In the days just before he and his shoe collecting wife were booted out of the Philippines for good, Ferdinand Marcos got a huge boost of rhetorical support from then-President Ronald Reagan. When Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier was fleeing for his life from his own private fiefdom of Haiti, he received it in part courtesy of the CIA. After murdering hundred, perhaps thousands, of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government received the American Secretary of State, James Baker, who showed proper respect to the butchers of Beijing. The list of murderous thugs in Latin America given kid-glove treatment by American Presidents is long and stretches back at least a century - shoot, the CIA managed to start an uprising in Chile against a popularly elected leftist President - and the body count is enormous. South Vietnam, Indonesia, the Congo, apartheid South Africa, Rhodesia, Angola, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Iran under the Shah - the list of countries whose dictators have been photographed with American Presidents, whose regimes have been given money by the American government, is long and bloody.
Let's not even start with Stalin dealing with two American Presidents during the Second World War, Kruschev with Kennedy, Breznev with Nixon and Ford and Carter, or Gorbachev with Reagan. The Soviet Union was the sine qua non of dictatorships, and Stalin second in line behind Mao Tse-tung in butchering his own people (and, of course, the Chairman received Nixon in 1972), and was given the sobriquet, "Good Old Joe", by Pres. Roosevelt (not one of his brighter moments, let us confess).
Now, the right is enraged because Pres. Obama shook hands with, and received a gift from . . . Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.
As police Chief O'Rourke used to say on the old Batman TV series, "Saints preserve us!"
First off, giving air time to Newt Gingrich is always a good thing for Democrats, so I'm all for allowing him to get his mug out there and yap about anything he wants. The President's approval rating probably gains five points just from Gingrich talking smack about him.
Second, so what? Who is Hugo Chavez? The twice-elected President of a sovereign nation with whom the United States has had (until recently) normal relations, including business ties. Then, along came the Bush Administration that supported a coup attempt that failed miserably (which certainly didn't hurt Chavez re-election bid). Whether or not I'm a fan of Chavez is immaterial. Like equally loud, and irrelevant, Bolivian President Evo Morales, he happens to be the President of the country, and we have to deal with him. Period.
Standing behind all this is, I think, a fascinating phenomenon outlined in the linked piece in TPM. Josh point out that American power, properly understood, shouldn't be something we wave around like a big old sword or gun pushed in other people's faces. Rather, true power rests in not having to show how powerful one is. The former is the act of a bully, someone afraid of his or her lack of power. The latter is the way a leader accepts power, and uses it wisely. For all those out there frothing at the mouth at the temerity of the President of the United States shaking hands with the President of another sovereign country - and please, remember, that is all he did (well, he took Chavez' gift) - please remember: this is a President supremely confident, a practitioner of Theodore Roosevelt's dictum of walking softly, precisely because he knows that the US has a stick larger than the next 20 nations' combined militaries.
It would be nice if we had better people with which to deal in other countries. Unfortunately, we do not. I think that Chavez revels in the status given him by right-wing Americans, using it to bolster his position at home, and giving him leverage with, for example, the Russians, who are desperate for a return to a Caribbean port for its navy. Most of Latin America is, currently, swinging toward social democracy in its politics. Former military dictatorships from Brazil and Argentina right up through Nicaragua and El Salvador are moving away from Banana Republic status, reforming their politics, and staking a claim to enter the century as modern states (Brazil, Chile, and Argentina in particular are determined to show they are major world players in a variety of ways). American leverage over Latin America has been declining for 20 years, and will erode even further in the coming decades, and this is a good thing for everyone involved. The sooner we grow out of our imperialist ways with our southern neighbors, the better it will be for all involved.
Part of that pattern is treating the duly-elected President of a sovereign country as a . . . President of a sovereign country. You shake his hand, you smile, you thank him for his gift. Then, you move on. If the right needs devils and enemies everywhere around the globe, they certainly know how to create them. Obama, a far more intelligent and self-possessed individual than the combined foreign policy team of the Bush Administration, has no need of devils. All he needs is for the rest of the world to know that he isn't George W. Bush. I think he's done quite well.
