The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [132]
It was on a beach just a few miles from the site of those bombings that I stayed the last time I visited Bali. When I think of that island, and all of Indonesia, I’m haunted by memories—the feel of packed mud under bare feet as I wander through paddy fields; the sight of day breaking behind volcanic peaks; the muezzin’s call at night and the smell of wood smoke; the dickering at the fruit stands alongside the road; the frenzied sound of a gamelan orchestra, the musicians’ faces lit by fire. I would like to take Michelle and the girls to share that piece of my life, to climb the thousand-year-old Hindu ruins of Prambanan or swim in a river high in Balinese hills.
But my plans for such a trip keep getting delayed. I’m chronically busy, and traveling with young children is always difficult. And, too, perhaps I am worried about what I will find there—that the land of my childhood will no longer match my memories. As much as the world has shrunk, with its direct flights and cell phone coverage and CNN and Internet cafés, Indonesia feels more distant now than it did thirty years ago.
I fear it’s becoming a land of strangers.
IN THE FIELD of international affairs, it’s dangerous to extrapolate from the experiences of a single country. In its history, geography, culture, and conflicts, each nation is unique. And yet in many ways Indonesia serves as a useful metaphor for the world beyond our borders—a world in which globalization and sectarianism, poverty and plenty, modernity and antiquity constantly collide.
Indonesia also provides a handy record of U.S. foreign policy over the past fifty years. In broad outline at least, it’s all there: our role in liberating former colonies and creating international institutions to help manage the post–World War II order; our tendency to view nations and conflicts through the prism of the Cold War; our tireless promotion of American-style capitalism and multinational corporations; the tolerance and occasional encouragement of tyranny, corruption, and environmental degradation when it served our interests; our optimism once the Cold War ended that Big Macs and the Internet would lead to the end of historical conflicts; the growing economic power of Asia and the growing resentment of the United States as the world’s sole superpower; the realization that in the short term, at least, democratization might lay bare, rather than alleviate, ethnic hatreds and religious divisions—and that the wonders of globalization might also facilitate economic volatility, the spread of pandemics, and terrorism.
In other words, our record is mixed—not just in Indonesia but across the globe. At times, American foreign policy has been farsighted, simultaneously serving our national interests, our ideals, and the interests of other nations. At other times American policies have been misguided, based on false assumptions that ignore the legitimate aspirations of other peoples, undermine our own credibility, and make for a more dangerous world.
Such ambiguity shouldn’t be surprising, for American foreign policy has always been a jumble of warring impulses. In the earliest days of the Republic, a policy of isolationism often prevailed—a wariness of foreign intrigues that befitted a nation just emerging from a war of independence. “Why,” George Washington asked in his famous Farewell Address, “by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our