International Relations

This afternoon in Shanghai, U.S. President Barack Obama held a townhall-style meeting with university students. It was an event that his staff had worked hard to include on his China trip itinerary. After a brief speech extolling the importance of core values to the success of the United States as a nation and Americans as individuals, Obama took questions from the audience and online.

It has since come to light that not all of the questions came from bonafide students. One questioner was a vice director of daily affairs for the Communist Youth League; another was a young-looking teacher. Obama's answers about Internet freedom weren't heard by most remote audiences because several networks, including CNN, mysteriously cut away for commentary at that moment. The response among expats in China was, by and large, negative -- with many complaining Obama had minced his words, talking for instance of "universal rights" rather than "human rights." If one is looking to be cynical, there's plenty of fodder.

On the other hand, from the point of view of most Chinese I've spoken, these official efforts at censorship might have been silly, or nefarious, but they didn't have much impact. The notion of a president taking questions, not a frequent occurence in China, was itself the point. The symbolism was more arresting, to them, than the content. "Why does he want to talk to Chinese students?" one 29-year-old Chinese woman asked me, without irony. She was puzzled, impressed, and a bit amused at the spectacle. 

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The World Economic Forum posted the 2009 Global Gender Gap Report today, its yearly survey of gender inequality based on economic, political, educational and health factors.  For the first time, two African nations entered the top 10 rankings:  South Africa at #6 position (up from #22 in 2008) and Lesotho in the #10 slot (up from #16 in 2008).

The increased ranking for South Africa is due to increases in parliamentary and ministerial positions for women under the new government. Lesotho holds its strong position thanks to its lack of gender gap in health and education services.

These advances for South Africa may come as a surprise to many who feared for women's empowerment in South Africa following the May election of President Jacob Zuma, a practicing polygamist and accused rapist.

The World Economic Forum reports that two thirds of countries surveyed have made reduction in their gender gaps since 2006. However, the United States fell four spots since last year, coming in at #31 on the list. It looks like the death of macho due to the global recession may not be occurring as quickly as some expected. In any case, the United States is not alone in its loss of gender equality; Germany, the United Kingdom and France also saw declines in their rankings since last year.

Unsurprisingly, the bottom of the list remained largely unchanged from last year with Yemen, Chad, Pakistan, Benin, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran continuing to boast the world's worst gender gaps.

ALEXANDER JOE/AFP/Getty Images

Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas and Republican presidential hopeful, has never been known for his foreign-policy prowess. Wonder why?

At a junket hosted by a far-right Israeli religious group, he rejected a two-state solution for the Israel-Palestine conflict. The two-state solution both Israeli and Palestinian leaders say they want. The two-state solution virtually every U.S. politician, conservative or liberal, supports. The two-state solution essentially the entire world agrees offers the best hope for peace.

The new U.S. ambassador to Britain, Louis Susman, has indicated he will not pay the 3.5 million pounds ($5.7 million!) in congestion charges the embassy owes the City of London. 

Drivers pay 8 pounds a day for the privilege of driving in a central zone at peak hours -- but the U.S. embassy has refused to pay. The argument? The congestion charge is a tax, not a service fee. And embassies don't pay taxes. 

The mayor's office and Transport for London, which administers the program, argue that around three-quarters of embassies pay the charge -- a service, not a tax -- and that the United States should do better than to rely on semantics to wiggle out of it. 

I tend to think of congestion charges as taxes. They're designed to encourage certain behaviors and to make money for local governments. London spends the program's surplus (around a third of revenue, or nearly 90 million pounds, in 2007) on transport investment, for instance. But this still seems a little unseemly. What do you think?

Seven months ago, Hillary Rodham Clinton -- the powerful New York Senator, former First Lady, and runner-up in the brutally long Democratic primary competition -- became U.S. President Barack Obama's secretary of state. Since then, she's chastened North Korea, advocated on behalf of Burma, and rallied against Israeli settlement building. She's logged nearly 100,000 air miles. She's tirelessly pursued Obama's diplomatic agenda around the world.

And she's done it while fostering or demonstrating little friction with the White House she once hoped to occupy. Being secretary of state doesn't just require being a diplomat abroad. It requires being a diplomat in Washington. For, foreign policy is not and has never been the purview of State alone -- Clinton overlaps and dovetails and supports and creates policy with Obama, a spate of diplomatic envoys, the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense, the national security advisers, Vice President Joe Biden, et cetera. By all accounts, she's done well at that as well.

Not that you'd know it reading the paper. Too often, coverage of Clinton neglects the fact that the secretary of state has never been the sole creator of U.S. foreign policy. It also, far too often, focuses hyper-intently on the perceived narrative of how Clinton feels about her relationship with the White House -- rather than the actual relationship between Clinton and Obama or how she's doing her job.

Here are some main offenders.

Two weeks ago, Tina Brown took to the pages of the Daily Beast to proclaim that "It's time for Barack Obama to let Hillary Clinton take off her burqa." The article -- which makes a decent argument that Clinton's love of policy nitty-gritty means she's happy to play a supporting role -- is suffused with the speculative, the hypersensitive, and the hyperpersonal. It digresses into Clinton's relationship with her husband. And it seems shocked -- shocked! -- that Clinton might not mind being a good soldier in such a well-liked and well-run administration.

Other offenders come from less-opinionated sources.

On May 1, the New York Times' diplomatic correspondent Mark Landler published a profile of Hillary-in-situ, with the headline "Her Rival Now Her Boss, Clinton Settles Into New Role." The piece covered the secretary's tiring schedule and her jockeying for position amid other top foreign-policy thinkers in the administration.

But it also included a lot of strange diversions into Clinton's relationship with her husband and her family -- "Sad Hillary" anecdotes, as I like to call them. Take, for instance, this tart assessment of the way Clinton communicates her daughter, Chelsea: "[She] exchanges e-mail messages with her daughter, Chelsea, on her BlackBerry, which she is not allowed to use, for security reasons, at work."

Even worse was an April 1 story by the same author, about Clinton's participation at the G-20 meetings in London.  Here's the lede:

For Hillary Rodham Clinton, arriving here on Tuesday night from The Hague was a lesson in the difference between being a supremely important person and just a very important one.

Mrs. Clinton's government plane was put into a holding pattern in the skies over Stansted Airport because air traffic had been backed up by Air Force One and other planes carrying world leaders to the economic summit meeting here. Once on the ground, her blue-and-white Boeing 757 taxied past President Obama's much larger 747, parking at a respectful distance.

Does the NYT honestly think anyone's surprised that the President's plane gets to go first? And do they honestly believe that it taught Hillary Clinton a lesson? I don't think so. The piece concludes with an anecdote about how Clinton brought a bunch of the tulip varietal named for her back to her hotel room -- whereas Obama got to stay in some sort of plush castle.

Of course, Clinton's a fascinating personal figure. And of course her relationship with the White House remains a topic major news outlets need to cover. This weekend, for instance, Clinton strayed far from the White House's line on Iran, taking a much harder position than other proxies on the issue of enrichment while speaking with Meet the Press.

I look forward to reading stories on that. But such strained coverage on the made-up narrative of Clinton's dislike of the parameters of her current job? No, thank you.

Photo: Flickr user sskennel

It was bound to happen: President Barack Obama's innocuous little trip to Ghana was apt to annoy someone or another. One might have exptected Kenya, where Obama still has family, to feel slighted. But the visit did even more damage the ego of another African power: Nigeria.

As soon as the news of Obama's trip was announced, the editorials began. Nigeria is the largest country in Africa by population. It has oil reserves that head, by and large, to the United States for consumption. It is a regional leader in economic and political terms. So why, the country wondered, would Obama pick its relatively smaller neighbor to the South? 

The answer, many in civil society concluded, is pretty clear: Nigeria must get its house in order before it will be honored with such a visit. Notorious for corruption, flawed elections, and an ongoing insurgency in the oil-producing region, Nigeria is in many ways everything Ghana is not. One Nigerian commentor on the BBC site proclaimed, "Snubbing Nigeria is okay. It is a wake up call for those who drag Nigeria by the nose." Even Wole Soyinka, one of the country's most esteemed intellectuals, said that he agreed with Obama's decision; Nigeria didn't merit the honor, he told a gathering in the capital, Abuja.

How has the Nigerian government reacted? If the Daily Trust newspaper has it pegged, "the honey pot of the 'big men' has turned paranoid." The head of the Foreign Relations Committee in Nigeria told the BBC that Obama should express any concerns he had about Nigeria in Abuja -- in person -- rather than by sending cryptic foreign policy signs. Criticism of the foreign service abounds, as well, as many claim that it was poor Nigerian diplomacy that failed to win the visit. 

So if Obama has been trying to send a message by visiting the relatively democratic and peaceful Ghana, it appears to at least be causing a stir. Of course, there are those who favor other theories for Nigeria's being slighted of the visit:

Come to think of it, you know Obama likes to play basketball. Suppose he invites President Yar'Adua while visiting to a game of basketball, one on one, and the man out of politeness agrees. And you know President Yar'Adua doesn't play basketball, he only plays squash.

Israel:

We share President Obama's hope that the American effort heralds the opening of a new era that will bring an end to the conflict and to general Arab recognition of Israel as the nation of the Jewish people that lives in security and peace in the Middle East.

Israel is committed to peace and will do all it can to expand the circle of peace while considering its national interests, first and foremost being security.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran:

You witness that in Afghanistan, American warplanes bomb people and kill some 150 not once, but 10 and 100 times. They kill people continually. So, terrorist groups, do what you are doing there.

If the new president of America wants a change of face, America should change this behaviour. Words and talk will not result in change.

Iraq:

The use of Koranic sayings plays a big part in a positive change of picture, but there is a necessity for action.

Hezbollah:

The Islamic world does not need moral or political sermons. It needs a fundamental change in American policy beginning from a halt to complete support for Israeli aggression on the region, especially on Lebanese and Palestinians, to an American withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan and a stop to its interference in the affairs of Islamic countries.

Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood:

There's an unjust perspective on the part of the American president toward the Palestinian issue, one that does not differ from former President Bush's and the neoconservatives' perspective.

Hamas:

Speaking about a policy of pursuing a war against extremism and working towards two states for peoples on Palestinian lands is no different from the policy of his predecessor, George W Bush.

Talking Points Memo:

Not only did the speech specifically reject western (and American) colonialism, its entire tone was the antithesis of colonial. This is a profoundly different American voice, one that will do much to advance American goals rather than to sabotage them.

Arab leaders who were listening to this speech might want to consider a similar speech of their own to their people.

Shimon Peres, president of Israel:

President Obama's journey to Saudi Arabia and Egypt could be an opportunity. It reflects both the need for an historic change in the Middle East and a unique chance of achieving it. 

Real Clear Politics:

The Middle East requires realpolitiks. It's indeed intriguing that Obama came to Egypt for this speech. The location and timing underline the moral choices made. And on the Middle East no less, where the means so often define the effort because the ends constantly prove elusive.

Matthew Yglesias:

This seems connected to me to the remarkable way in which this speech is being pushed out in multiple media—on television, but also on Twitter and on Facebook and via SMS and all in multiple languages—to a global audience. Part of the rise of Obama is the rise of a post-television, post-sound bite technological paradigm ... It creates a whole new world from one in which the point of a speech is just to field test a couple of zingers in hopes that one or two of them gets picked up for the evening news.

Stephen Hayes:

Perhaps the most curious passage was this one: "Given our interdependence, any world order which elevates any nation or group of people above any other will inevitably fail." This is nonsense, of course, as Obama seems to recognize several sentences later when he says that America will 'relentlessly confront violent extremists who pose a grave threat to our security.

The Economist:

Mr Obama has addressed Muslims before. ... But this speech fulfilled his pre-inauguration promise to make a bold bid to restore American prestige with a direct public address in a Muslim capital. ...

Yet the constant refrain, heard on Cairo’s streets as well as from media pundits, is that Arabs and Muslims would like to see Mr Obama’s words matched by deeds. 'To win our hearts, you must win our minds first, and our minds are set on the protection of our interests,' declared one of the reams of editorials, columns and open letters from across the region before Mr Obama spoke.

The Washington Times:

If they want respect, Muslim states must seek active ways to improve relations with the United States. We would like to see a generally more positive and welcoming tone, with fewer anti-American harangues in official media and firebrand sermons in state-controlled mosques. ... Respect for Islam would be much more palatable if the Muslim world decriminalized conversion to other faiths and allowed true religious freedom, as Muslims enjoy in America.

Stephen Walt:

The truest thing he said? "No single speech can eradicate years of mistrust."

Marc Lynch:

President Obama's speech today in Cairo met the bar he set for himself.

Hussein Ibish, senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine:

The ball is now in the Arab court – he needs and deserves their help, and they have a vital interest in providing it. Arab governments, organizations and individuals should, in their own interests, move quickly to do everything possible to reciprocate and support the President’s bold gestures.

MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images

Here at FP, we watched U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. John Kerry's speeches at the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference. We parsed the response to the two-state solution proffered by both. We considered their call for a settlement-freeze. We read about Netanyahu's reception.

Israel and Palestine -- and AIPAC especially -- tend to be tinder-box issues, and we expected to find ourselves amid some policy or defense discussion (flamewar?) in the blogosphere.

Oddly, what we noticed most was the sound of crickets.

Why the silence? Barack Obama isn't speaking (the big reason for last year's spike), The Israel Lobby is old news, there's relatively little violence between Israel and its neighbors, and the Israeli elections are over; plus, no one has yet said anything too contentious. The issues that make AIPAC's conference hot are, for the moment, relatively cool.

An extremely unofficial measurement of the response -- Google Trends -- seems to bear the observation out.