Obama's 'new beginning': US foreign policy and comic exceptionalism.

• Author: Chirindo, Kundai
• Position: Report

For the second time since his first inauguration, on June 4, 2009, President Barack Obama departed for an overseas tour focusing on foreign policy. The highlight of the trip was a speech Obama gave at Cairo University, which received the most attention in part because it made good on a campaign promise to address the Muslim world directly. More than "3,000 invited guests, including 500 journalists," witnessed the speech in person along with "an audience of tens of millions more over national television networks, social-networking Web sites, and instant-messaging services" (Wilson, 2009, p. A01). It was Obama's longest speech as president up until that point (Couric, 2009), and it was his "most high-profile attempt to change the direction of U.S. relations with Islamic nations" (Wilson, 2009, p. A01). Immediate reactions to Obama's "A New Beginning" were mixed, though. Gallup, for instance, found that in the three days following his remarks the president's "approval fell slightly among Republicans and independents, while gaining a point among Democrats" (Newport, 2009, para. 5). Some in the American media hailed the president for demonstrating strong leadership ("The Cairo speech," 2009), especially in exhibiting sincerity in his desire "to turn the page from the last eight years" (Madden, 2009, para. 4). At the same time, others were less enthused by the speech. Former U.S. Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North (2009), for example, called Obama's appearance part of a "grand apology tour." By no means was the speech an unequivocal success.

Even though Obama's Cairo address received mixed reviews, we think that the speech was important because it signaled a turning point in the articulation of American exceptionalism in United States foreign policy. In our view, the Cairo speech was a microcosm of the distinct doctrine of exceptionalism we are calling comic exceptionalism. Comic exceptionalism is the variant of American exceptionalism defined by an emphasis on reflexivity, agonism, and the pursuit of common ground. To elucidate this point, we draw on the connections among Burkean rhetoric, American exceptionalism, and constitutive rhetoric. We begin by outlinining the relevant contexts in which we approach the Cairo address. Second, we revisit the frames of acceptance and show how they foster various orientations among people. We then develop frames' constitution of orientations as a fourth ideological effect of constitutive rhetoric. Fourth, we connect Burke's frames of acceptance to foreign policy discourse. An analysis of Obama's speech in Cairo follows, and we conclude by exploring the implications of our analysis.

CONTEXTUALIZING OBAMA'S ADDRESS AT CAIRO UNIVERSITY

Obama's effort to launch the foreign policy blueprint of his presidency occurred at a rather complex point in history. Part of the problem Obama faced stemmed from the absence of a coherent strategy in Middle East policy during the latter years of George W. Bush's administration. As Mead (2010) explained, after the initially unilateralist response to 9/11 sputtered, the Bush foreign policy team attempted to rationalize American conduct abroad by recourse to Wilsonian idealism. The war in Iraq became "a war to establish democracy, first in Iraq and then throughout the region" (Mead, 2010, p. 61). Bush's turn to idealism angered hardline conservatives who favored the unilateralism he had displayed in the early days of the war, while less hawkish moderates were skeptical about the sincerity of his idealism. The foreign policy chaos was so bad, wrote Mead (2010), "Bush [himself] (sic) could not have developed a strategy better calculated to dissolve his political support" (p. 61). Elsewhere within the region, escalating political tensions punctuated the salience of Obama's speech: Israeli citizens were establishing controversial settlements in the West Bank; moreover, Israeli-Palestinian peace talks had stalled; America's wars continued despite Obama being in office for four months; Iran was seeking weapons grade nuclear technology, and an Iran-backed Hezbollah was campaigning aggressively in elections in Lebanon. Furthermore, the intricacies of an interdependent global economy-illustrated painfully in the 2008 economic meltdown-made it clear that the United States economy could no longer withstand American unilateralism. In short, as Obama ascended to the White House, a confluence of the forces of twenty-first century globalization, among them high-speed information connections, American indebtedness to Chinese largesse and labor, reliance on foreign oil, and the protracted "War on Terror" set the stage for yet another recalibration in the meanings of exceptionalism in United States foreign policy.

Obama's Cairo address was the most prominent culmination of a series of remarks he made in which he laid out what might be called the "Obama doctrine". In a speech on the military conflict in Iraq in 2006, he had argued that the United States needed to engage the country's neighbors, including Syria and Iran, in order to resolve the war and that America must "be more modest in our belief that we can impose democracy on a country through military force" (Obama, 2006, para. 45). By the time he entered the democratic primary, Obama was more explicit in his advocacy for a comic frame in foreign policy rhetoric. On the stump he advocated for "the most aggressive diplomatic effort in recent history to reach a new compact in the region" (Obama, 2007, para. 32). After winning the presidency in 2008, Obama wasted no time in signaling his intention to adopt a new orientation in foreign policy. His first inaugural address promised to "seek a new way forward [with the Muslim world] (sic) based on mutual interest and mutual respect" (Obama, 2009a, para. 20). Speaking to the country's adversaries, Obama declared, "we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist" (para. 20). In his first interview as president, which he granted to Al Arabiya, Obama expressed how the United States would unclench its own fist by dropping the portrayal of its adversaries as evil. As he explained, "the language we use matters . .. [we] cannot paint with a broad brush a faith as a consequence of the violence that is done in that faith's name" (Obama, 2009b, para. 16). By the time Obama addressed the Turkish parliament in April 2009, he began to preview the tenets of the message he would expound in Cairo. "We must listen to one another," Obama (2009c) stated in Ankara, "and seek common ground. That is why we must build on our mutual interests, and rise above our differences. We are stronger when we act together" (para. 14).

Several scholars have already demonstrated how Obama's expression of American exceptionalism broke with the tendencies and trajectories of his predecessors. Observing his departure from Bush's unipolar exceptionalism, Ivie and Giner (2009a) wrote, "The rhetorical turn of Obama's [2008] presidential campaign was toward the more democratically robust theme of interdependency, not just interconnectedness" (p. 372). "Rather than reiterate talk of sinister deviance and evil savagery," Ivie and Giner (2009b) noted elsewhere that Obama, "spoke instead of responding to America's calling in a new spirit of confidence, intelligence, tolerance, and caring for global humanity" (p. 290). Mead (2010) argued that whereas George W. Bush's foreign policy resembled the legacies of Alexander Hamilton and Andrew Jackson, Obama's diplomatic sensibilities seemed to reflect those of Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson. All this was "symptomatic," Edwards (2012) observed, "of a larger debate in the United States concerning its exceptionalist ethos" (p. 352). While we generally agree with these analyses, we combine the rhetorical concepts of frames and constitutive rhetoric to American exceptionalism to make a case for comic exceptionalism. Comic exceptionalism brings about (i.e. it constitutes) an egalitarian orientation among actors. It favors international cooperation and frames adversaries as misguided, rather than as anathema, and is thus a means of taming the cataclysmic implications that often result from international disagreements. Through many of his foreign policy pronouncements, Obama challenged world leaders and general populations alike to view each other as flawed members of the great community of humans. Whereas George W. Bush claimed at the beginning of the "War on Terror" that the United States was the world's lone paragon of virtue and that all who meant well had better align with her in the struggle against the "axis of evil," Obama saw exceptionalism as a belief common among many nations. Whereas Clinton saw the United States as the world's great purveyor of democracy and human rights, Obama insisted that although both were indispensible to civilization, each nation had the right to manifest these principles in culturally specific ways. The lynchpin of the Obama doctrine, then, was not minimalism, interventionism, isolationism, idealism, nor realism alone, but mutuality. Obama favored a foreign policy premised on a belief in the indispensible mutuality of minimalism and interventionism, idealism and realism, and, to render things in Burkean terms, the mutuality of both comedy and tragedy. Most importantly, we think, Obama was moved by the mutuality, as we show below, that defines the human experience.

To clarify, we neither mean to suggest that all of the Obama administration's foreign policy actions manifested the comic orientation we describe, nor that the administration was the first to espouse a version of comic exceptionalism. Indeed, some of the policies Obama pursued-the infamous drone wars being one example-continued and even refined the less comedic legacy of some of his predecessors. Moreover, the Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter administrations, to list two, preceded Obama in projecting a broad humanitarian concern into their...