They've given the prize to terrorists (Yasir Arafat), war makers (Le Duc Tho), and frauds before, as well as many true heroes of peace (Martin Luther King Jr., Aung San Suu Kyi, Nelson Mandela, and on and on). But this may be the first time the Olympics committee--whoops, I meant the Nobel committee--has awarded the peace prize to an infant. I mean that metaphorically, of course: the Obama administration is just 10 months old, and while there have been many fine words from the president in that time, he hasn't done anything in the toddler stage of his tenure that comes close to the lifetime of sacrifice and courage that earned the award for such people as Lech Wałęsa, Andrei Sakharov, or Anwar Sadat. (Well, OK, he helped to bring the world back from the brink of another Great Depression, but if that's the reason for the award, why not give it to Ben Bernanke too?) This prize shows two things: one, the prize committee wishes to express the world's delight at being rid of George W. Bush; and two, there is still a yearning out there to have the "old America" back.(Click here to follow Michael Hirsh)
But as popular as Obama remains abroad, his career trajectory is starting to remind me more and more of another Nobel Peace Prize winner who was a major world leader. Today's Obamamania is not unlike Gorbymania. You may not remember Gorbymania"”it marked a brief period of giddy enthusiasm for the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, and ran from the late 1980s up until the dismantling of his country in late December 1991. For Westerners, the genial Gorbachev was such a stunning departure from the Soviet leaders of yore and seemed so enlightened in his attitudes"”seeking to dramatically reform the Soviet Union with perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness)"”that he became wildly popular across the Cold War divide. During his frequent visits to U.S. cities and other countries, people would line the streets on the off chance he might jump from his motorcade to press the flesh, which he often did, and TV producers panted to book him. Plump Gorby dolls even sold by the gross in U.S. department stores.
Gorbachev won the Nobel in 1990, at the height of his international celebrity. Then it all came abruptly to an end. It turned out that Gorbachev didn't understand a basic point: the communist system he was trying to reform was unreformable. His popularity disappeared with the Soviet Union. And he became a despised figure in post-Soviet Russia. His good nature no longer conveyed hope but weakness.
I wonder whether something reminiscent of this might be happening to Obama. Granted, the comparison is more than a little overripe, even alarmist--the United States is still the world's most powerful country, and it is in no danger of collapsing like the Soviet Union. But there are disturbing parallels. An almost giddy sense of hope accompanied Obama's inauguration, especially in other countries still quaking under the trauma of the Bush years. And Americans still line the streets just hoping to catch a glimpse of the presidential motorcade when Obama comes to town"”at least in some cities. Despite the message coming from Oslo (keep at it, Barack!), those hopes are fading fast. As Obama finds himself bogged down in one nearly impossible issue after another"”financial reform, health care, budget deficits, Afghanistan"”while meeting with a solid wall of GOP opposition, some around the world wonder whether the America everyone used to look to for leadership is unreformable itself.
The last decade has seen multiple disasters and missed opportunities emanating from Washington: the diversion away from Afghanistan to Iraq; the long period of fiscal, regulatory, and financial recklessness; the squandering of global leadership over climate change; and the carbon-based global economy. As a result, other countries are no longer interested in looking to Washington as a model on anything, and after 10 months Obama frankly hasn't given them enough substance to change their minds. At the IMF/World Bank fall meetings in Istanbul, which took place this week, U.S. economist Joseph Stiglitz says he was struck by the outright contempt he encountered. "There was a real discounting, a dismissal of our advice. They think we have the politics of a banana republic," Stiglitz said.
Many foreign financial officials like the reform proposals that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner brought to Istanbul. But they're still waiting for the details. Sure, higher capital requirements for banks are great, but how much higher? Yes, we would like to see more derivatives trades done on standardized exchanges or clearinghouses where it can be monitored--but how rigid is that requirement going to be? The more time that goes by without fleshing out these proposals, the less likely reform becomes. And as with so many other issues, like health care and climate-change standards, Obama is deferring to Capitol Hill to fill in the details. That's dangerous. Just this week the financial industry (aided by pro-Wall Street "new Democrats") sought to gut a bill that Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, is drafting, slipping in provisions that would have made derivatives trading even less regulated than it is now. "The rest of the world is concerned that all we'll do is straighten the paintings a little bit and fix up the furniture and say we're fine," said Harvard's Ken Rogoff, a former IMF chief economist. "You hear a lot of concern in Europe that the U.S. has exercised too much restraint with Wall Street. There is the [German Chancellor] Angela Merkel view that U.S. regulation was the lowest common denominator, and that's why money flowed to us."
The lack of faith can be measured, perhaps, in the long slide of the dollar, and regularly rising rumors that other major nations--often led by China"”are looking for new ways around the dollar's role as the global currency. The latest such rumor, reported by the British newspaper The Independent, was that major nations had recently held secret meetings about pricing oil in a "basket of currencies," rather than the dollar.
All is not lost for Obama as it was with Gorby (though Gorbachev didn't know it at the time). Leaders abroad haven't forgotten that Obama is still largely engaged in cleaning up the Augean stables' worth of disaster that Bush left him, especially when it came to letting the Taliban return in Afghanistan and allowing Wall Street to run amok. That's probably the main reason he won the Nobel Prize. A year ago there were signs that other countries would mount a real insurgency against U.S. economic leadership. "Europe must promote the idea of a radical reform of global capitalism," French President Nicolas Sarkozy said in a speech to the European Parliament in late 2008. "Can we, those of us in the rest of the world, go on financing the deficits of a leading world power without having any say? The answer is clearly no." Actually, the answer was clearly yes, since the financing of U.S. deficits is still going on. At the much-touted G20 meeting in Pittsburgh in late September there was more congeniality than contention, and Sarkozy has fallen silent. For many officials, says Rogoff, "there's just this incredible relief that we didn't end up in a depression."
But sorry, Norway: there's no longer much Obamamania out there--more of a grim waiting game.
Michael Hirsh is also the author of At War with Ourselves: Why America Is Squandering Its Chance to Build a Better World .
© 2009
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"Flying shoe award." I definitely lol'ed.
Kumbaya, my Lord, Kumbaya. Great idea. Or would you prefer Bush had won the prize for his efforts to promote peace through carpetbombing?
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