Does Obama have a dream big enough?
Behind his rhetoric of change, Barack Obama has managed to maintain a remarkable opacity about what he will actually do as president, particularly when it comes to the USA's role in world affairs.
Sure, he will try to get troops out of Iraq and redeploy some of those resources to Afghanistan. Sure, he is predisposed to multilateralism and diplomacy rather than to starting more wars -- for example with Iran. True, he won't be a climate change denier, a free market deregulator, a cold warrior, or a bombastic proponent of the "New American Century", where all other powers supplicate to the shining city on a hill. But what will he actually do?
Mr Obama brings a new world view to the office -- one explicitly opposed to neoconservative neo-imperialism. Mr Obama's African heritage, his Kansas roots, his Indonesian schooling, and his Hawaiian youth give him a sensitivity and appreciation of the world outside continental USA. His foreign policy experience may not be much greater than Sarah Palin's, but at least he doesn't believe that living next to Russia constitutes a qualification for high office.
When the world outside America listened to George Bush they were instinctively distrustful, and that included many who were ideologically pro-American. The USA's global political influence is now far smaller than its economic and military strength might otherwise enable.
Mr Obama's eloquence harks back to a time of Martin Luther King, the Kennedys, Bob Dylan and Noam Chomsky, when America was the leader of a world striving to be free. But now we live in a new world, where old empires have been torn down.
Mr Obama could become the truly pre-eminent global leader of our age, but only if he has the strength and vision to recognise that America is not diminished by being of greater service to the world as a whole. America once had that vision and that visionary -- who helped to end a huge economic crisis and a World War. His name was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
I hope Mr Obama has the ambition to be not just a good president, but a great world leader. The idealism of the American people deserves no less.
- Co Wicklow
