By Mark LeVine
Al-Jazeera
".....Brand America
Like Woods, America's brand is under threat. Unlike Woods, however, Obama cannot be blamed for the problems that so tarnished the country's image in the last decade.
Indeed, as Thorbjorn Jagland, the chairman of the Nobel committee, all but admitted, he was awarded the Peace Prize in good measure because of his attempts to re-brand the US as a less bellicose, more cooperative global leader.
Read through the "Obama Doctrine" outlined in his Nobel speech, however, and the similarities to the strategy behind the rehabilitation of 'Brand Tiger' are clear. "We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend," the president eloquently intoned.
The reality is that Obama is willing to admit to "mistakes" made by predecessors, but he will not question, or even mention, the larger system that has produced them. He cannot do so because that would call into question the myth of American exceptionalism that for so long has been used to justify them.
As long as the US is a unique, divinely appointed and essentially just power, its mistakes, however costly, do not threaten the core values that have made it exceptional.
System of global dominance
Obama cannot acknowledge what the rest of the world well understands: that the wars he has inherited, and have now made his own, are the direct result of decades of policies aimed at supporting a system that enabled the global dominance of the US, but at the cost of large-scale violence, oppression and exploitation across the developing world.
Rather than challenge or even scrap the system that produced this violence and the periodic blowback it generates, the Obama doctrine will reinforce it......
Instead, the myth of American exceptionalism must be reasserted; it is the only way the president, and the American people with him, can imagine that the US will not ultimately suffer the same fate as the empires before it; that the iron laws of imperial rise and decay, and the violence attending both, simply will not apply to it.
Only then can it be imagined that the "evil in the world" has not touched us; that the "imperfections of man and the limits of reason," as the president described them, apply to other men and ideas, and not to ours.
Only then can Obama mention human rights seven times in his speech while leaving unsaid what everyone sitting before him well knew: that US aid and support for regimes that systematically violate these rights would continue the next morning uninterrupted......
Voices from below
The awarding of the Peace Prize to Obama reads like a desperate attempt to resuscitate the discredited idea of a "Great Man" of history ushering in a new era. It is an understandable fantasy, given the magnitude of the problems the world confronts.
But it distracts from the reality that it will be movements from below, however imperfect and irrational they can be, that will create, in Obama's words, "the world that ought to be," not leaders from above, however audacious their rhetoric.
In that regard, perhaps the most historically significant aspect of Obama's speech is its irrelevance on the ground.....
When coupled with the burgeoning struggles for democracy and human rights in the Muslim world, and even broader struggles across the global south, they constitute a direct challenge to the system President Obama, like his counterparts in Moscow, Beijing, and other global power centres, prefers to leave unnamed.
Such a multi-layered, often disorganised movement will likely remain too amorphous and hard to define ever to award a Nobel Peace Prize. But if history is kind, it just might help usher in the global transformation that Obama and the Nobel committee can only dream of."
Al-Jazeera
".....Brand America
Like Woods, America's brand is under threat. Unlike Woods, however, Obama cannot be blamed for the problems that so tarnished the country's image in the last decade.
Indeed, as Thorbjorn Jagland, the chairman of the Nobel committee, all but admitted, he was awarded the Peace Prize in good measure because of his attempts to re-brand the US as a less bellicose, more cooperative global leader.
Read through the "Obama Doctrine" outlined in his Nobel speech, however, and the similarities to the strategy behind the rehabilitation of 'Brand Tiger' are clear. "We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend," the president eloquently intoned.
The reality is that Obama is willing to admit to "mistakes" made by predecessors, but he will not question, or even mention, the larger system that has produced them. He cannot do so because that would call into question the myth of American exceptionalism that for so long has been used to justify them.
As long as the US is a unique, divinely appointed and essentially just power, its mistakes, however costly, do not threaten the core values that have made it exceptional.
System of global dominance
Obama cannot acknowledge what the rest of the world well understands: that the wars he has inherited, and have now made his own, are the direct result of decades of policies aimed at supporting a system that enabled the global dominance of the US, but at the cost of large-scale violence, oppression and exploitation across the developing world.
Rather than challenge or even scrap the system that produced this violence and the periodic blowback it generates, the Obama doctrine will reinforce it......
Instead, the myth of American exceptionalism must be reasserted; it is the only way the president, and the American people with him, can imagine that the US will not ultimately suffer the same fate as the empires before it; that the iron laws of imperial rise and decay, and the violence attending both, simply will not apply to it.
Only then can it be imagined that the "evil in the world" has not touched us; that the "imperfections of man and the limits of reason," as the president described them, apply to other men and ideas, and not to ours.
Only then can Obama mention human rights seven times in his speech while leaving unsaid what everyone sitting before him well knew: that US aid and support for regimes that systematically violate these rights would continue the next morning uninterrupted......
Voices from below
The awarding of the Peace Prize to Obama reads like a desperate attempt to resuscitate the discredited idea of a "Great Man" of history ushering in a new era. It is an understandable fantasy, given the magnitude of the problems the world confronts.
But it distracts from the reality that it will be movements from below, however imperfect and irrational they can be, that will create, in Obama's words, "the world that ought to be," not leaders from above, however audacious their rhetoric.
In that regard, perhaps the most historically significant aspect of Obama's speech is its irrelevance on the ground.....
When coupled with the burgeoning struggles for democracy and human rights in the Muslim world, and even broader struggles across the global south, they constitute a direct challenge to the system President Obama, like his counterparts in Moscow, Beijing, and other global power centres, prefers to leave unnamed.
Such a multi-layered, often disorganised movement will likely remain too amorphous and hard to define ever to award a Nobel Peace Prize. But if history is kind, it just might help usher in the global transformation that Obama and the Nobel committee can only dream of."
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