COMMENT As Woodrow Wilson declined to meet Ho Chi Minh in Paris in 1919, so Barack Obama avoids Anwar Ibrahim in Kuala Lumpur in 2014.
What’s the beef?
Well, an American President who was an idealistic exponent of self-determination declined to meet an emerging titan of Asian nationalism.
The latter would in ensuing decades turn out to be central to the freeing of a subject people from the colonial yoke before going on to unite his country under a communist rule that for long would remain averse to the interests of the United States.
What were the cumulative costs in lives of that error of omission by Wilson?
Between the signing of the Geneva Accords in the mid-1950s and the desperate departure of the last US helicopter from the rooftop of the American Embassy in Saigon in late April 1975, two million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians died and 58,000 American lives were lost in the conflicts of the Indochina theatre which history may well say were avoidable.
This toll does not take into account the collateral damage to Cambodia, which was immense, and to Laos, which was also affected though not as severely.
In a horrific sequel, two million other Vietnamese would become boat people, fleeing oppression at home by opting to risk their lives on rickety vessels on the high seas, in yet another of the 20th Century’s not infrequent mass migrations prompted by man’s inhumanity to man.
Wilson’s tragic decision not to meet Ho Chi Minh at the onset of a world-historical moment in the freeing of subject peoples from colonialism is being replicated by Obama’s avoidance of Anwar, long a signal player in the equally momentous issue of Islam’s compatibility with democracy.
Failed to make experience count
A world leader with an African-Asian and Muslim overlay -- an unusual combination in a US president -- fails to make his experience count by granting the moral support of an audience to an Islamist democrat who for the better part of two decades has been the object of withering pressure from oppressors scrambling to save their tottering rule from deserved termination.
This issue is Islam’s compatibility with democracy, a matter of world-historical importance, not only to Obama’s presidency but also to the United States’ self-conception in a world no longer led by power blocs but by the contest of ideas.
Obama omitting to meet with Anwar may turn to be as crucial a misstep as the failure of Woodrow Wilson to give the young Vietnamese then studying in Paris, Ho Chi Minh, a chance to meet with the US president during the negotiations in the French capital in 1919 to end the First World War.
Ho, who at 29 was already the leader of an emerging Vietnamese independence movement fighting to free the country from French colonial rule, approached Wilson’s adviser, Edward House, for a meeting with the 28th US president.
Fired by the Jeffersonian ideals enunciated in the US Proclamation of Independence and by Wilson’s Fourteen Points manifesto for world peace at the end of the Great War, a document that urged democracy and self-determination for large and small nations, Ho approached House with hope.
But the requested meeting did not take place.
A prescient touch from Wilson, not a lot to ask for given that the US president was espousing the self-determination that his Vietnamese supplicant was questing after, could well have encouraged Ho in pursuit of the Jeffersonian ideals that had initially animated him instead of the Marxist-Leninist ones that he would, out of disappointment with the US, come to embrace.
Among former presidents of the United States, Barrack Hussein Obama (few American voters knew his Muslim middle name because sections of the US press conspired to keep quiet about it until after the 2008 election) most resembles Wilson.
Both are what you call ‘progressives’, the term in American political parlance that is applied to politicians who think that government can be reduced to a science and that the principles of abstract reason can be applied to the political arena.
A former Princeton University president and professor of political science, Wilson had gone to Paris in 1919 where negotiations to end the war were being held.
Promises, promises and promises
He had high hopes of securing a lasting peace after the carnage of a world war that took millions of lives and caused much devastation in Europe.
Like an optimistic Wilson at the Paris negotiations to end the Great War in 1919, Obama had begun his presidency five years ago announcing that he was the change that would fundamentally transform the United States of America, just as Wilson was intent on fundamentally transforming the post-Great War world with the League of Nations, democracy and self-determination for nations large and small.
By change Obama meant not only the promised departures from the public policies of his predecessor George W Bush, but also the radical shifts in foreign and domestic policy that would make America a new nation.
Most observers would have taken this to mean that in an Obama administration, the usual trade-offs between principles and interests would not occur as often and as easily as before.
In Obama’s omitting to meet Anwar, there appears to be a trade-off between United States’ interest in getting Malaysia to sign on to the unpopular Trans Pacific Trade Agreement and the country’s principles in encouraging democracy and human rights.
Small wonder that five years on from his administration’s epic start, the first by an African-American, the early optimism and hopes that attended its start are looking more than a little frayed around the edges.
Apropos of something else, the president was once quoted as asking, “Can you blame [Americans] for feeling a little cynical?"
Of course, nothing spawns cynicism as the change game and few play it better than Barack Obama.
TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for four decades now. He likes the profession because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them.
What’s the beef?
Well, an American President who was an idealistic exponent of self-determination declined to meet an emerging titan of Asian nationalism.
The latter would in ensuing decades turn out to be central to the freeing of a subject people from the colonial yoke before going on to unite his country under a communist rule that for long would remain averse to the interests of the United States.
What were the cumulative costs in lives of that error of omission by Wilson?
Between the signing of the Geneva Accords in the mid-1950s and the desperate departure of the last US helicopter from the rooftop of the American Embassy in Saigon in late April 1975, two million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians died and 58,000 American lives were lost in the conflicts of the Indochina theatre which history may well say were avoidable.This toll does not take into account the collateral damage to Cambodia, which was immense, and to Laos, which was also affected though not as severely.
In a horrific sequel, two million other Vietnamese would become boat people, fleeing oppression at home by opting to risk their lives on rickety vessels on the high seas, in yet another of the 20th Century’s not infrequent mass migrations prompted by man’s inhumanity to man.Wilson’s tragic decision not to meet Ho Chi Minh at the onset of a world-historical moment in the freeing of subject peoples from colonialism is being replicated by Obama’s avoidance of Anwar, long a signal player in the equally momentous issue of Islam’s compatibility with democracy.
Failed to make experience count
A world leader with an African-Asian and Muslim overlay -- an unusual combination in a US president -- fails to make his experience count by granting the moral support of an audience to an Islamist democrat who for the better part of two decades has been the object of withering pressure from oppressors scrambling to save their tottering rule from deserved termination.
This issue is Islam’s compatibility with democracy, a matter of world-historical importance, not only to Obama’s presidency but also to the United States’ self-conception in a world no longer led by power blocs but by the contest of ideas.
Obama omitting to meet with Anwar may turn to be as crucial a misstep as the failure of Woodrow Wilson to give the young Vietnamese then studying in Paris, Ho Chi Minh, a chance to meet with the US president during the negotiations in the French capital in 1919 to end the First World War.
Ho, who at 29 was already the leader of an emerging Vietnamese independence movement fighting to free the country from French colonial rule, approached Wilson’s adviser, Edward House, for a meeting with the 28th US president.
Fired by the Jeffersonian ideals enunciated in the US Proclamation of Independence and by Wilson’s Fourteen Points manifesto for world peace at the end of the Great War, a document that urged democracy and self-determination for large and small nations, Ho approached House with hope.
But the requested meeting did not take place.
A prescient touch from Wilson, not a lot to ask for given that the US president was espousing the self-determination that his Vietnamese supplicant was questing after, could well have encouraged Ho in pursuit of the Jeffersonian ideals that had initially animated him instead of the Marxist-Leninist ones that he would, out of disappointment with the US, come to embrace.
Among former presidents of the United States, Barrack Hussein Obama (few American voters knew his Muslim middle name because sections of the US press conspired to keep quiet about it until after the 2008 election) most resembles Wilson.
Both are what you call ‘progressives’, the term in American political parlance that is applied to politicians who think that government can be reduced to a science and that the principles of abstract reason can be applied to the political arena.
A former Princeton University president and professor of political science, Wilson had gone to Paris in 1919 where negotiations to end the war were being held.
Promises, promises and promises
He had high hopes of securing a lasting peace after the carnage of a world war that took millions of lives and caused much devastation in Europe.
Like an optimistic Wilson at the Paris negotiations to end the Great War in 1919, Obama had begun his presidency five years ago announcing that he was the change that would fundamentally transform the United States of America, just as Wilson was intent on fundamentally transforming the post-Great War world with the League of Nations, democracy and self-determination for nations large and small.
By change Obama meant not only the promised departures from the public policies of his predecessor George W Bush, but also the radical shifts in foreign and domestic policy that would make America a new nation.
Most observers would have taken this to mean that in an Obama administration, the usual trade-offs between principles and interests would not occur as often and as easily as before.
In Obama’s omitting to meet Anwar, there appears to be a trade-off between United States’ interest in getting Malaysia to sign on to the unpopular Trans Pacific Trade Agreement and the country’s principles in encouraging democracy and human rights.
Small wonder that five years on from his administration’s epic start, the first by an African-American, the early optimism and hopes that attended its start are looking more than a little frayed around the edges.
Apropos of something else, the president was once quoted as asking, “Can you blame [Americans] for feeling a little cynical?"
Of course, nothing spawns cynicism as the change game and few play it better than Barack Obama.
TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for four decades now. He likes the profession because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them.
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