If Barack Obama showed up one afternoon in front of his own statue in Jakarta, he would almost certainly feel embarrassed. Erected at the end of 2009, the three-foot bronze statue depicts a young boy in shorts with a slightly loopy grin on his face. His left hand, on which a butterfly is landing, points toward the sky.
The Treaty of Lisbon, finally entering into force in late 2009, heralds a new, more advanced phase of the continuing European integration process. The treaty creates the post of High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, to which a much-expanded European diplomatic corps, the European External Action Service, will report.
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 February 1, the Obama administration delivered a budget request calling for a full 10 percent increase in nuclear weapons spending next year, to be followed by further increases in subsequent years.
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.
This past June, Iran was a major part of mainstream political debate in the international press. Much of the world rallied in support of Iran’s green movement, and condemned Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ali Khamenei for stealing the presidential election.
North Korea fired hundreds of artillery shells into waters near the disputed western sea border with the South last week, and the South Korean military returned warning shots, heightening the already high tension on the peninsula. The rising tension came amidst recent signals from Pyongyang that it wanted to negotiate a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War. If peace negotiations began, Pyongyang could return to the Six Party Talks on ending its nuclear programs.
Recent suicide bombings in the heart of Baghdad have sent a message to Washington: Maintaining the Iraq policy of the past administration does not inspire hope.
Despite two ongoing wars, it was striking that Obama focused so little in his first State of the Union speech on the world outside our borders other than the call to be competitive in the global economy. Indeed, he dedicated only eight minutes of the 70-minute speech to foreign policy.