I think one of the biggest talking points of the new Obama administration is going to be the battle between the State Department and the Department of Defense. President Obama has throughout this election coverage maintained that the USA should engage in more active diplomatic relations with potentially hazardous nations. A lot of people disagreed with him on that, especially his willingness to immediately sit down with such foreign leaders as Ahmadinejad, Castro, or Chavez to name a few.
With the signed order this week to close down Guantanamo Bay prision within a year, you could literally feel the Department of Defense cringing. The DoD has hold a stranglehold on US foreign policy over the past 8 years in the Bush administration. Rumsfeld and Cheney basically ran out international relations – how’d that go? The state department were pawns in W.’s global cowboy wrangling. Sending Gen. Powell to the UN to say Iraq had WMD’s was the lowest of the low.
Back to my main point, President Obama made a move this week that could prove I’m right. Usually the new incoming President makes the Pentagon his first stop once in office. Instead, President Obama went to the state department this week for a ‘rah-rah’ motivational push to support his new Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
I’m pumped about it. The DoD shouldn’t worry about their absurd funding being cut (we do after all recognize there are foreign enemies with intent on destruction) but they should be worried about their almost ‘need’ for war. Robert Gates is a hangover from the Bush administration as Secretary of Defense, and I’m okay with that. He is an intelligent man that deserves to at least groom someone of Obama’s choosing over the next year. The DOD is a complicated department in the global age with daily technological advances.
But in Barack Obama alone presents the chance for a new world of diplomacy and prospects of peace. Fidel Castro of Cuba, since falling ill last year and relinquishing day to day Presidential responsibilities, has remained fairly out of the limelight. He said this week of Obama, “I do not harbor the slightest doubt about the honesty with which Obama has expressed his ideas, but that despite his noble intentions, many questions remain to be answered. But I do wonder, how can a wasteful and consumerist system par excellence preserve the environment?”
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez warmly greeted President Obama’s inauguration yesterday. The firebrand socialist, who has promised to end what he calls U.S. imperialism and called Bush “the devil,” praised Obama’s decision to close a prison in Guantanamo, Cuba that has drawn harsh international criticism. “Barack Obama is a man with good intentions; he has immediately eliminated Guantanamo prison, and that should be applauded,” Chavez said, speaking to supporters in a televised speech. “I am very happy and the world is happy that this young president has arrived. We welcome the new government and we are filled with hope. We cannot say that everything that comes from the United States is bad per se, because we would be acting irrationally”
So while not expecting tense relations with either country to stop tomorrow, we have every reason to be optimistic going forward. In three days Obama has two of our highest profile foreign ‘enemies’ praising him and the hopes of relations between their country and America in the future. Cuba isn’t going to accept democracy overnight and Chavez isn’t going to relent his criticisms of our country, but it’s the first rung in the ladder that we certainly couldn’t climb with Bush at the helm.
Here’s hoping the state department gets to trump the DoD in the Obama administration. Fingers crossed.
