Last week, President Obama was living the Twenty-Third Psalm as he gave a well received speech at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo:
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies; thou anointest my head with oil, my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
This week it’s the presidential in-box that runneth over and the President’s life is more like Psalm Two:
The kings of the earth stand up, and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord, and against his anointed, saying, let us break their bands asunder and cast away their cords from us.
In Havana, the President and Vice President of the Grand Exalted Order of Ankle-Biters, Hugo Chavez and Raul Castro, held an anti-Yanqismo kaffeeklatsch over the weekend. Mr. Castro described the opposition between the United States and the revolutionary nations of the world in terms that could have been uttered at any time during the Cold War: “On the one side, there’s an exploitative model of dependence subordinated to the interests of the empire, on the other, the advance of revolutionary and progressive forces, representing the dispossessed.”
This “could be a signal that ties between Cuba and the US might be taking a turn for the worse,” speculated the BBC. Do you think?
Meanwhile, the New York Times ran with a story on Cuba’s detention of an American contractor on the island who was working for the Obama administration. Hugo Chavez did his bit by reaffirming his support for the gloriously revolutionary and progressive Islamic Republic of Iran. The Obama administration’s concerns about deepening ties between Venezuela and Iran were part of “an imperial offensive,” said Chavez, concluding a deal with Raul that the BBC described as “throwing a lifeline” to a Cuban government hard hit by a series of hurricanes, falling tourist revenues and the general decline of virtually every aspect of the Cuban economy.
(Economic and cultural cooperation between Cuba and Venezuela is taking interesting new forms. According to the New York Times, the Cuban religion of Palo has attracted new adherents in Venezuela, leading to an epidemic of grave-robbing as human bones are used in Palo ceremonies of various kinds.)
From Tehran, the news was also not good. The London Times led with a front page story on alleged secret documents showing that Iran has been working on developing the triggering device for a nuclear bomb since 2007:
“The technical document describes the use of a neutron source, uranium deuteride, which independent experts confirm has no possible civilian or military use other than in a nuclear weapon. Uranium deuteride is the material used in Pakistan’s bomb, from where Iran obtained its blueprint.”
With intelligence leaks like this one, it is hard for the lay reader to evaluate the information. Was the leak intended to push western governments to take a tougher stand? Was it really a ‘leak’ — or was the information given to the press with the full knowledge of officials wanting to alert the public to an ominous new twist in the Iran saga? Is the document tilted like some of the WMD ‘leaks’ back in the run up to the Iraq War, or is it a relatively sober piece of analysis that reflects mainstream spook thought on the matter?
We just don’t know, although there are signs that the flow of information to the west about Iran’s nuclear activities has been speeding up lately.
Other signs from Tehran are also unpromising: the three American hikers arrested in Iranian territory last July will be tried for espionage, the revolutionary and progressive Iranian foreign minister announced yesterday. Iran has also announced a breakthrough in the revolutionary and progressive investigation into the reported desecration of images of the late revolutionary leader, Ayatolleh Khomeini, with arrests being made in the case. Trials will no doubt follow; while one can hope that the trials will end by further undermining the government’s legitimacy, they will create one more obstacle to any rapprochement between the United States and the Islamic Republic.
Obama’s Peace Prize has also not awed the Israelis into cooperating more fully with the White House. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s government has decided to include some of Israel’s West Bank settlements in a subsidy program for distressed residential areas. In Israeli politics this may look like a compromise of some kind; much of the money will go to improving the conditions of Arabs living in Israel proper. Internationally, however, new subsidies of any kind for the settlements will undercut any benefits of the temporary construction freeze Israel recently announced and complicate the White House’s already difficult task of getting peace talks back on track.
The super-revolutionary and progressive Democratic Peoples’ Republic of North Korea has also done its little bit to make the world a less peaceful place for President Obama; an airplane carrying 35 tons of weapons from Pyongyang to an undisclosed location was intercepted in Bangkok over the weekend. Faced with the choice of letting the arms move on to their final destination or creating an incident that could derail talks with the North Koreans, the administration and its Thai allies chose to stop the plane and investigate. This will likely complicate efforts underway to establish a better atmosphere for the talks on North Korea’s nuclear program; the flagrant violation of U.N. sanctions left the U.S. with little choice, but the timing was poor.
Meanwhile, the climate change convention in Copenhagen is so far not moving in directions that work well for the United States or its president. Rich green European countries whose populations are declining want aggressive carbon cuts fast; poor developing countries with exploding populations see the whole climate change movement as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to lock the rich countries into the largest foreign aid program ever. Whatever the merits of the issue, the danger from the US perspective is a perverse trade-off between the two camps: the Europeans will join the developing world in proposing huge financial transfers, and the developing world will join the Europeans in demanding extremely large and fast cuts in CO2.
President Obama needs a program moderate enough to have a prayer of being passed by the Congress and his arithmetic is very simple. The more carbon cuts for the US and the more money for the third world in the package, the less chance he has of passing a bill. The problem is that both the Euros and much of the third world may not be as committed to reaching a binding agreement as their public stands would indicate. A situation in which they can blame the U.S. for the conference’s failure might work pretty well for a lot of the leaders who will be trekking into Copenhagen over the next week. The Europeans get to look pure and green, the third world leaders look like they are forcefully standing up for their rights, nobody has to do anything painful, and the United States looks bad.
Politically speaking, that might be an acceptable outcome for everyone in Copenhagen except for President Obama.
All this comes against the steady, dispiriting drumbeat of stories about Obama’s falling popularity in the United States. While the President is nowhere near the lows his predecessor touched, the decline in his popularity has been unusually rapid. This almost certainly reflects public worries about the economy rather than foreign policy. (Far more Americans, for example, support the President’s Afghanistan policy than support the health care reform in Congress.) With three years until re-election, the President doesn’t have to worry too much about the poll numbers long term, but in the short term the falling polls undermine his efforts to lead an increasingly skittish Congress.
The Psalmist tells us how this worked out for King David:
Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.
The only rods of iron that President Obama really wants to use are in his golf bag, and he has very little desire to break the world’s crockery. He’d rather be a builder than a breaker, and I hope he gets his way. But how do you cooperate with people who want you to fail? That is the question that haunts this administration both at home and abroad and it’s a hard one to answer.