President Obama appears to be a true believer in internationalism. The doctrine posits that nation states are inherently dangerous, being susceptible to provincial and narrow interests that inevitably work against the interests of humanity as a whole. True human development can be secured only when human beings transcend narrow sectarian national interests and join hands together across nations. Inevitably this leads to a belief that international agreements are more fundamentally important and righteous than the parochial concerns of one's own nation.
Probably in Obama the world has not seen a such a profoundly internationalist US president since Woodrow Wilson, who, it turns out, was a hopelessly naive idealist. Obama's beliefs have certainly shocked down-home folk in the US. To achieve the internationalist vision (which, when all is said and done, is the ultimate manifestation of secular humanism) the first thing which Obama believed necessary was to put the US on an equal footing with all other nations. Gone would be the big bully in the school yard. Gone would be "special alliances" with select other nations. Hence, almost the first international act was the grand apology tour ("We had done bad things too") which has so offended Americans. Hence, the State Department's policy of conducting discussions with other nations via a mea culpa voluntary disclosure of US problems in an attempt to establish good faith internationalist cred. All of this has been part of repositioning the US as a genuine protagonist for internationalist solutions to human problems.
Nuclear weapons, Iran's belligerency and its nuclear arms race, global warming, the clash of civilizations, Palestianian-Israeli conflicts, the credit crisis--for Obama the real and ultimate solution to all these issues is a global one--that is, solutions found and forged by nations agreeing together and entering into international compacts.
Internationalism is a utopian dream. It is the preserve of the foolish. Those politicians who pursue internationalism end up doing at least two things: betraying the people who elected them by sacrificing their interests to a nebulous all-human-beings-on-the-planet idealism; secondly, offending the Living God, bringing down His wrath and curse for arrogant hubris and calculated insult to His Son.
International relations will always be a hopeless mess until the governed restrict the competence of their governments to the very narrow set of duties ordained and commanded by God Himself. In the meantime, expect the worst. Expect unintended consequences to flow down like a torrential river.
We see one such consequence in Obama's well-meant but stupid bumbling attempts toward his internationalist utopia. He has offended just about every US ally to the point where the United States now appears to be entering, not a splendid, but an ignoble isolationist phase. The leaders of Germany and France can no longer stand him, believing themselves to be let down and insulted by him in turn. He is now increasingly disliked in the Muslim world. His insults to Benjamin Netanyahu are offensive to Israelis. His public persona of wagging his head from side to side as he reads from teleprompters has become a metaphor for negative criticism of most of America's allies.
Now even public figures in the UK are expressing uncharacteristic hostility towards the US. Consider the umbrage being taken in the Daily Mail over Obama's hectoring of BP, a British commercial institution.
America's ALWAYS tried to do down Britain
By Geoffrey Wheatcroft
11th June 2010
Has the worm turned at last? As the oil continues to gush in the Gulf of Mexico, angry rhetoric has gushed from President Barack Obama's lips. His rabid denunciations of BP have damaged the interests not only of that company but of most British people, in a way that must make us wonder whether he leads a friendly country.
Vince Cable, the new Business Secretary, calls Obama's rhetoric 'extreme and unhelpful'; London mayor Boris Johnson says it's 'anti-British', adding that 'BP is paying a very, very heavy price indeed'.
Bemusingly, David Cameron says only that he understands the U.S. administration's 'frustration', although he promises to take up the matter with Obama, after the Prime Minister returns from Afghanistan - where British troops are fighting and dying on behalf of the United States, it may be recalled.
'Extreme and unhelpful' is no exaggeration. Obama has played to the gallery by saying that he would like to sack Tony Hayward, head of BP; the president talks in a cheap way about 'kicking ass'. Whether or not the American president can kick our asses, he can certainly hurt our wallets and purses.
As BP's share price has plummeted, it has lost £55billion of its market value, and the company's entire outlook is very bleak, which affects most of us. Every British insurance company, building society and pension fund has large holdings of BP shares in its portfolio.
If you have a pension, at present or in prospect, your income falls with every sour word Obama speaks. It's a fine way for a friend to behave, if indeed we should regard the president as a friend.
His rhetoric is repellently hypocritical as well as demagogic. Quite apart from the fact that Hayward and his colleagues have every interest in plugging the spill, for years past BP has filled Washington's coffers with tax revenue, and fed the American people's unquenchable thirst for cheap petrol.
When Obama continually refers to BP as 'British Petroleum', which is no longer its formal name, he is saying something revealing about himself, and his Anglophobic spite will come as no surprise to those who have followed his career, and read his memoir Dreams From my Father.
He seems to have made up the part about his father being tortured by the British in Kenya, but there's no question that Obama nurses a disdain for and even dislike of this country.
Instead of reciprocating his feelings, we should maybe take the opportunity to look harder at our connection with the United States, and at that ridiculous phrase 'special relationship'. . . . Shortly after he had taken us into the appalling Iraq war, by way of telling a pack of porkies with Alastair Campbell's sordid help, Tony Blair visited Washington to be greeted by President Bush - 'Thank you, friend' - and cheered to the echo by Congress for services rendered. In his smarmy speech, Blair mentioned the burning of Washington by the British in 1814 and obsequiously said: 'I know it's kinda late, but sorry.'
Had he known more history, he might have been aware that this was only one episode in a very fraught story. For most of the 19th century a large part of the British Army had to be stationed in Canada to protect it from its southern neighbour, and at one point Sir Robert Peel warned Parliament about the grave danger of a war with the United States.
In 1895 the two countries nearly went to war again over an incomprehensible border dispute in South America, and bloodshed was avoided only by the forbearance of Lord Salisbury, the prime minister.
A certain kind of fawning Tory likes to talk about the way the Americans have generously rescued us in the past century. This is historical claptrap. When the Great War began in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson worried that he might need to intervene - on the German side.
In 1917, the United States did at last enter the war, after the British had suffered hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded. Even then the Americans sustained very few casualties by European standards, as they did in the next war.
This time they waited from September 1939 until December 1941, and then they went to war only because the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and Hitler declared war on the United States (not the other way round). And before that, the supposedly generous Lend-Lease agreement had stripped us of overseas assets and destroyed the British exporting economy for decades to come.
Any idea of a special relationship should have been ended in 1956 when Washington pulled the rug from under the British and French when their troops had gone to Suez. That didn't stop President Johnson from subsequently demanding British troops to serve in Vietnam. Mercifully, Harold Wilson, in his one good deed as prime minister, politely declined.
Since then we have been taken into another terrible war in which we had no reason to fight by Tony Blair, who throughout his career assiduously served the interests of another country. Our rewards from Washington have ranged from a tariff likely to destroy what's left of the British steel industry, to studied American neutrality over the Falklands, to Obama's grandstanding attacks on BP.
A year ago Gordon Brown visited Washington to be publicly humiliated by Obama (remember the exchange of gifts: thoughtful presents for the president and his children, trashy DVDs and toys for the Browns in return).
If a dark cloud of oil can now have a silver lining, then it might at least lead us to reassess our ignoble relationship with Washington. If the American president is going to ignore or even damage British interests, then let him.
But might not our own government stand up for those interests? For a start, some of the money we've all lost through the BP debacle, and presidential venom, could at least be recouped by bringing our troops home from a hopeless American war in Afghanistan.
So there we have it: Obama, the most internationalist US president in a century, is leaving the United States isolated. It has few "friends" left. But this is not splendid isolation--the doctrine which respects the preserves and governments of other nations, refusing entangling political alliances, whilst not prohibiting its citizens from pursuing their private interests internationally. It is an ignoble isolationism, where virtually all other nations detest and despise the United States.
So much for Obama's grand internationalist utopian vision. This is an unintended consequence indeed.
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