesmo a eleição de Donald J. Trump, cuja vitória foi impulsionada por pessoas comuns desgostosas com esse mesmo sistema, não pode obrigá-lo a fazer perguntas fundamentais sobre a política que liderou por oito anos.
Essa incapacidade sugere que a presidência de Obama, inicialmente identificada como um exemplo da eflorescência do liberalismo, na verdade sinalizou seu declínio. Liberais como Obama não podem mais fornecer soluções satisfatórias para os problemas que atormentam os americanos. Após seus dois mandatos, os Estados Unidos permanecem altamente desiguais; as tropas dos EUA ainda estão atoladas no Afeganistão; e pouco foi feito para conter a mudança climática. Nenhuma quantidade de “processo” resolverá esses problemas - o que é necessário é vontade política para transformar o sistema do qual eles surgiram.
E é justamente essa vontade que Obama não só não teve,como considerou de certa forma ridícula.
Essa incapacidade sugere que a presidência de Obama, inicialmente identificada como um exemplo da eflorescência do liberalismo, na verdade sinalizou seu declínio. Liberais como Obama não podem mais fornecer soluções satisfatórias para os problemas que atormentam os americanos. Após seus dois mandatos, os Estados Unidos permanecem altamente desiguais; as tropas dos EUA ainda estão atoladas no Afeganistão; e pouco foi feito para conter a mudança climática. Nenhuma quantidade de “processo” resolverá esses problemas - o que é necessário é vontade política para transformar o sistema do qual eles surgiram.
E é justamente essa vontade que Obama não só não teve,como considerou de certa forma ridícula.
A ideia de América
Existem razões pessoais para sua ligação com os Estados Unidos. Como filho de uma americana branca e de um queniano negro que passou a infância no Havaí e na Indonésia, Obama por muito tempo se sentiu “inseguro de onde [ele] pertencia”. Foi somente quando ele se identificou com os Estados Unidos, igualando essencialmente seu próprio sucesso ao de sua nação, que ele finalmente “localizou uma comunidade e um propósito para [sua] vida”.
Mas como um homem negro, bem versado nos crimes cometidos por americanos tanto em casa quanto no exterior - na verdade, ele se mudou para a Indonésia um ano depois que um genocídio assistido pelos EUA matou pelo menos meio milhão de pessoas lá - se identifica tão plenamente com o Estados Unidos? A resposta é surpreendentemente simples: para Obama, “a ideia da América, a promessa da América” sempre foi mais importante do que as realidades americanas.
Em nenhum lugar isso é mais verdadeiro do que no campo da política externa. Assim como muitos internacionalistas liberais, Obama entende que a história recente dos EUA está repleta de erros que tiveram efeitos desastrosos na vida das pessoas. Ao recontar a história do período pós-Segunda Guerra Mundial, por exemplo, ele admite que os americanos “curvaram as instituições globais para servir aos imperativos da Guerra Fria ou os ignoraram completamente; intrometíamos-nos nos assuntos de outros países, às vezes com resultados desastrosos; nossas ações muitas vezes contradiziam os ideais de democracia, autodeterminação e direitos humanos que professávamos incorporar”. No entanto, e em contradição com a história que acabou de contar, afirma que os Estados Unidos abraçaram simultaneamente uma “vontade de agir em nome de um bem comum”.
Obama nem tenta enquadrar esse círculo. Para ele, a ideia de América sempre triunfa sobre sua realidade. Pelo menos Trump admitiu que os Estados Unidos, como todas as grandes potências, abrigavam um bom número de “assassinos”.
E talvez seja por isso que Obama, que fez uma campanha em que prometia transformar os Estados Unidos, não conseguiu aproveitar o momento histórico e mudar um sistema que gerou duas intervenções estrangeiras catastróficas e a pior depressão econômica desde os anos 1930. Certo de que o arco da história americana se inclina para a justiça, ele estava satisfeito em buscar programas de melhoria que preservassem as estruturas que haviam falhado com tantos.
Esperança, não mudança
Portanto, não é surpreendente que, ao final do mandato de Obama, a política externa dos Estados Unidos tenha permanecido relativamente inalterada. Embora ele tenha retirado com sucesso as tropas do Iraque, a nação manteve milhares de soldados no Afeganistão; liderou uma intervenção desastrosa na Líbia; vendeu armas e forneceu inteligência à Arábia Saudita para apoiar sua intervenção no Iêmen; deu apoio aos rebeldes sírios e enviou forças de operações especiais ao país; e não conseguiu atenuar as tensões com a China e a Rússia.
Most important, the structure of US empire endured: the nation still maintained hundreds of foreign military bases; still spent hundreds of billions of dollars on its military; and still had hundreds of thousands of troops deployed abroad. For all of Obama’s talk about “hope and change,” he was far more interested in the former than the latter.
When Obama first burst onto the national scene, it didn’t necessarily look like he would be a politician of the status quo. The first prominent speech of his career was delivered in 2002 in the run-up to the Iraq War. The then-state-senator criticized the “dumb” and “rash” invasion being planned by “weekend warriors” like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, presciently predicting that “even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.”
But even in this early speech, the seeds that would germinate into Obama’s static foreign policy were present. He made clear, for instance, that he endorsed wars “in defense of our freedom” (a vague phrase if ever there was one) and that, though he believed Iraq was a dumb war of choice, Afghanistan and the war on terror were righteous wars of necessity.
Even when he ran for president on an anti–Iraq War platform, Obama took pains to illustrate his embrace of the foreign policy status quo. He refused to sign a pledge that committed him to reducing the defense budget, and he publicly stated that he was willing to violate other nations’ sovereignty if it meant the United States would capture Osama bin Laden.
Nevertheless, Obama did differ from 2008 primary contenders like Hillary Clinton in one crucial respect: he vigorously endorsed diplomacy. During one primary debate, he declared that, unlike his opponents, he was prepared to sit down and negotiate with Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and North Korea’s Kim Jong-il. Though excoriated for this rather quotidian position — an example of the derangement of US national security discourse in the years after the September 11 attacks — Obama held firm. Indeed, the president’s greatest foreign policy accomplishment, the diplomatic opening to Cuba, stemmed from this early willingness to engage with US adversaries.
O anti-establishment no poder
Besides his commitment to withdraw troops from Iraq, Obama’s embrace of diplomacy was his most significant departure from the Bush administration’s foreign policy. In most other ways, he remained tied to the status quo of an increasingly delegitimized empire. This is why Obama’s initial national security picks read like a who’s who of the foreign policy establishment. He asked Robert Gates, “a Republican, a Cold War hawk, [and] a card-carrying member of the national security establishment” to remain on as secretary of defense; he appointed James L. Jones, a retired Marine Corps general who had previously led the European Command, to be his national security advisor; he installed Leon Panetta, Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency; and he asked Hillary Clinton to become his secretary of state. All of these people, Obama notes, “believed that American leadership” — i.e., US hegemony — “was necessary to keep the world moving in a better direction.”
Obama defends these choices in terms of their supposed practicality. While explaining why he requested that Gates stay on as defense secretary, for example, he declares that “any wholesale turnover in the Defense Department seemed fraught with risk.” This is no doubt true. But if Obama was serious about “moving America’s national security apparatus in a new direction,” it’s strange to appoint one of the most establishmentarian figures possible to one of the most important positions in his administration.
He also claims that people like Gates (and Jones, and Panetta, and Clinton) allowed him to oversee a more effective national security process, in which he was forced to “hear a broad range of perspectives” and “continually test even my deepest assumptions against people who had the stature and confidence to tell me when I was wrong.” (Obama, of course, appointed no anti-imperialists, or even heterodox foreign policy thinkers, to his national security team, despite the fact that they, too, would’ve tested his “deepest assumptions.”)
Obama’s choices were the correct ones for him. After becoming president, he quickly discovered that he “was a reformer, conservative in temperament if not in vision.” And predictably, the national security debates in the White House ran the gamut from A to B, with Obama proudly noting that “even the more liberal members of my team . . . had no qualms about the use of ‘hard power’ to go after terrorists and were scornful of leftist critics who made a living blaming the United States for every problem around the globe.” Within the first months of his presidency, it was obvious that no genuine strategic change in the US approach to the world was going to emanate from the Obama White House.
Partially for this reason, the anti-establishment energies that engendered Obama’s election either went nowhere or migrated to the right wing, helping prepare the path for another Washington outsider to win the presidency in 2016.
Comandante em chefe?
So, what did Obama do while in office? Ironically, given that he was elected on an anti–Iraq War platform, very little of A Promised Land is devoted to explaining the president’s decision to remove most troops from that country. In Obama’s telling, this choice was a no-brainer, and he rapidly approved a plan to withdraw the majority of troops within nineteen months (though many Americans stayed in the country for years; today, a few thousand troops remain, as US diplomats traipse around an embassy that cost $750 million).
Afghanistan presented a more significant problem. According to Obama, it was critical for the United States to prevent Hamid Karzai’s government from falling to the Taliban, as this was the only way to ensure that Afghanistan would stop serving as a “terrorist” safe haven. At the same time, Obama avows that he had little desire to transform the country into a functioning democracy, which he believed would take years, if it was ever accomplished.
Military leaders, however, disagreed, maintaining that if they had enough resources, they could accomplish the nation-building mission that George W. Bush had assigned them. Furthermore, many high-ranking officers didn’t believe that a civilian who had never served in uniform knew how to conduct a war better than them.
The stage was thus set for a confrontation between the White House and the military.
Soon after Obama entered office, the Joint Chiefs of Staff asked him to send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. Though he refused to deploy that high a number, in mid-February of 2009, he agreed to send 17,000 troops and 4,000 military trainers to the country.
One month later, Obama received a report on Afghanistan that argued in favor of adopting a policy centered on nation-building. While the president claims he didn’t want to approve this plan, “the alternatives were worse. The stakes involved — the risks of a possible collapse of the Afghan government or the Taliban gaining footholds in major cities — were simply too high for us not to act.” As such, in late March, he announced the adoption of this new strategy.
Soon thereafter, General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of military forces in Afghanistan, advocated an even more expansive counterinsurgency program. In this, the general had the full support of the military. Though Obama again affirms that he was reticent to embrace McChrystal’s strategy, he simultaneously argues that he just “couldn’t ignore the unanimous recommendation of experienced generals.” To determine what to do, Obama retreated into the process, holding a series of National Security Council meetings to “methodically work through the details of McChrystal’s proposal.”
The military wasn’t having any of it. To circumvent Obama’s process, David Petraeus (commander of Central Command), Mike Mullen (chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), and McChrystal all gave public statements endorsing the latter’s strategy, which engendered a flurry of media coverage and impelled Republicans to come out in favor of the military’s preferred approach.
This was a serious challenge to Obama, an obvious attempt by the military to undermine the will of the constitutionally mandated commander in chief. To his credit, Obama quickly nipped the mutiny in the bud, summoning Gates and Mullen to his office, dressing them down, and forcing them to promise that the military wouldn’t undercut him in the future. (He later dismissed McChrystal for insulting members of his administration in an article printed in Rolling Stone.)
Though Obama disciplined the generals, their insouciance reveals that the military has become far too emboldened. As the president highlights, when he entered office, he learned that “basic policy decisions — about war and peace, but also about America’s budget priorities, diplomatic goals, and the possible trade-offs between security and other values — had been steadily farmed out to the Pentagon and the CIA.” This is a serious problem for a civilian-run society and should become a major focus of criticism for the American left, especially given that, like Trump, Joe Biden decided to nominate a retired military officer as his secretary of defense.
Ironically, and tragically, the generals needn’t have worried: in the end, Obama decided to send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. As usual, all the searching questions Obama asked himself during the process — e.g., “Does anyone think that spinning our wheels in Afghanistan for another ten years will impress our allies and strike fear in our enemies?” — didn’t change the final decision to deploy more and more troops. In the end, Obama trusted the experts, and as a matter of course, the foreign policy status quo endured.
Today, thousands of US troops remain deployed in Afghanistan, and it was recently revealed by the Intercept that the CIA trained death squads that murdered at least fifty-one civilians, including children as young as eight.
No palco mundial
Surprisingly for someone who spent his youth on the peripheries of the American empire in Hawaii and Indonesia, Obama displays a remarkably dismissive view of countries and leaders outside the North Atlantic. In particular, he suggests that it’s ridiculous to imagine that the so-called BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) are ready to exert significant influence on the global stage. Most insultingly (at least from Obama’s perspective), he says that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the Brazilian president who is perhaps the most successful center-left politician in modern history, has “the scruples of a Tammany Hall boss.”
If only Obama had the scruples of a Tammany Hall boss — then he might have rewarded the millions of workers who voted for him with some semblance of patronage to improve their lot in life.
In addition to criticizing Lula, Obama remarks that Vladimir Putin leads a regime that “resembled a criminal syndicate as much as it did a traditional government”; laments the “corruption and incompetence” of South Africa’s African National Congress; and describes India as “a chaotic and impoverished place.” Without denying the elements of truth in these descriptions, it’s not as if the United States doesn’t have its own inequities and problems that, under Obama’s framework, should prevent it from “leading” the world. The truth is that Obama simply thinks it’s the United States’ right and duty to enjoy its imperial privileges.
Indeed, Obama affirms that, for all their complaining, the world’s countries actually desire US hegemony. What struck him most, he avows, is that “at every international forum I attended . . . even those who complained about America’s role in the world still relied on us to keep the system afloat.” For Obama, the United States remains the indispensable nation, the only country willing “to act beyond narrow self-interest.” In contrast, he argues that the BRICS, and presumably other nations in the Global South, “abided by the established rules only insofar as their own interests were advanced . . . and they appeared happy to violate them when they thought they could get away with it.”
After all, it’s not as if the United States has ever disregarded international law by overthrowing democratically elected foreign governments.
As this suggests, Obama devoted himself to “putting out fires that predated [his] presidency” and restoring confidence in a “damaged U.S. leadership.” If he failed to achieve these goals, he worried that the “older, darker forces [that] were gathering strength” and replacing “the hopeful tide of democratization, liberalization, and integration that had swept the globe after the end of the Cold War” would ultimately triumph. Tragically, he couldn’t see that the exact opposite was true: restoring the pre-Bush ancien régime only heightened the contradictions that engendered Bush’s presidency in the first place — contradictions that later impelled Trump’s victory. What was needed was a revolution that Obama refused to lead.
Imperialismo sem alegria
Embora ele mal mencione drones em A Promised Land, Obama aborda o fato de que, sob sua liderança, milhares de pessoas no Sul Global, especialmente homens jovens, foram assassinados. Desanimadoramente, se previsivelmente, tudo o que ele pode fazer como explicação - e, supõe-se, expiação - é oferecer seus pensamentos e orações.
Eu queria salvá-los de alguma forma - mandá-los para a escola, dar-lhes uma troca, drenar o ódio que estava enchendo suas cabeças. E, no entanto, o mundo do qual eles faziam parte, e a maquinaria que eu comandava, mais frequentemente me fazia matá-los.
Esta declaração é típica de A Promised Land. Superficialmente, parece bastante curioso: algum outro presidente foi tão aberto sobre como articular as tensões de ser o chefe do império mais poderoso do mundo? Mas, na verdade, esse solilóquio termina exatamente onde a formulação de políticas deveria começar. Obama nunca considerou seriamente como poderia alterar as estruturas de troca e distribuição, as estruturas do império que ele lidera, que “deformaram e atrofiaram” as mentes dos jovens no Iêmen, Afeganistão, Paquistão, Iraque e Somália com os quais ele afirma se importar. Em vez disso, sua fé absoluta na ideia americana permite que ele não faça nada além de se sentir mal. Embora ele “não tivesse prazer” em atacar “terroristas”, no final, “o trabalho era necessário”, e ponto final.
In fact, Obama didn’t really disagree with Bush’s anti-terrorism strategy. “Unlike some on the left,” he affirms, he had “never engaged in wholesale condemnation of the Bush administration’s approach to counterterrorism (CT).” His intent while in office was merely “to fix those aspects of our CT effort that needed fixing, rather than tearing it out root and branch to start over.” It’s thus not especially surprising that Obama named John Brennan, a former member of the CIA who had served as acting director of Bush’s National Counterterrorism Center, as his counterterrorism head. As with Gates, Jones, Panetta, and Clinton, this was about as establishment a pick as one could have possibly made.
Indeed, a little more than two years after assuming the presidency, Obama committed the military to a new regime change effort, this time in Libya. As usual, Obama avows that he “found the idea of waging a new war in a distant country with no strategic importance to the United States to be less than prudent.” And, as usual, he made the militarist choice anyway.
Obama provides humanitarian, multilateralist, and pragmatic explanations for his decision to topple the government of Muammar Gaddafi: Gaddafi was set to massacre innocents in Benghazi; the Arab League had voted to support an international intervention; and he had developed a plan that he believed would engender regime change “swiftly, with the support of allies, and with the parameters of our mission clearly spelled out.” Of course, we all know how the story ended: today, Libya is mired in chaos, home to incredible violence and suffering.
Esperando nas asas
Obama ran for office claiming to be an Abraham Lincoln or a Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In actuality, he governed like a Bill Clinton, confining himself to the politics of earlier generations. His administration remained tied to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and other despotic governments; dismissed Putin’s worries about NATO and European Union expansion; did almost nothing to democratize international governing organizations; violated Pakistan’s sovereignty to assassinate bin Laden; and paid embarrassing obeisance to Israel. While Obama defends these and other positions by claiming they were the only “realistic” options, for him, “realism” seems to mean doing nothing to upend the traditional US approach to the world.
It’s for this reason that it’s impossible to believe Obama’s assertion that he “was determined to shift a certain mindset that had gripped not just the Bush administration but much of Washington — one that saw threats around every corner, took a perverse pride in acting unilaterally, and considered military action as an almost routine means of addressing foreign policy challenges.” Though the tone of foreign policy did genuinely change under Obama — unlike Bush, he was willing to express humility — this is cold comfort for those who continue to labor under the boot of American empire. When it came down to it, the military bases remained; the budget remained; and the violence remained.
On a visit to India, Obama offered a comment about Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that reflected his own blinkered approach to governance. “Like me,” Obama remarks, Singh
had come to believe that [slow, painstaking reform] was all any of us could expect from democracy. ... Not revolutionary leaps or major cultural overhauls; not a fix for every social pathology or lasting answers for those in search of purpose and meaning in their lives. Just the observance of rules that allowed us to sort out or at least tolerate our differences, and government policies that raised living standards and improved education enough to temper humanity’s baser impulses.
According to Obama, the best a president could do was tinker at the margins.
But what Trump’s election demonstrated was that tinkering was not, and will never be, enough. When a system fails its people, the people will demand something different. And this is precisely what Obama was congenitally unable to offer, to which the numerous districts that flipped from Obama to Trump in 2016 testify. Ordinary Americans know that the system isn’t working for them, and when transformation is on the ballot, they will vote for it, whether it’s Obama-style “hope and change” or Trump-style “America first.”
Ultimately, Obama cannot admit his own failures. At one point in A Promised Land, he goes so far as to ask himself whether it was
But what Trump’s election demonstrated was that tinkering was not, and will never be, enough. When a system fails its people, the people will demand something different. And this is precisely what Obama was congenitally unable to offer, to which the numerous districts that flipped from Obama to Trump in 2016 testify. Ordinary Americans know that the system isn’t working for them, and when transformation is on the ballot, they will vote for it, whether it’s Obama-style “hope and change” or Trump-style “America first.”
Ultimately, Obama cannot admit his own failures. At one point in A Promised Land, he goes so far as to ask himself whether it was
possible that abstract principles and high-minded ideals were and always would be nothing more than a pretense, a palliative, a way to beat back despair, but no match for the more primal urges that really moved us, so that no matter what we said or did, history was sure to run along its predetermined course, an endless cycle of fear, hunger and conflict, dominance and weakness?
Obama seems to think that the answer to this question is “yes”; that there is little anyone can do to really change the world. This is a nihilistic approach to governance that denies the very real power of the president of the United States. It’s also ahistorical, as the manifold revolutionary transformations that have occurred in the last century demonstrate.
In retrospect, it appears that Obama was the exact wrong president for the exact right time. Now, we can only hope that a genuinely visionary leader, aligned with grassroots movements and dedicated to pushing politics in a more progressive direction, one day becomes president.
In retrospect, it appears that Obama was the exact wrong president for the exact right time. Now, we can only hope that a genuinely visionary leader, aligned with grassroots movements and dedicated to pushing politics in a more progressive direction, one day becomes president.
Infelizmente, se a história recente revelou alguma coisa, é que podemos ficar esperando um bom tempo.
Colaborador
Daniel Bessner is the Joff Hanauer Honors Associate Professor in Western Civilization in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. He is also a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and a contributing editor at Jacobin.
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