Africans greeted Barack Obama’s presidential election with excitement and hope. Few ever imagined that a son of Africa would come to inhabit the most powerful office in the world. One year on, however, Obama’s legacy in Africa remains unclear.
Recently I had the opportunity to accompany two labor union leaders from my country, Mexico, to meet with high-level officials of the Obama Labor Department. The meeting was an example of the kind of new U.S.-Latin America relations that so many hoped would come from an Obama presidency.
On his trip to Japan last fall, Barack Obama proudly announced that he was America’s first Pacific president. The president lived in Indonesia as a young boy and went to high school in Hawaii. This past informs his present. Obama has visited the region, been the first U.S. president to attend an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit, and underscored the importance of the region for U.S. policy. Instead of simply containing China, Obama has stressed a relationship of cooperation. He has called for strengthened alliances with South Korea and Japan. And he has offered a policy of careful diplomacy toward North Korea.
I recently went to Tripoli, where we held a news conference to release a report about human rights in Libya. That’s right — a public event in Libya’s capital at which Human Rights Watch staff sharply criticized the government led by Muammar el-Gaddafi. Mundane in many countries, in Libya this was a momentous event. But it was only one of the breakthroughs we observed on the trip.
The Obama administration has gotten at least one thing right on U.S. foreign policy: its emphasis on empowering women and their rights around the world.
Understandably preoccupied the economic crisis and health care reform, the Obama administration has failed to deliver on the multilateral front. Still awaiting signatures and ratification are the Law of the Sea (wanted by the Pentagon), the Comprehensive Test Ban treaty (crucial to the administration’s nonproliferation policy), the Conventions on Land Mines and Child Soldiers (both popular with Obama’s base), and, of course, the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The Obama administration’s record on human rights has been a major disappointment.
When Barack Obama was elected president, many climate activists were thrilled. With the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere reaching dangerous levels, and Democrats controlling the House and Senate, hopes couldn’t have been higher among climate campaigners that Obama would act swiftly to make energy and climate change one of his top priorities.
Barack Obama raised the hopes of global justice advocates by committing to significant changes in our international economic policies. As president, however, his efforts to implement alternatives have been slow to get off the ground.
The June 28 coup in Honduras against democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya presented a crisis that would color the Obama administration’s foreign policy outlook for all of the Americas — and would ultimately become one of the administration’s most disappointing foreign policy failures of its first year.