Obama's Report Card: Rehabilitating America’s image

President Obama’s ability to captivate the world and “give its people hope for a better future”  moved the Norwegian Nobel Committee to chose him over more than 200 other nominees for the Peace Prize less than nine months after his inauguration.

The decision speaks to the significant change of America’s image in the eyes of the world, and after a semester of studying abroad in South America, I can attest that the change is not, as an American public increasingly disenchanted with its president might wish to believe, limited to an elitist committee in a left-leaning Scandinavian nation.

It is somewhat difficult to evaluate the effect of a new administration when one’s primary observation is that immigration officers have been less scornful upon seeing an American passport.

Nonetheless, I repeatedly encountered people who, even if they do not see Obama as a resolver of their own national issues, believed that America had elected a respectable president who is less bellicose than his predecessor. And guess what? That is exactly what they are looking for.

The majority of the world’s inhabitants do not wish to turn their national sovereignty over to an American. That is precisely what we should have learned from the diplomatic debacle that was the Bush administration.

The United States was scorned around the world for its brazen military action that toppled governments and sought to single-handedly remake nations in its own image.
 
The hope for President Obama was not that he would be a better judge of when to intervene in other nations’ affairs, but rather that he represented a willingness to negotiate, to use words in lieu of bombs. 

In short, Obama stood for a move in the direction of respecting the right of other peoples to determine their own national agendas and to collaborate on issues that impact the entire planet.

Americans have every right to be disillusioned with the paucity of the president’s domestic policy achievements a year into his term. And with the failure of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen to meet even basic expectations, questioning the administration’s foreign policy achievements is hardly unreasonable either.

Now, we may well expect the tangible results from Obama that, so far, we have not gotten. If we are lucky, those accomplishments, if and when they come, will convince Americans that his methods of less violence and humility are the most efficient approach to international issues.

Grade: Incomplete