A Promised Land

by Barack Obama

Our motivations for erecting this architecture had hardly been selfless. Beyond helping to assure our security, it pried open markets to sell our goods, kept sea-lanes available for our ships, and maintained the steady flow of oil for our factories and cars. It ensured that our banks got repaid in dollars, our multinationals’ factories weren’t seized, our tourists could cash their traveler’s checks, and our international calls would go through. At times, we bent global institutions to serve Cold War imperatives or ignored them altogether; we meddled in the affairs of other countries, sometimes with disastrous results; our actions often contradicted the ideals of democracy, self-determination, and human rights we professed to embody.

but in exchange for emergency financing and continued access to global capital markets, folks like Bob Rubin and Alan Greenspan (not to mention Rubin’s aides at the time, Larry Summers and Tim Geithner) had pushed ailing countries to accept tough medicine, including currency devaluations, deep cuts in public spending, and a number of other austerity measures that shored up their international credit ratings but visited enormous hardship on their people. Imagine, then, the consternation of these same countries when they learned that even as America lectured them on prudential regulations and responsible fiscal stewardship, our own high priests of finance had been asleep at the switch, tolerating asset bubbles and speculative frenzies on Wall Street that were as reckless as anything happening in Latin America or Asia.

And then there was China. Since the late 1970s, when Deng Xiaoping effectively abandoned Mao Zedong’s Marxist-Leninist vision in favor of an export-driven, state-managed form of capitalism, no nation in history had developed faster or moved more people out of abject poverty. Once little more than a hub of low-grade manufacturing and assembly for foreign companies looking to take advantage of its endless supply of low-wage workers, China now boasted topflight engineers and world-class companies working at the cutting edge of advanced technology.

Even those who complained about America’s role in the world still relied on us to keep the system afloat.

Still, the trip provided sobering evidence of just how much of my first term was going to be spent not on new initiatives but on putting out fires that predated my presidency. At the NATO summit, for instance, we were able to secure alliance support for our Af-Pak strategy—but only after listening to European leaders emphasize how sharply their publics had turned against military cooperation with the United States following the Iraq invasion, and how difficult it was going to be for them to muster political support for additional troops. NATO’s central and Eastern European members had also been unnerved by the Bush administration’s tepid reaction to Russia’s invasion of Georgia and questioned whether the alliance could be counted on to defend them against similar Russian aggression.

I reminded myself that every president felt saddled with the previous administration’s choices and mistakes, that 90 percent of the job was navigating inherited problems and unanticipated crises. Only if you did that well enough, with discipline and purpose, did you get a real shot at shaping the future.

What did have me worried by the end of the trip was less a particular issue than an overall impression: the sense that for a variety of reasons—some of our own making, some beyond our control—the hopeful tide of democratization, liberalization, and integration that had swept the globe after the end of the Cold War was beginning to recede. Older, darker forces were gathering strength, and the stresses brought about by a prolonged economic downturn were likely to make things worse.

“In some ways, the Soviets simplified who the enemy was,” Havel said. “Today, autocrats are more sophisticated. They stand for election while slowly undermining the institutions that make democracy possible. They champion free markets while engaging in the same corruption, cronyism, and exploitation as existed in the past.”

The Saudi monarchy could take satisfaction in having averted an Iranian-style revolution, both within its borders and among its Gulf partners (although maintaining such order still required a repressive internal security service and broad media censorship). But it had done so at the price of accelerating a transnational fundamentalist movement that despised Western influences, remained suspicious of Saudi dalliances with the United States, and served as a petri dish for the radicalization of many young Muslims:

I was left with an impression that would become all too familiar in my dealings with aging autocrats: Shut away in palaces, their every interaction mediated by the hard-faced, obsequious functionaries that surrounded them, they were unable to distinguish between their personal interests and those of their nations, their actions governed by no broader purpose beyond maintaining the tangled web of patronage and business interests that kept them in power.

How useful is it to describe the world as it should be when efforts to achieve that world are bound to fall short? Was Václav Havel correct in suggesting that by raising expectations, I was doomed to disappoint them? Was it possible that abstract principles and high-minded ideals were and always would be nothing more than a pretense, a palliative, a way to beat back despair, but no match for the more primal urges that really moved us, so that no matter what we said or did, history was sure to run along its predetermined course, an endless cycle of fear, hunger and conflict, dominance and weakness?

Merkel spoke clearly and humbly of the necessity for Germans to remember the past—to wrestle with the agonizing question of how their homeland could have perpetrated such horrors and recognize the special responsibility they now shouldered to stand up against bigotry of all kinds.

but his appeal for public support was no match for the well-financed PR efforts of the American Medical Association and other industry lobbyists. Opponents didn’t just kill Truman’s effort. They convinced a large swath of the public that “socialized medicine” would lead to rationing, the loss of your family doctor, and the freedoms Americans hold so dear.

Meanwhile, defenders of the status quo could point to the many innovations brought to market by the for-profit medical industry, from MRIs to lifesaving drugs. Useful as they were, though, these innovations also further drove up healthcare costs. And with insurers footing the nation’s medical bills, patients had little incentive to question whether drug companies were overcharging or if doctors and hospitals were ordering redundant tests and unnecessary treatments in order to pad their bottom lines. Meanwhile, nearly a fifth of the country lived just an illness or accident away from potential financial ruin. Forgoing regular checkups and preventive care because they couldn’t afford it, the uninsured often waited until they were very sick before seeking care at hospital emergency rooms, where more advanced illnesses meant more expensive treatment. Hospitals made up for this uncompensated care by increasing prices for insured customers, which in turn further jacked up premiums.

it was in response to foreign competition that U.S. companies began off-loading rising insurance costs onto their employees in the late 1980s and ’90s, replacing traditional plans that had few, if any, out-of-pocket costs with cheaper versions that included higher deductibles, co-pays, lifetime limits, and other unpleasant surprises hidden in the fine print.

Drug reimportation was a great political issue, but at the end of the day, we didn’t have the votes for it, partly because plenty of Democrats had major pharmaceutical companies headquartered or operating in their states.

House Democrats hated the idea. It would mean giving away their power to determine what Medicare did and didn’t cover (along with the potential campaign fundraising opportunities that came with that power). They also worried that they’d get blamed by cranky seniors who found themselves unable to get the latest drug or diagnostic test advertised on TV, even if an expert could prove that it was actually a waste of money.

Still, the reaction to my comments on Gates surprised us all. It was my first indicator of how the issue of Black folks and the police was more polarizing than just about any other subject in American life. It seemed to tap into some of the deepest undercurrents of our nation’s psyche, touching on the rawest of nerves, perhaps because it reminded all of us, Black and white alike, that the basis of our nation’s social order had never been simply about consent; that it was also about centuries of state-sponsored violence by whites against Black and brown people, and that who controlled legally sanctioned violence, how it was wielded and against whom, still mattered in the recesses of our tribal minds much more than we cared to admit.

Frank Luntz, a well-known Republican strategist, had circulated a memo stating that after market-testing no fewer than forty anti-reform messages, he’d concluded that invoking a “government takeover” was the best way to discredit the healthcare legislation.

politicians and conservative media had been peddling for years. Nor, it turned out, was the Tea Party the spontaneous, grassroots movement it purported to be. From the outset, Koch brother affiliates like Americans for Prosperity, along with other billionaire conservatives who’d been part of the Indian Wells gathering hosted by the Kochs just after I was inaugurated, had carefully nurtured the movement by registering internet domain names and obtaining rally permits; training organizers and sponsoring conferences; and ultimately providing much of the Tea Party’s financing, infrastructure, and strategic direction.

I wondered if any of that was still possible, now that I lived locked behind gates and guardsmen, my image filtered through Fox News and other media outlets whose entire business model depended on making their audience angry and fearful.

In our interactions with other nations, we had become obdurate and shortsighted, resistant to the hard, slow work of building coalitions and consensus. We’d closed ourselves off from other points of view. I believed that America’s security depended on strengthening our alliances and international institutions. I saw military action as a tool of last, not first, resort.

Operation Ajax set a pattern for U.S. miscalculation in dealing with developing countries that lasted throughout the Cold War: mistaking nationalist aspirations for Communist plots; equating commercial interests with national security; subverting democratically elected governments and aligning ourselves with autocrats when we determined it was to our benefit.

Iraq’s attempted 1980 invasion of Iran and the bloody eight-year war that followed—a war in which the Gulf states provided Saddam Hussein with financing while the Soviets supplied Khomeini’s military with arms, including chemical weapons—accelerated Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism as a way to offset its enemies’ military advantages. (The United States, under Reagan, cynically tried to have it both ways, publicly backing Iraq while secretly selling arms to Iran.) Khomeini’s vow to wipe Israel off the map—manifest in the IRGC’s support for armed proxies like the Lebanon-based Shiite militia Hezbollah and the military wing of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas—made the Iranian regime Israel’s single greatest security threat and contributed to the general hardening of Israeli attitudes toward possible peace with its neighbors. More broadly, Khomeini’s rendering of the world as a Manichaean clash between the forces of Allah and those of “the Great Satan” (America) seeped like a toxin into the minds not just of future jihadists but of those in the West already inclined to view Muslims as objects of suspicion and fear.

I left those conversations weighed down by the knowledge that if war became necessary, nearly everything else I was trying to achieve would likely be upended.

my heart was now chained to strategic considerations and tactical analysis, my convictions subject to counterintuitive arguments; that in the most powerful office on earth, I had less freedom to say what I meant and act on what I felt than I’d had as a senator—or as an ordinary citizen disgusted by the sight of a young woman gunned down by her own government.

Shorn of its ideological underpinnings, the once-shiny promise of workers uniting to throw off their chains, Putin’s Russia came off as insular and suspicious of outsiders—to be feared, perhaps, but not emulated. It was this gap between the truth of modern-day Russia and Putin’s insistence on its superpower status, I thought, that helped account for the country’s increasingly combative foreign relations.

In the battle for Russia’s identity, fear and fatalism usually beat out hope and change.

And yet, in order to reduce the risk of nuclear catastrophe or another Middle East war, I’d just spent the morning courting an autocrat who no doubt kept dossiers on every Russian activist in the room and could have any one of them harassed, jailed, or worse whenever he pleased.

the U.N. hadn’t always lived up to these lofty intentions. Like its ill-fated predecessor, the League of Nations, the organization was only as strong as its most powerful members allowed it to be.

But as globalization shifted into overdrive during the Clinton and Bush years, these voices found themselves in the minority. There was too much money to be made. U.S. corporations and their shareholders liked the reduced labor costs and soaring profits that resulted from shifting production to China.

by the time I took office, a rough consensus had emerged among U.S. foreign-policy-making elites and big party donors: Instead of engaging in protectionism, America needed to take a page from the Chinese playbook. If we wanted to stay number one, we needed to work harder, save more money, and teach our kids more math, science, engineering—and Mandarin.

I wondered when exactly such a sizable portion of the American Right had become so frightened and insecure that they’d completely lost their minds.

So long as they competed with us on a level playing field, I considered Southeast Asia’s progress something for America to welcome, not fear. I wonder now whether that’s what conservative critics found so objectionable about my foreign policy, why something as minor as a bow to the Japanese emperor could trigger such rage: I didn’t seem threatened, as they were, by the idea that the rest of the world was catching up to us.

If some of the students chafed against the way the government blocked their access to websites, they likely experienced the full weight of China’s repressive apparatus mainly as an abstraction, as remote from their personal experience as the U.S. criminal justice system might be to middle-class, suburban white kids back home.

I was reminded once again that for Wen and the rest of China’s leaders, foreign policy remained purely transactional. How much they gave and how much they got would depend not on abstract principles of international law but on their assessment of the other side’s power and leverage. Where they met no resistance, they’d keep on taking.

other words, if you wanted good government, then expertise mattered. You needed public institutions stocked with people whose job it was to pay attention to important stuff so the rest of us citizens didn’t have to.

Reviewing this history, I sometimes imagined a parallel universe in which the United States, without rival immediately following the end of the Cold War, had put its immense power and authority behind the climate change fight. I imagined the transformation of the world’s energy grid and the reduction in greenhouse gases that might have been achieved; the geopolitical benefits that would have flowed from weakening the grip of petrodollars and the autocracies supported by those dollars; the culture of sustainability that could have taken root in developed and developing countries alike.

Now that Bush was gone and Democrats were in charge, they wanted to know, why couldn’t the United States ratify a Kyoto-style treaty? In Europe, they said, even the far-right parties accept the reality of climate change—what is wrong with Americans?

voters in focus groups couldn’t distinguish between TARP, which I’d inherited, and the stimulus; they just knew that the well-connected were getting theirs while they were getting screwed. They also thought that Republican calls for budget cuts in response to the crisis—“austerity,” as economists liked to call it—made more intuitive sense than our Keynesian push for increased government spending.

Just as he’d known that in a crisis people needed a story that made sense of their hardships and spoke to their emotions—a morality tale with clear good guys and bad guys and a plot they could easily follow. In other words, FDR understood that to be effective, governance couldn’t be so antiseptic that it set aside the basic stuff of politics: You had to sell your program, reward supporters, punch back against opponents, and amplify the facts that helped your cause while fudging the details that didn’t. I found myself wondering whether we’d somehow turned a virtue into a vice; whether, trapped in my own high-mindedness, I’d failed to tell the American people a story they could believe in; and whether, having ceded the political narrative to my critics, I was going to be able to wrest it back.

Although liberal by American standards, Europe’s biggest economies were almost all led by center-right governments, elected on the promise of balanced budgets and free-market reforms rather than more government spending. Germany, in particular—the European Union’s one true economic powerhouse and its most influential member—continued to see fiscal rectitude as the answer to all economic woes. The more I’d gotten to know Angela Merkel, the more I’d come to like her; I found her steady, honest, intellectually rigorous, and instinctually kind. But she was also conservative by temperament, not to mention a savvy politician who knew her constituency, and whenever I suggested to her that Germany needed to set an example by spending more on infrastructure or tax cuts, she politely but firmly pushed back. “Ya, Barack, I think maybe that’s not the best approach for us,” she would say, her face pulling into a slight frown, as if I’d suggested something a little tawdry.

Greece’s economic problems weren’t new. For decades, the country had been plagued by low productivity, a bloated and inefficient public sector, massive tax avoidance, and unsustainable pension obligations. Despite that, throughout the 2000s, international capital markets had been happy to finance Greece’s steadily escalating deficits, much the same way that they’d been happy to finance a heap of subprime mortgages across the United States.

How prepared were citizens in Europe’s wealthier, more efficient nations to take on a neighboring country’s obligations or to see their tax dollars redistributed to those outside their borders? Would citizens of countries in economic distress accept sacrifices imposed on them by distant officials with whom they felt no affinity and over whom they had little or no power?

The fuss of being president, the pomp, the press, the physical constraints—all that I could have done without. The actual work, though? The work, I loved. Even when it didn’t love me back.

It makes me wonder now, with the benefit of hindsight, whether Michelle’s was the more honest response to all the changes we were going through; whether in my seeming calm as crises piled up, my insistence that everything would work out in the end, I was really just protecting myself—and contributing to her loneliness.

There was every reason to expect that Mitch McConnell would fight us on new financial regulations. After all, he’d made a career of opposing any and all forms of government regulation (environmental laws, labor laws, workplace safety laws, campaign finance laws, consumer protection laws) that might constrain corporate America’s ability to do whatever it damn well pleased.

The reforms they favored included capping the size of U.S. banks and reinstating Glass-Steagall, a Depression-era law that had prohibited FDIC-insured banks from engaging in investment banking, which had been mostly repealed during the Clinton administration.

FDR may have once had a mandate from voters to try anything, including a restructuring of American capitalism, after three wrenching years of the Depression, but partly because we’d stopped the situation from ever getting that bad, our mandate for change was a whole lot narrower.

Reading the transcript now, a decade later, I’m struck by how calm and cogent I sound. Maybe I’m surprised because the transcript doesn’t register what I remember feeling at the time or come close to capturing what I really wanted to say before the assembled White House press corps: That MMS wasn’t fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do. That the government didn’t have better technology than BP did to quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn’t like paying higher taxes—especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn’t happened yet. That it was hard to take seriously any criticism from a character like Bobby Jindal, who’d done Big Oil’s bidding throughout his career and would go on to support an oil industry lawsuit trying to get a federal court to lift our temporary drilling moratorium; and that if he and other Gulf-elected officials were truly concerned about the well-being of their constituents, they’d be urging their party to stop denying the effects of climate change, since it was precisely the people of the Gulf who were th...