Barack Obama has earned his Nobel

Syed Badrul AhsanSyed Badrul Ahsan
Published : 29 May 2016, 01:33 AM
Updated : 29 May 2016, 01:33 AM

Barack Obama has earned his Nobel Prize for Peace seven years after he came by it rather prematurely. By the time he leaves office in January next year, he will have accomplished tasks which rarely will any of his predecessors, in terms of broad history, be in a position to match.

John F. Kennedy committed America, in 1961, to landing a man on the moon and getting him back safely to earth within the decade. The 35th President's pledge was fulfilled eight years later when the astronauts of Apollo 11 walked on the lunar surface and sent the human imagination soaring with visions of what lay beyond this planet.

Lyndon B. Johnson, catapulted to office by JFK's assassination in November 1963, earned for himself a place in history through putting the Civil Rights Act in place in 1964. Of course, the war in Vietnam brought LBJ down. But it is that seminal act which assured his country's Afro-Americans that they would have a place in the sun, finally, which remains his defining contribution to history.

In 1972, Richard M. Nixon, the arch anti-communist in American politics, took the dramatic step of travelling to China in his search for an opening to the republic Mao Zedong and Zhou En-lai had inaugurated in 1949. It was fitting and proper that Nixon undertook the trip, for his outstretched hand to Zhou in Beijing was a wiping away of the bad memory of John Foster Dulles rudely turning his back on Zhou when the latter approached him in Geneva in 1954. It was in February 1972, as has been said, a week that changed the world.

There is little question that all these American leaders, as also Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt earlier in the last century have, through some of their major decisions, been points of light in the history of the United States, a history certain to have an impact on the larger history of the world outside America. Woodrow Wilson may not have been able to carry Congress with him on the League of Nations issue, but that very failure was to lead in time, through unimaginable bloodletting in Europe, to the realization of the need for a safer and more disciplined world.

It is to this idea of a safer world that President Obama has made his contributions. Of course, like many of his predecessors he will be reviled by the more rabid of his critics for many of the decisions he has made in these past many months. In the longer perspective of history, though, there is the promise of his occupying a perch higher than all recent American presidents. The reasons why that should be so are all out there

Begin with Obama's visit to Hiroshima. He may not have categorically offered an apology to the people of Japan over the death and destruction Harry Truman wrought through the atomic bombs in August 1945, but there was no mistaking the pain that he and with him the rest of the world felt yet once again as he spoke in that city scarred by terrible memories. An unmistakable quality in Obama has been his sincerity of approach to the challenges he has faced. That sincerity was on display in Hiroshima. By daring to do what none of his predecessors since Truman have been able to do – travel down to Hiroshima and vicariously comprehend the ancient pain of Japan's people – he has demonstrated courage. It was courage which came on the strength of his political convictions.

Barack Obama, in so many ways, has informed his country of the monumental follies committed by some of his predecessors in the White House. For the more than fifty years since Fidel Castro's rebels put Fulgencio Batista's regime to flight in Havana, no American president – all the way from Dwight Eisenhower to George W. Bush – was able to summon up the moral authority to reach out to Cuba and thereby inform Americans and the world that it had been foolhardy and self-defeating for Washington to have persisted with policies that had been hollow and so questionable right from the start. The President's visit to Havana was, in a larger sense, a clearing away of the detritus left behind by his predecessors. All the old CIA machinations to murder Fidel Castro, memories of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, the near war generated over the missiles of October 1962, the crippling sanctions were suitably relegated to the past.

Obama's decision to have America reconnect with Cuba has made the world a trifle safer. Add to that the painstaking negotiations which eventually led to a deal on Iran's nuclear programme some months ago. American diplomacy under Obama, insofar as it related to Tehran, was clearly based on the principle of mutual respect. Unlike some of the earlier occupants of the White House, Obama made sure that bellicosity did not pose a threat to the talks his country and Europe engaged in with the Iranians. Where men like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were content to stay confined in the past, Barack Obama was patently in need of a chink into the future. His gamble paid off. Today Americans, Europeans and Iranians understand the meaning of respect and responsibility in the conduct of global diplomacy.

The Obama presidency has in large measure been a painstaking effort toward rolling back the damage done to America, at home and abroad, by the George W. Bush administration. The bad economy Obama inherited from his predecessor in January 2009 was a gigantic challenge, one that the new President and his team patiently were able to tackle. Abroad, it was the mess in Iraq and Afghanistan which needed cleaning up. These two countries have been gravely, perhaps permanently, fractured by the policies of the Bush era. Obama's job, as he saw it, was to prevent America from getting bogged down in Kabul and Baghdad, in the way it was tied down once in Vietnam. Obama's response was to draw down America's military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq. The two places may yet be cause for worry, but they are no more the severe headache they used to be for Washington.

Finally, President Obama's visit to Vietnam is a pointer to the efforts America has made in recent years to turn the page on a conflict which once divided the world right down the middle. Obama is only the third US President to travel to Hanoi since the conflict drew to a close in 1975 – Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were there before him – but he is the first to focus on the need for his country and the nation it desperately tried bombing to the Stone Age under Johnson and Nixon to come together in the shaping of a purposeful new world.

Barack Obama's legacy promises to be enduring. The cerebral nature of his leadership, the scholarly approach he has brought to the exercise of presidential authority and the overall decency which has underlined his dealings with the outside world will be hard for his successors to match.

Long ago, it was an earlier politician from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln by name, who left his imprints on the public imagination through his calm leadership and philosophical attitude to governance. The Illinois man in our times, as the past seven years have shown, means to achieve quite a similar feat.