What do Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan all have in common? Absent fathers.

I hadn’t realised that this was true of Reagan until I came across this passage in Sean Wilentz’s book on “The Age of Reagan”. He notes that Reagan’s father, Jack, was an alcoholic who played very little part in his son’s upbringing. Wilentz writes - “Many children of alcoholics are said to have trouble separating illusion from reality. Whether or not this was true of Reagan, he did have a proven propensity to …conflate the two.” He also, of course, learned to be charming and grew up with a burning ambition that took him to the White House.

As Obama makes clear in his autobiography - “Dreams From My Father” - the absence of his Kenyan father was central to his own search of identity.

As for Bill Clinton, his biological father was killed before he was even born. And his step-father, Roger Clinton was an alcoholic. In an interview with CBS, Clinton reflected: “I think the fact that I was born without a father, and that I spent a lifetime trying to put together a picture of one also had a lot to do with how I turned out.” Continue reading "Presidents without fathers"

And so it was that Barack Hussein Obama visited Europe. In London, he rescued the world economy. In Strasbourg, he healed the Nato alliance. In Prague, he rid the world of nuclear weapons. In Ankara, he reconciled Islam and the west. And on the seventh day, he got back on to Air Force One and disappeared into a cloudless sky.

Was it all a dream? I fear so.

On many levels, the new US president’s first tour of Europe was indeed a triumph. Mr Obama was articulate, ambitious and charming. His personal style has a touch of the emperor and a touch of the rock star – but with an appealing humility that is common to neither profession.

While his manner was relaxed, Mr Obama also consistently displayed an instinct for bold action that seems to be beyond the European leaders he mingled with. He wants to abolish nuclear weapons, shock the world economy back into recovery and redouble efforts to win the war in Afghanistan.

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Europeans have long worshipped Barack Obama from afar. Now the beloved one is paying his first visit as US president to the old continent. Yet there is every indication that Europe’s leaders are about to stiff him.

Mr Obama is on a rapid-fire tour that will take him from the Group of 20 meeting in London to a Nato summit in Strasbourg, then on to a US-European Union meeting in Prague and, finally, a state visit in Turkey. But he will be lucky to return from Europe with much more than commemorative photos and some presents for the kids. (“I went to the G20 summit in London and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”)

If you look at Mr Obama’s top priorities, you get a sense of just how little the Europeans are prepared to give him. More help in Afghanistan? Most Europeans will do the bare minimum. A co-ordinated fiscal stimulus? Sorry, Europe is out of cash as well as troops.

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She appeared at Barack Obama’s inauguration in a magnificent hat. She even sang a song. But who would have guessed that Aretha Franklin would be such an acute guide to the new US president’s foreign policy?

In one famous song, however, the Queen of Soul literally spells out an idea central to Mr Obama’s approach to the world: “R-E-S-P-E-C-T.”

In his first proper television interview as president, Mr Obama told Al Arabiya news channel that, in approaching the Middle East, “the language we use has to be a language of respect”. He added: “The Iranian people are a great people and Persian civilisation is a great civilisation.”

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Maybe I am hyper-sensitive, but I always find these set-piece speeches by British prime ministers in Washington a real cringe. Unlike many regular commenters of this blog, I feel very warmly towards the US. But the sycophancy of the Blair and Thatcher speeches was just too much for me.

Gordon Brown also laid it out on with a trowel yesterday. There was one genuinely moving passage in his address to Congress, I thought, which was actually not about America but about the Rwandan genocide - (unfortunately it’s not in the text that Downing Street released, which suggests Brown added it at the last minute.) But for the rest, it was mostly gush - with a bit of G20 policy-wonkery thrown in for good measure.

I did a quick snap reaction to the speech for the paper last night - and my comments are here. There is a longer, snazzier, interactive, internet-only version of the textual analysis on the FT site -except I am too stupid to get it to work from my home computer. I hope others are luckier or more patient.

There are plenty of people who argue that the financial crisis is a severe setback for globalisation. Come to think of it, I am one of those people. In a column I wrote just after the Davos meeting, I argued that you could see the process of globalisation going into reverse.

Moises Naim, editor of Foreign Policy, has just published a fascinating riposte to this line of thinking. He argues that globalisation is only in difficulties “if you believe it is mainly about international trade and investment.” But, according to Naim, it is about much more than that - above all, globalisation is about a growing web of international networks, caused in large part by the communications revolution and the internet. Naim cites numerous examples - global charities, global criminal networks, social networking, international terrorism. None of this is going away. Continue reading "World government, revisited"

Barack Obama’s foreign policy team knew that sooner or later they would face a crisis over Iran. Unfortunately for the new US president, the crisis is already upon them.

On Friday, the Financial Times reported that “Iran has built up a stockpile of enough enriched uranium for one nuclear bomb”. That same day, Benjamin Netanyahu was invited to form Israel’s next government.

Mr Netanyahu thinks that the Iranian government is “preparing another Holocaust for the Jewish state”. He has said: “It is 1938 and Iran is Germany.” Mr Netanyahu said this in 2006, so logically it is now 1941 – but the intervening years have not calmed him down. He thinks that an Iranian nuclear weapon would be a mortal threat to Israel.

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On both sides of the Atlantic, senior officials are issuing dire warnings about global political turmoil. In the US, Admiral Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, says instability produced by the economic crisis is now the biggest short-term threat to US national security. In Britain, Ed Balls, a cabinet minister, argues that the financial crisis is “more serious” than that of the 1930s, adding cheerfully: “And we all remember how the politics of that era were shaped by the economy.”

All this is alarming - but also rather vague. So how might world politics look in four years’ time? Something like this, perhaps …

It is November 7 2012. At three in the morning, an exhausted-looking President Barack Obama appears before weeping supporters in the ballroom of the Chicago Hilton and concedes defeat. The euphoria of his victory-night speech in Grant Park four years earlier is a distant memory. The Obama administration has been overwhelmed by America’s economic problems. Sarah Palin is the new president of the US.

The remainder of the article can be read here. Please post comments below.