Avuncular American

Climate: Earth's Recirc Button Still On

Whatever just happened in Copenhagen - and I reserve judgment 'til I've read a comprehensive debrief - the underlying problem of carbon overproduction hasn't gone away.

One thing is for sure: this post and millions like it, and the millions of emails and spam mails sent daily, will add their share of greenhouse gases to our planet's already full atmosphere.  I read somewhere that the spam sent to Hotmail accounts alone consumed the equivalent of the production of 5 nuclear power plants.  Only they're more likely to be coal-fired plants...

It's like we're in one big airplane, folks, Earth Airlines, breathing in that stale air constantly recirculated around us.  The flight never ends, and fresh air is a relative concept.  So am I going to cease blogging?  Hardly.  I'm already using public transport for most movement throughout Brussels, and I try to climb the staircase vice using the elevator in my building a good half of the time.  But I still am dependent on electricity coming - in the case for Belgium and France - from a mix of nuclear and coal-fired power plants.  I"m in the grid.

For Brussels and its surrounding countryside, the solid waste equivalent of the closed circuit effect was illustrated this past week with odoriferous obviousness.  The private sector contractor in charge of the city's main waste treatment facility decided, apparently without consulting the city (capital region) authorities, to shut down the facility and dump Brussels' untreated effluent into the rivers flowing through and out of the capital.

Into someone's back yard, that is. The backyard being the Flanders region, already prickly about the presence of the million Francophones, expatriates, and immigrants who make up Brussels, in their midst (Brussels is entirely surrounded by Dutch-speaking Flanders).  Every time I flushed the toilet, I felt like saying "excuseer mevrouw en meneer" or some such thing.

The Francophone Brussels environment minister even had to scurry home from Copenhagen to handle the PR mess, since all she could do about the other mess was to frustratedly order the contractor to re-open the plant, which will be done - eventually.

The affair shows, with visual and nasal effect, how no man is an island, or how "down the drain" doesn't end when you flush the toilet.  Homeowners with septic tanks know that the honey-dipper must come or the system backs up; for those with municipal sewerage systems, it gets more complicated.  But someone else always lives downstream.

Maybe politicians weren't the right people to send to Copenhagen.  How about some HVAC technicians to explain that polluted recirculated air remains polluted unless filtered?  Better yet, stop polluting the air in the first place.  Or plumbers, who know that garbage in will result in garbage out, unless purified to an acceptable level.

When it comes down to it, perhaps even in the hearts of the most die hard climate change deniers, it should be common sense and a sense of self-preservation that forces us to do the right thing.  But as last week's ballyhoo in Brussels over solid waste flowing downstream should show us, governments cannot count on their contractors to do the right thing or even the most basic of civic-minded actions.  Not without controls, oversight, rules and regulations.  The job of governments, and the people who elect them.

Obama in Oslo: Community Organizing Goes Global

President Obama is a political leader who understands that even the mightiest are vulnerable when they stand alone. He is a man who believes in the strength of a community, be it the local community where he started his career many years ago or the global community which he leads today.

Thorbjørn Jagland, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee

..........

While the President produced a fine speech yesterday, I daresay it won't be remembered as his finest, if only because he had to balance so many constituencies in the TV audience:

- the domestic US audience, composed of skeptical Democratic peaceniks and even more skeptical Republican hawks

- the Nobel Committee on the dais, whose Chairman Jagland enumerated every objection to the Obama nomination, and shot them all down with devastating accuracy

- the NATO allies, especially Europeans with underutilized military establishments, whose help is needed in resolving the Afghanistan conflict

- the Israelis and Palestinians, who will surely be the object of the Nobel laureate's renewed attentions, once the domestic agenda, especially US health care reform, permits.

The President's speech is full of signals and nuances, which is why I like the more straightforward Norwegian approach.  Jagland quoted another Nobel Laureate, Desmond Tutu of South Africa, who said of Obama: "he has already lowered the temperature in the world," more a reference to lowered tensions and eased fears of American bullying than anything climate-related.

But it's the "community organizer" analogy that I like best.  Though Ms. Palin sought to use the President's Chicago experience as a source of ridicule (compared to what - her world class experience in Wasilla?), Obama's years as a community leader showed him the value of collective action, of perseverance when faced with problems that went beyond the community's own borders.  Surely useful experience - recognized by the Nobel Committee - when it comes to reclaiming America's leadership through example, as opposed to hectoring à la Bush.  It's recognition that "Brand America" is back.

Now that he has received his prize, President Obama cannot but add that reality to his reflection on a wide range of issues, and ponder what posterity will make of his decisions: "what would a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate do?"  The Committee - dedicated to peace, awarding a prize named after an arms manufacturer - knows that the road to peace is sometimes through war-torn territory.  They know this better than most.  Which is why they gave the Prize to the person, said Jagland, quoting from Alfred Nobel's will, who "shall have done the most or the best work "for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."

It's a prize for potential.  To the "community organizer" who made good.

Transatlantic Trends: Can US Surf Obama's Wave In Europe?

The 8th annual Transatlantic Trends survey of European and American attitudes is out.  I must first qualify "European," which includes non-EU Turkey (which is not even in Europe, according to many), but does not include a number of EU countries.  No Scandinavians, no Balts?  Likewise, "American" is just that: North American partners in NATO, the Canadians, don't figure in the report.  Maybe next time, funding permitting.

That said, it is a fascinating survey of public opinion on a range of important policy issues, from what to do about Afghanistan to whether to kowtow to the Russians.  And don't presume you know where public opinion in selected countries already stands on these questions.  Ronald Asmus, the German Marshall Fund's Executive Director in Brussels and former Clinton Administration State Department appointee, says that a common reaction to his numbers is "that can't be so!"

Yes, the numbers don't lie: "Old Europe" Westerners are generally more pro-NATO and pro-US than their "New Europe" Eastern counterparts (Donald Rumsfeld must be saying "that can't be so!!").  And Turks - whom successive US administrations have adopted as their favorite EU candidate country - haven't gotten over their Iraq War slump, when Rumsfeld's Deputy Paul Wolfowitz tried to sic the Turkish Army on a recalcitrant elected civilian government.  Turkish attitudes toward the US - though improved over the Bush years - are the least susceptible to the Obama charm.

But the sheer magnitude of the "Obama Bounce," as Asmus likes to call the chart-topping effect, is what is so different.   "Unprecedented," says Asmus, of the 70 point jump in approval ratings between Bush and Obama (in the case of German public opinion).

I wish I had another slide that was shown at the recent GMFUS briefing, a composite of similar surveys taken since 1952, where European opinion of the US has had its momentary ups and downs, but nothing like the abyssal depths of the Bush years, followed by the bends-inducing rise beyond the surface after Obama's appearance on the scene.

Okay, all this is refreshing but what to do with it?  Confirmed Atlanticist Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, German Liberal Member of the European Parliament, called the findings evidence of "political capital."  "Now, let us use it," he said.   Indeed.

So I pose that very question to the public diplomacy community, which knows that it is good to have public opinion on your side.  How can the Obama Administration build on this groundswell of European public opinion in favor of the person of Barack Obama, which, as the survey shows, does not always have its corollary in support for US policies?

In a week where some of his fellow citizens called him a liar, it has to be reassuring in the White House and in Foggy Bottom that the Obama magic still appears to be working on the European side of the Atlantic.

9/11/09 - Fear Of a Different Sort

September 11th.

Americans are frustrated, they're angry, and, most importantly, they're scared to death.

Representative John Boehner, House Republican leader (Washington Post, 9/11/09)

Last year on September 11, just weeks before the US Presidential election, I asked whether this year's commemorations would see "fear up" or "fears overcome."  Thankfully, President Barack Obama has tried to calm the nerves of peoples across the world, most especially in the Muslim world.  We are far from the early days after 9/11/01, when George W. Bush let loose the "C" word - Crusade, the born-again Christian answer to Jihad.

But on the US domestic front, fear-mongering is thriving, as if a certain type of politician cannot appeal to any other emotion but people's fears.  If, as Rep. Boehner asserts, Americans are "scared to death," then maybe it's because he and his colleagues have done little else than rant on about "death panels" and urge on the kind of person who brandishes a sign "Obama Lies While Grandma Dies."

A certain breed of politician appeals to gut fears - fears of "the Other," the foreigner, the outsider - when things are going badly at home.  By "home," I mean the Republican party, which appears to have run out of ideas.  Except bad ideas, negative ones.  And it was a Republican - Spiro Agnew, who was forced to resign the Vice Presidency even before his boss Richard Nixon had to leave the White House - who used to rant about the "nattering nabobs of negativity."  He should check out his own party now.

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney ran their administration based on fear for eight long years.  Fear is what the GOP has to offer.  And the Know-Nothings are back.  This is not what I had hoped for on September 11, 2009.

Le Doaré Archives: Preserving Brittany's Past

One of the discoveries during our August holidays in Finistère was the Le Doaré Archives, literally the patrimony of three generations of Chateaulin's Le Doaré family photographers.  The current scion, Dominique (here at right, in front of some of his father's and grandfather's photos), presented over three hundred slides one evening to a hushed outdoor audience of Chateaulinois, all eager for a look at their town's past.

Three hundred slides, selected from a treasure trove of 80,000 to 100,000 photos, which represents a visual history of this unique part of France going back over one hundred years.  Dominique Le Doaré invited the audience to identify some of the subjects of his forebears' photos, and admonished everyone to label photos in their own family collections, saying that their archival value is greatly diminished without dates or context.

No such worries for this iconic photo below of Jos Le Doaré, Dominique's father and founder of Editions Jos, a local institution that has now been sold to a publisher, but which continues to provide thousands of quality postcards to tourists wanting to mail home a souvenir to family and friends.

Here little Jos clicks the shutter on an early 20th-century camera, while posing for his father Jean-Marie, who established the dynasty in 1898.  Jos, dressed in traditional Breton costume and sporting the then de rigueur below shoulder length tresses, was to grow up to continue in his father's footsteps, and to catch some historic moments, like the liberation of Chateaulin by Free French forces in August 1944 (which I wrote about last month).

Le Doaré Archives works with the University of Brest's Centre de Recherche Bretonne et Celtique (CRBC) in safeguarding this photographic heritage, recently in a collection of old sepia postcards.

Working out of a corner of the Editions Jos facility, Jacques Le Doaré scans his way through the thousands of negatives, slides, photographic plates, and postcards to build a digital record of a way of life that has long disappeared.  For photography and history buffs alike, the Le Doaré brothers' work is vital in preserving what the rest of us often relegate to the shoe box.  More power to them.

Man Of the 20th Century, Walter Cronkite

When legendary BBC/PBS commentator Alistair Cooke died a few years ago, it was like losing your grandfather, whose wisdom you would now have to do without.  Now we've lost Walter Cronkite, who told us every night "And that's the way it is."  Great was the impact of these authoritative chroniclers of the Twentieth Century.

Cronkite, who hosted a weekly documentary series "The 20th Century" as well as two decades' worth of the evening news for CBS, epitomized the best of broadcast journalism.  His presence was reassuring, even if the news he was relating was of the most jarring sort: war (Vietnam), assassination (the Kennedys, MLK), or revolution (Iran, and the ensuing hostage crisis).

In TPM, David Kurtz provides a touching remembrance of a childhood influenced by this father figure.

The passing of Walter Cronkite also reminds us of the demise of The News, as in "did you see The News last night?"  It was mainly a reference to Cronkite's CBS Evening News, and it invariably included reports from a string of American correspondents positioned across the globe.

Cronkite and his international team are now gone, replaced by pretty boy (or girl) anchors who rely on technicians whose prowess with pixels cannot patch over the lack of depth or analysis.  Cronkite had an amazing team of journalists, reporters like him who had covered World War II with Edward R. Murrow: men like Eric Severeid, who died in 1992, and Richard C. Hottelet, whose work had landed him in a Nazi jail.  Cronkite and his colleagues were literate, homespun, authoritative, and must have been appalled in ensuing years by the downward spiral of TV "journalism" that is embodied by the likes of Fox News.

Readers in the US will be able to watch the CBS tribute, "That's The Way It Was: Remembering Walter Cronkite" (image), tomorrow Sunday 19 July at 7:00 PM EST; for the rest of us, they have put up a nice page of text and video here.

Walter Cronkite, the original "avuncular American."

Africa Welcomes Obama

Photo: TouringGhana.com

Barack Obama chose well for the venue of his first sub-Saharan Africa visit as President.  Ghana, as the BBC's Martin Plaut writes, "ticks all the boxes"

Not only is Ghana clearly democratic, but it has some of the African oil on which the US increasingly depends, and there is the symbolic link with slavery, from which so many African-Americans trace their heritage.

Plus Ghanaians deserve to be put forward as a model for other Africans who live in countries not quite as enlightened.  Their country's reputation was not always quite as positive as it has been in recent years.

(Photo, Ghanaian slave "castle" Fort Good Hope, 2005)

The public diplomacy people who helped prepare this inaugural trip had an inspired thought when they invited Africans' comments, which have been pouring in by SMS, email, etc.  Using the best texting shorthand, this is one of my favorites:

Dear Mr President B Obama! Welcome 2 Africa! Congrats 4 ur election! N greetings n blessings 2 ur family! Wat will b ur new foreign policy towards z Islands of SWest of Indian Ocean including Diego Garcia ? Take care ! All z best n God bless!
Mauritius

Actually, I have been wondering the same thing (about Diego Garcia and its exiled inhabitants).

Presidents have very limited time on these foreign trips, and the Obamas are fortunate to be able to visit the Cape Coast Castle, much more spectacular than my little castle here, which has been turned into a very modest hotel (possibly brothel) on a seldom-visited part of Ghana's coast.

Too bad they don't have enough time to make a pilgrimage in Accra to the final resting place of W.E.B. Du Bois, the African-American writer and one of the founders of the NAACP, who decided to settle in the newly-independent Ghana of Kwame Nkrumah in the late 1950s early Sixties.

I will be listening to the President's speech, to be broadcast live on the BBC.  Stay tuned for comment.

Pacific Rim Fireworks: The Kim & Sarah Shows

Definition of narcissistic personality disorder: “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy.”

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

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I doubt that Kim Jong-Il, the North Korean leader, has much need for a public relations adviser, but his decision to launch a bunch of missiles on the eve of American Independence Day was surely a master move of attention grabbing.

Though it did confuse the message of the month, just when the world was getting used to the kindler, gentler image of a country that dismantled an entire English brewery to make "The Pride of Pyongyang," reputed to be a very decent beer.  Then there was the barbecue diplomacy between North Korea and the US via a New Jersey restaurateur.  All that sacrificed for the sake of some pyrotechnics.

But then we're used to the cognac-swilling dictator (Hennessey's best customer) - who provides junior high school-aged girls to his high-level visitors - acting a bit outrageously.  "He believes his own propaganda," said former CIA psychologist Dr. Jerold Post, in a 2003 CNN interview.  Scary stuff indeed.

Not nearly as scary, perhaps, as the portrait of Sarah Palin provided by Todd Purdum in the current Vanity Fair, many of whose Alaskan interviewees cited the above-mentioned "narcissistic personality disorder" in connection with their soon-to-be-former governor.  Purdum's article provides excellent background reading for anyone still harboring any illusions about Gov. Palin being the incarnation of the wholesome home town girl.

Yesterday Palin launched her own pre-Fourth fireworks: a rambling "Hi Alaska" paean to herself and her accomplishments delivered in high school diction, which was actually a "Bye, Alaska" to announce her resignation.  She, who might want to become the first woman President of the United States, assured her listeners that "America is now, more than ever, looking North to the Future."  Presumably when they look North they'll see Sarah Palin, and yearn for the times when we last had a Republican President who had trouble with coherent speech.

How appropriate, in her July 4th double bill with Kim Jong-Il, that she closed her farewell address with a quote from General Douglas MacArthur, the "American Caesar" who suffered from another type of narcissistic personality disorder: hubris.  Palin's MacArthur inspiration: "We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction."  In fact, MacArthur's headstrong disregard for his civilian superiors (i.e., President Truman) made a Korean War turn into a war with China.  He was finally dismissed for near insubordination.

MacArthur's replacement in Korea, General Mathew Ridgeway's words about his predecessor...

...the hunger for praise that led him on some occasions to claim or accept credit for deeds he had not performed, or to disclaim responsibility for mistakes that were clearly his own; the love of the limelight that continually prompted him to pose before the public... the headstrong quality...that sometimes led him to persist in a cause in defiance of all logic; [and] a faith in his own judgment that created an aura of infallibility...

... could be applied to Ms. Palin as she begins to stake out ground deserted by more grown up and stable Republicans.

But unlike old soldier MacArthur, don't expect Sarah Palin to "fade away."

(Fireworks photo from OSHA)

Europe's Multiplicity of Messengers

At a recent Brussels conference on the international media, it took an octogenarian to cut to the heart of things: the creation of the European Union has helped prevent war on a continent that has known many wars, and was at the center of two World Wars in the last century. Ferdinando Riccardi of Agence Europe, an institution that predates the European Union which it covers for subscribers, has been aware of this message for the fifty-plus years he has been reporting from Brussels. War is news, but absence of war is, well, absence of news.

That “message” is not new, in fact it is of such glaring self-evidence that it is now almost invisible. Too bad, and too bad that the campaign for the European Parliament is such a yawn, as described recently by The Economist’s Charlemagne. The European Parliament, says Charlemagne, “is worse than dull: it does not work properly. Like a student union, only with better expenses, it spends an inordinate amount of time on subjects way outside its mandate, such as foreign policy and defence.”  Most Belgians are aware of regional elections scheduled alongside the European Parliament elections next month; voting for MEPs is almost an afterthought for many.

For the international journalists gathered at the conference organised by IERI, “who speaks for Europe?” is more than a matter of whom to phone for an interview. Labib Fahmy, Brussels correspondent for Al-Jazeera, spoke of “misunderstood Europe,” the victim of its multiplicity of institutions (Commission, Council, Parliament). Sounding like an Arab Henry Kissinger, he asked “who is Europe?” American readers will be surprised to learn that Fahmy’s struggle to explain Europe to his audience (“Inside Europe”) has languished, while, “despite difficulties,” the Stateside program “Inside Washington” carries on.

Quentin Dickinson (a Frenchman with Scottish forebears) of Radio France Internationale (RFI) has covered the European Union from Brussels for years, and has seen the evolution of Europe’s spokesmen. From the days when spokesmen knew more about the subject than about spin, to today’s tendency to hire “communications” experts, with the result that the experienced journalist hardly consults them if he or she is looking for hard news.

Last word to the dean of the international Brussels correspondents, Ferdinando Riccardi.  When Agence Europe was started, the European Union had morphed from its precursor, the European Coal and Steel Community.  That economic, technocratic underpinning - for what in reality is a unique experiment among nation-states, that of surrendering pieces of sovereignty in the name of national interest - still dogs the EU.  “Brussels,” instead of being synonymous with lofty ideals of peace on the European continent, is in most Europeans’ minds another way of saying mindless bureaucracy.

Let’s see what happens if and when the Lisbon Treaty is ratified.  Will there be a super-spokesman, or will he or she just be another “president” with a small “p?”

Obama and the Power of Peace

Close to fifty percent of my posts have the category tag "diplomacy," this one included.  Having spent most of my adult life practicing that art, my blogging is a natural outgrowth of my previous calling.  Note my words: "art," "calling."  I might just have easily used "vocation," but my diplomacy was largely secular.  I'll leave the messianic part where it belongs, in the rubbish heap of the Bush era, where War was his middle name (or was it Waterboard?).

Note the symbolism in the Great Seal of the United States: "the olive branch and the arrows 'denote the power of peace & war',” according to the State Department (the keeper of the official US symbol; 18th century image at left from the Library of Congress).

The power of peace...

Today's Roger Cohen piece in the New York Times, "The Mellow Doctrine," nicely sums up where President Obama, in his 100+ day march through foreign capitals, has brought the United States in its relations with the rest of the world:

Call it the mellow doctrine. Neither idealistic nor classic realpolitik, it involves finding strength through unconventional means: acknowledgment of the limits of American power; frankness about U.S. failings; careful listening; fear reduction; adroit deployment of the wide appeal of brand Barack Hussein Obama; and jujitsu engagement.

There he is again, our Pragmatic President, confusing the opposition by using the non-kinetic weapons of candor and "careful listening."  This is exactly what we need, as both were lacking in a foreign policy that cost the United States much more - in moral terms - than simply the trillions devoted to the Iraq war-of-choice.  It's nice that students - from 4th graders in Washington to Stanford University - remember that, and are putting the torture-enablers on the spot.

Obama can continue to gain much by appearing to "give" in on previously cherished positions (and possessions).  As Julia Sweig of the Council on Foreign Relations suggested in yesterday's Washington Post, "Don't Just Close Gitmo. Give It Back."  She reminds us that the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay started out over a century ago as a coaling station, that 19th century military "must" that was a corollary of gunboat diplomacy.

We've given up the battleships, but kept the coaling station.  Just like the Maginot Line and the Siegfried Line are now just tourist attractions across the internal EU non-border, sometimes ratcheting down the military must-haves is a positive move for national security.

In what may become the toughest foreign policy challenge of his presidency - safely normalizing relations with Iran, a country whose Islamist government has been on a 30 year collision course with the United States - Barack Obama could do worse than some "careful listening" to Alistair Crooke of Conflicts Forum, profiled over the weekend by Robert F. Worth of the New York Times.  Crooke, a former British intelligence officer, is spending his post-spying career building bridges with political Islam (another one of my subject tags).  Crooke knows how difficult this is:

“George Mitchell once said to me, ‘you don’t even have a political process until you accept that the other side has a legitimate point of view,’ ” Mr. Crooke said, referring to Mr. Mitchell’s landmark 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland and relating it to the many obstacles between the United States and Iran.

“Does America have the will and the patience for that?” he said. “I’m not sure we’re there yet.”

Diplomacy is all about will and patience.  We are certainly not "there yet," but notice where Obama Middle East envoy George Mitchell has been sent?  The man whose "Mitchell Method" brand of quiet diplomacy brought peace to a centuries-old conflict is now applying his skills to a confrontation that is "merely" decades-old.  Maybe the Obama Method will become known, in Roger Cohen's phrase, as "no-drama diplomacy."