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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Perspectives |
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Politics |
In Whose Shoes Is Obama Standing?
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| Will Barack Obama be able to overturn the old framework of American Exceptionalism from its foreign policy to lay foundations for a more equitable relationship with the world? |
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Published : 1 November 2010 |
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JASON REED / REUTERS |
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| President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama welcoming Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh and wife Gursharan Kaur to the White House in November 2009.
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OR MOST AMERICAN LIBERAL INTELLECTUALS, the astonishing election of a black man to the nation’s
highest office provided the main narrative
needed to understand Barack Obama. The president was defined by his race—and the president’s race, in
turn, defined a new moment in American history. |
Beautiful metaphors were used to describe Obama’s ascent.
Cassandra Butts, Obama’s classmate at Harvard Law
School and a longtime friend, called him “a translator”— someone
who could interpret the black experience for white
Americans, and the white for black Americans, in the process
cultivating a constituency sizable enough to elect a president.
In similar terms, the black politican and civil rights leader
John Lewis—who marched with Martin Luther King,
Jr—saw Obama as the culmination of the struggle for civil
rights. The new president, Lewis said, “is what comes at
the end of that bridge in Selma,” where civil rights activists
were beaten by Alabama police during a march in 1965. And
David Remnick, the New Yorker editor, borrowed Lewis’
metaphor for the title of his epic biography on Obama: The
Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama.
Beyond the historic event of his election, Obama has pursued
an ambitious agenda during his two years in office: he
has passed a national healthcare bill, presided over a massive
economic-stimulus programme, initiated financial reforms,
established a commission to police securities fraud, and
begun to bring back troops from Iraq (though he has sent
30,000 more to Afghanistan). In all these areas, of course,
there is scope to do much more: Obama’s critics on the Left
have insisted on this point, while his enemies on the Right
have been outraged by what he’s already accomplished. But
it’s clear that he has worked to address some of the more
serious issues facing the United States today.
As Obama makes his first state visit to India this month,
it seems appropriate to question whether the man whose
election inspired so much hope outside the United States
can truly recalibrate America’s relations with the rest of the
world. Since the time of Harry Truman, who presided over
the end of World War II, presidents have been guided by
the idea of American Exceptionalism—the idea, diffuse but
powerful, that America alone is destined to lead the world.
In matters of foreign affairs, this exceptionalist doctrine
has given the United States a faith in its own providential
chosen-ness, and a sense that it need not always play by the
rules that bind other states.
Today, the era in which America’s status as the world’s
sole superpower could not be challenged looks to be
drawing to an end; can Obama again serve as a bridge, this time between Washington and the rest of the world? Or
will the persistence of the exceptionalist idea, and its sense
that the United States stands above and apart from its peers,
make Obama little different from the 43 white faces who
occupied the Oval Office before him?
Those of us who have grown up and lived in the developing
world—especially in countries that did not take the American
side during the Cold War—hardly need reminders
of how the United States has previously chosen to flex its
superpower muscles. India, whose stance of non-alignment
displeased Washington, suffered under economic sanctions
for much of the 1970s and again between 1998 and 2001;
during the 1950s and 60s, India faced hurdles in its access
to international trade, and it still suffers from double-standards
in America’s interpretation of trade laws.
Such are the dividends of American Exceptionalism,
which offers some explanation to those of us, elsewhere in
the world, who wonder why American politicians often act
as if their country can do as it likes, while anyone who wants
to do business with the United States must conduct it exclusively
on America’s terms. In the case of India, there are
more than a few examples of such American high-handedness,
as negotiations between the two countries have rarely
proceeded from an equal footing.
Consider, as an example, the case of agriculture, where
the US and India still have considerable disagreements.
After seven ministerial rounds, the WTO-mediated global
trade talks collapsed in 2008. The US was not willing to reduce the subsidies it had been
giving away to American farmers,
which in India’s opinion “risked
the livelihood of millions of farmers”
in this country.
For decades and decades, the
United States had consistently
pressured India to end its own
farm subsidies—one item on
the menu of free-market economic
liberalisation and deregulation
known as the Washington
Consensus. While the US insisted
that other countries remove
subsidies, it continued to provide
lavish support to its own farmers:
in 2007, the year before the crucial
WTO talks, the US Congress passed a farm bill that included
subsidies worth 12.6 trillion rupees. And in 2008, in
a rare assertion of power, the Indian-led block of 100 countries
walked out from the WTO talks, accusing the United
States of “sacrificing the world’s poor for the big commercial
interests.”
Agriculture in the United States looks very different
from India: the mythical small farmer is nearly extinct, and
farms today are large commercial operations, many of them
owned by enormous corporations, and highly mechanised
and automated. In India, of course, the picture could not be
more different: farming is predominated by small landholders,
it is highly labour-intensive, and its crop yields are low
compared to the US. Less than three percent of Americans
are dependent on agriculture to make a living; in India that
figure is more than 60 percent, comprising subsistence farmers
and farm labourers, whose only security comes from
the land they till.
The playing field between Indian and American farms,
therefore, has never been a level one—but the American
subsidies make it massively unequal. Look at just one crop,
cotton: India is the world’s second-largest cotton producer,
and the US is number three. Cultivation in India is spread
across ten states, and more than 15 million Indian farmers
grow cotton; the comparable number for the US is only
25,000, concentrated in the American south. The Indian
government offers hardly any support to its cotton farmers,
while American cotton farms receive an average equivalent of 5 million rupees in annual subsidies. Cotton farmers from
Vidarbha and Telangana made national news here recently,
but not for their prosperity. A suicide epidemic broke out
among their ranks, as they found themselves crippled with
debts that ranged from 5,000 to 50,000 rupees. One American
farmer’s annual subsidy, in other words, could have
saved 100 or 1,000 lives in Vidarbha.
Invoking the same feeling of unfairness, the leader of a
little known West African country, Burkina Faso, sounded
the alarm bells recently that his country’s collapsing cotton
sector is bringing down the nation’s economy. He was
very angry at the exceptions US takes from the WTO regulations.
Being protective about one’s own people is fine. But in
that case, from India to Burkina Faso, you should let protectionism
rule trade. But if you drive the whole world towards
laissez-faire, then follow the rules.
Exceptionalism has been a bipartisan constant in American
politics for most of the 20th century, and no political
party has a monopoly on faith in the nation’s uniqueness. It
was a Democratic congressman, Colin Peterson, who boldly
proclaimed during the debate over the subsidies in the
2008 Farm Bill: “I want to write a Farm Bill that’s good for
(American) agriculture. If somebody wants to sue us (at the
WTO), we’ve got a lot of lawyers in Washington.”
The same is the case with Kyoto Protocol. There was a big
opportunity in 1997 if the US had kept its word and reduced
carbon emissions. But by 2009 Copenhagen, the world became
multi-polar, and countries like India and China became
more assertive, by the might of their growth stories. An
attitude of “Americans exempted themselves all these years,
so why can’t we do what they did once?” is heard more often
in the bilateral talks from more and more countries in the
areas of trade, rights, environment, and security and policing.
But breaking laws, non-compliance, and manipulation
aren’t doing any good from whoever it comes. Someone somewhere
is suffering unduly because of you protecting the
commercial interest of a powerful few in your country.
Now, can Barack Obama, the bridge in many ways within
the US, move away from the exceptionalist worldview and
make his country interact with the world differently? He has
the potential at least. The will he’s shown in withdrawing
the troops from Iraq exemplifies that.
However, the Tea Party movement—the new conservative
drive that has vouched to undo what Obama is doing—seems to be gaining ground. If the revisionist slogans such as
‘we want our country back,’ end up derailing the promised
‘change,’ then it’s bad news for the US and the world.
Sensitive sectors like agriculture cannot be defined the
world over by a few family-owned, agri-business companies
such as Dunavant and Cargill, and their lobbyists in K
Street.
Whether Obama charms India with his rockstar aura is
not the question. He may well do so. But if he fails to negotiate
with India—and the rest of the world—from a more
equitable position, setting aside the baggage of American
Exceptionalism, then the world will have no choice but to
measure him against what he often decried during his own
presidential campaign: “The inability of our leaders to stand
in other folks’ shoes.”
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Mira Kamdar
14 November 2010
08:25 PM
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Excellent piece Vinod. Unfortunately, Indian corporates are stumping to advance much of the US agenda that you rightly point out is inequitable, itself shaped by powerful corporations. The promotion of policies favorable to big agribusiness and harmful to farmers and consumers is just one example. What is missing in a more "equitable" relationship between India and the United States is the voice and interests of small farmers, ordinary workers and average citizens -- in both countries. The relationship has largely been hijacked by the CEO forum and the USIBC - CII partnership which now hosts a meeting to which Obama or Singh pay obeisance at every one of their joint get-togethers. The two governments essentially work to advance their countries' respective corporate interests, which increasingly overlap, at the expense of the interests of less powerful ordinary citizens only government can protect from corporate greed.
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