I was as surprised as anyone to hear that President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. His detractors wasted no time pointing out that he doesn’t deserve it — just as the week before, some were gleeful that the U.S. was NOT awarded the Olympics. Damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t.
As he has said himself, his accomplishments aren’t comparable to past recipients (so far). But President Obama’s foreign policy vision is worthy of international accolade. He is implementing a strategy that recognizes that nation states have to hang together in this world or suffer apart.
Countries that want peace and prosperity — which is most of them — need to work together to have any hope against forces of chaos like global warming, worldwide economic crises, omni-present swine flu or terror attacks.
And they need to strengthen the international system that helps fight them, too. That is a far cry from thinking that rising powers as a threat to us as many in Washington tend to do.
Last year, in conjunction with the book I co-authored on this topic (see sidebar), an artist made this video:
It’s often described as “edgy” by my foreign policy friends–to try to illustrate this point and we had the following discussion about it.
I’d like to hear what you think.
- Nina Hachigian
10/18/2009 :: 09:39:33 AM
kparcell Says:
Nina, you suppose that global pandemic threats illustrate the necessity of a multi-national approach (and I applaud your attention to the issue), but in fact international cooperation has consistently immunized and even subsidized the factory farming that births these diseases, working against the local food movements that are the obvious solution, because too much international power today rests with global corporations. We also can clearly see that today’s global corporations are well designed to migrate uphill as sea levels rise, but not so the innovators working out of their garages on the flood plains. Overall, international diplomacy, walking hand-in-hand with globalization, has tended to favor unsustainable development because it has favored external interests over innovative local oversight. Indeed, it is this intrinsic flaw in globalization — that it opposes local oversight — that has put us in the economic fecal soup. Thus, we might be wise to look to those local solutions, rather than cling to the disproved theory that we gain whenever the forces of global corporatism are united to make and enforce policy.
It seems to me that your background on the specific issues of nuclear arms and terrorism informs you that this is indeed where more and better international diplomacy is needed, but I think your general advocacy for strengthening cooperation between nations needs to be tempered with an awareness of the overwhelming influence of corporatism on international diplomacy regarding industry-related problems. My audacious hope is that Obama has led the world towards dismantling Kyoto because he’s beginning to grasp that global diplomacy there can only result in terminal compromises because of corporatism, and that he instead focuses his international efforts on disarmament and antiterrorism.