Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Humble Disagreement

Fresh from a Pulitzer victory and some praise in Gancho itself (clearly the latter stands as the more momentous achievement), Eugene Robinson penned a column today that I didn't think a whole lot of. The argument was that Obama should have pushed back at Daniel Ortega, Hugo Chávez, and the anti-American Latin American left.
But when Obama shook the man's hand, he should have telegraphed clearly, through posture, expression and language, that he was not amused. Chávez's gift of the book was meant to affront, not to enlighten, and I would have advised Obama to reciprocate in kind.

[Break]

Obama was right to show respect for the leaders of neighboring countries big and small at the Summit of the Americas. Those who were not gracious enough to show respect for him deserved to be given -- metaphorically, of course, and in the spirit of hemispheric cooperation -- the back of the presidential hand.

The question about whether he deserves it is really beside the point; I just don't see what would have been gained by an unfriendly moment with Chávez. Obama wouldn't maintain and therefore couldn't win a weeks-long shouting match with Chávez, and it would just drag the binational discourse into the gutter. And it would make a normalization of relations with Venezuela (and other like minded governments) harder to achieve; unless you think the freeze in diplomatic relations between the US and the Latin American thorns in its side is a good thing, I don't see how this would have been a constructive move.

Even beyond the absence of benefit for the US, such a moment would have likely been a godsend for Chávez himself. Now he is the uncomfortable position of having to reconcile a decade of Bush-fueled anti-Americanism with the arrival of a vastly more popular American leader. For Obama to show him up would spark a war of words, which places the US in the ideal role for Chávez: that of arrogant hegemon.

As long as we're on the topic, here's Chris Beam with more on Ortega's performance in the Summit of the Americas.

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