http://uscenterforcitizendiplomacy.org/us-center-programs/US-Center-Timely-Topics/election/index1.php

Thank you for your very thoughtful comment. I’d agree with the basic premise that there are many areas where smarter US leadership can achieve positive outcomes for this country and the rest of the world, insofar as those are in many cases the same, or largely overlapping.

The challenges are on issues that entail inherent trade-offs between immutable US priorities and the interests of other states in the international system. To name just a few examples: The relative contributions of developed and developing states to carbon emissions cutbacks, the precise mechanisms of nuclear arms reductions, and of course the challenge of detecting and eliminating non-state threats to the United States without violating the sovereignty of other states or other important international legal principles.

Certainly it’s possible to steer a better course through these rocky shoals than the Bush administration has in the past 8 years, but there is no solution that will leave every party satisfied. My specific concern in the above piece is that there is a non-negligible sentiment in many countries–and one that you echo to some degree in your comment–that Obama represents a departure from the “American interests” perspective on US foreign policy. I simply don’t think that will prove correct, and for that reason I worry that a great many potential friends of America stand to be very disappointed.

Matt Rojansky

Mr. Rojansky is of course correct technically. The US President serves the US. However, I would like to gently remind Mr. Rojanksy that the US leads the world one way or the other, and as such has to be accountable to that same constituency it leads. It would be imperative that Americans seize Obama goodwill gained for the US internationally, rather than retreat into the language of ‘us’ and ‘them’ implied by Mr. Rojansky’s title here, “our Obama, not yours.”

Part of the problem with the US discourse over time has been the inability of its elite to imagine the world as one of its citizens. (Therefore, what follows is not a personal critique of Mr. Rojansky.) This exceptionalism has led to serious weaknesses in policy with the sum total of these errors now adding up to a colossal challenge. (To be sure, there have been brilliant moments: Senator Lugar’s game changing support for regime change in South Africa and the Philippines provided those precious moments of the US as a global citizen. But these have been far too rare, suggesting the need for more worldly and erudite leadership.)

That is why Obama is essential for these times: he understood the “fierce urgency of now” when he stepped up to lead. It is thus important not to shackle this visionary to parochial concerns of ‘national interests’ or frame the discussion in terms of reducing global expectations. Rather what prominent ‘think tanks’ have to do now is to take the Obama vision on board and look beyond the immediate borders to understand the implications of US leadership of the world. US intellectuals should celebrate the arrival of a global Obama by educating themselves to understand the world not in terms of narrowly defined ‘national interests’ rather in more realistically derived ‘global interests.’ A single policy success in this global arena would yeild world support that Americans have no appreciation for so far.

To be sure the training provided in US universities will be hard to overcome for US trained policy elites. However, without such a paradigm shift to move from ‘US interests’ to ‘global interests’ you will surely squander the goodwill from the world, just as the same goodwill was squandered after 9/11, when every nation in the world felt they were Americans too. That we cannot afford, but who will change the thinking in the ‘think tanks’ of Washington?

Jayantha Jayman, Ph.D. (LSE), M.A. (Toronto), B.A. (Denison)
Assistant Professor (Research)
Institute of Global Cultural Studies
Binghamton University
New York