redblueamerica.com

I think Obama's speech before an adoring 200,000 people in Berlin was a brilliant move that offers many rewards for his campaign.  He looked Presidential and he said all the right things for a Europe that has clearly been skeptical of America for a long time (and not only since President George W. Bush came into office).However, for all of his talk about cooperation and the beautiful past of our relations with Europe, he should keep several things in mind.First, as Napoleon, I believe said, "A leader is a dealer in hope."  Clearly, Obama is this in spades.  However, hope when untethered to reality, leads quickly to disillusionment.  In fact, those who promise the most and fail, sometimes become just as if not more hated than those who are less grandiose from the outset.  Obama is taking great risks.  Perhaps, not risks that will derail him before November, but risks that will cloud his prospects in the future.  Second, cooperation can be great, but it can also be a race to the lowest common denominator in terms of policies.  When you have to keep various different groups, nations, and/or factions together, you have to dilute the clarity and simplicity of decisionmaking.  This can be worth it under certain circumstances, but it is not always so.  Leadership by committee can be unwieldly in crisis and often is dispensed with.  Enshrining cooperation as the altar upon which decisions must be made can also lead to the hypocrite label when necessity forces cooperation to be placed on the backburner.Also, I think Americans (and, for that matter Europeans too) need to remember that the Atlantic Alliance was never some "Golden Age" of cooperation.  The Cold War was rampant with splits in public opinion and diverging policies from France (DeGaulle took France out of the NATO military command and only now under Sarkozy is it coming back) to Germany (Ostpolitik under Willy Brandt represented a tumultuous time for our relations with then West Germany).  What about the throngs who opposed Reagan's deployment of Pershing missiles in response to the Soviet deployment off SS-20s?  Now considered a successful policy, at the time Reagan was as demonized as President Bush has been for Iraq.I do not mean to say the alliances and cooperation we have had were not extraordinarily important, they were, in fact, indispensable.  However, Americans often think we are now more disliked than ever before.  History shows that even the purported "Good Times" of friendship and comity, were not nearly as good as is now portrayed.  To believe that we will reembrace that mythical past is naive.  The Europeans were more with us than against us during the Cold War, not because they loved us (they did not), but because they felt they had to be because of the Soviet threat.  Remember, fear may split people apart, but it also can act as an amazingly effective glue too.  Interestingly, for all the talk of change, the more things will fundamentally remain the same.  No one will wave a magic wand and make history or mankind's nature vanish.  A good leader understands this even if he doesn't always say so.  Obviously, I have my concerns about Sen. Obama, but I would hope that if elected he will understand the difference between his overblown rhetoric (eloquent as it is) and the harshness of reality that roils beneath the surface of pious platitudes.  Hope is a necessary elixir to keep man from becoming despondent, but, to reemphasize, hope can also turn into a double-edged sword that can cut deeply when actions fail to square with the poetry of the spoken word.

www.gregrlawson.com