Obama's mesmerising but ultimately empty talk

US-JAPAN RELATIONS

Barack Obama's speech in Tokyo, delivered on Nov 14, 2009 at a glittering downtown concert hall gave a select audience the chance to savour the US president's trademark rhetoric, read aloud in familiar endearing tones, accompanied by slightly jarring Janus-like sideward glances, eyes darting back and forth between twin tele-prompters.

Barack Obama: The guns went silent, but only after the big bang!

Designed to set an upbeat tone for the president's Asia trip, it fell short of his much-hailed Cairo speech as a paean to international amity, but served to convince East Asia - despite the late date of his visit and two distracting wars on the other side of the continent - that the Pacific is somehow the centerpiece of his foreign policy. The pep talk might as well have been subtitled, "America still rules the Pacific."

The best, if not the most sincere of the many tasty sound-bites offered up in his Yankee-will-not-go-home speech came early, almost haiku-like in brevity, befitting the recollection of a childhood memory. During a visit to the Amida Buddha in Kamakura with his mother, he was distracted by the green tea ice-cream.

Thereafter the speech shifts to protocol-laden niceties about the Emperor and warm hospitality of Japan, the usual bromides to reassure his hosts, even though preparations for the visit were marred by serious disagreement about US bases in Okinawa, and the pomp and circumstance had to be trimmed due to the president's arriving a day late and the host prime minister departing a day early.

Despite looming tensions and policy disagreements, President Obama's speech soon had the select audience in Suntory Hall almost drunk with good cheer. The star-struck listeners who, judging from the applause, were more than willing to suspend belief in order to enjoy the show, allowed him to say things like "support for human rights and human dignity is ingrained in America", without a hint of humility.

In such a sumptuous symphonic hall, with a golden voice delivering gilded words about an imagined America filled the to the brim with goodwill and good ideas and high ideals, it would be a rude intrusion of the reality-based world to consider US involvement in torture, bombing, renditions, spying, war crimes, Guantanamo prison and the Af-Pak aerial bombing campaign.

Still, sometimes the word master's poetic rhetoric leaned too heavily towards euphemism, even for Japanese tastes. When it came to describing America's war against Japan, the president seemed to be whitewashing history when he summed up the long bloody war's end with the trite phrase: "After the guns went silent."

Went silent? What an evasive way to describe the big bang at the war's end, when the US dropped two nuclear bombs, killing over one hundred thousand hapless civilians! The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had the bad luck to live in cities that had been left untouched by conventional bombing which put them on the short list of as-yet-unbombed cities suitable for testing the effects of the terrible nuclear device under almost clinical conditions.

If Mr Obama knew Japan better, instead of appointing as ambassador a political donor who had not managed to visit the country even once before moving into the embassy where Douglas MacArthur famously welcomed the defeated Emperor with a handshake and stiff photo-op, he might have realised that the Japanese public, far from wanting more of the status quo, just resoundingly rejected the so-called "sense of purpose that has guided ties with the Japanese people for nearly fifty years".

Memo to Mr Obama's foreign policy team: the LPD, and its long, symbiotic relationship with Washington is history now.

And if Mr Obama had selected an ambassador who could speak a bit of the language and had experienced daily life in Japan as an ordinary gaijin, he might not have held Japan's racialist society up as exemplar of human rights.

Japan is a land where long-term residents of Korean and Chinese descent as well as native Burakumin still suffer as second-class citizens, where housing discrimination is legal, where age and sex discrimination are rampant and where discrimination against non-Japanese is enshrined in law.

"In Prague," Mr Obama goes on to say, "I affirmed America's commitment to rid the world of nuclear weapons," followed by a boastful caveat. "Let me be clear: so long as these weapons exist, the United States will maintain a strong and effective nuclear deterrent."

Mr Obama wants to disarm and keep his weapons, too. Yet somehow it doesn't sound right for the commander-in-chief in charge of the world's biggest nuclear arsenal to lecture others on the disarmament issue, especially in Japan of all countries, where the stealthy storing and transport of US nuclear weapons has been a bitter point of contention.

If nuclear weapons are, as Mr Obama claims, "a strong and effective nuclear deterrent", it does not necessarily follow that "those without them have the responsibility to forsake them".

He cites Japan as a country that pleases America for not having pursued nuclear capability, but it is pre-modern Japan that offers the most telling insight here. In a realm once ruled by the swagger of steely samurai, ordinary citizens were banned from carrying swords, keeping the peace, albeit in an extremely undemocratic, top-down fashion. Then, as now, those who wield the most destructive weapons get a free pass. Non-proliferation regulations, it seems, are for those without the bomb, not those with it.

Barack Obama peppered his speech with references to his diverse heritage, including mention of his half-sister and his brother-in-law. Suitable subject matter for a book, in fact a very good book, but what in the world does his gnarled family tree have to do with US policy?

Is he trying to say the Asia-related factoids about his life, which he tends to brush under the rug when dealing with the black-white dichotomy back home, have some kind of essentialist bearing on US-Asia relations?

Tiger Woods, a man of comparably rich ethnic heritage, doesn't wear ethnicity on his sleeve in the same way, nor would it advance his golf game if he did. Does this tireless posturing, cherry-picking of his own biography and playing to the crowd make Barack Obama a better commander-in-chief? A Pacific leader?

This incessant desire to please has obvious utility during a political campaign, but once power is secured, it can produce deadly results, if, for example, hawks in the Pentagon have his ear, or certain hard-boiled constituencies give him bad advice.

The problem with the silver-tongued superstar storyteller formally known as Barry Obama is that he can spin a great yarn, as good a yarn as any politician in memory, and mesmerise people without actually accomplishing very much.

• Philip J Cunningham is a free-lance writer and political commentator.

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