Matt Yglesias

Chavez Changes His Tune Faced With Obama’s Popularity

Hugo Chavez is one of a healthy number of leaders around the world who’s been fortunate to have George W. Bush as a high-profile enemy. With the Bush administration pursuing policies of unprecedented unpopularity around the world, a good tiff with Washington has been a surefire popularity-booster in a variety of contexts. But it seems that those days are done in Venezuela:

President Hugo Chávez said Saturday that he was ready to engage in direct talks with President Obama in a bid to repair relations with the United States. The statement marked an evolution in Mr. Chávez’s view of Mr. Obama, whom he described last month as having the “same stench” as his predecessor in the White House.

“Any day is propitious for talking with President Barack Obama,” Mr. Chávez said at a news conference here with foreign journalists ahead of a referendum on Sunday that could open the way for him to hold on to power indefinitely. Mr. Chávez said he would be willing to meet with Mr. Obama before a summit meeting in April of Western Hemisphere nations. The White House has not yet responded.

I’m not sure there’s actually a ton to talk about on the U.S.-Venezuelan diplomatic docket—the Caracas-Washington feud has been something of a conflict about nothing. Certainly I don’t see direct diplomacy on the highest levels as particularly critical, though it would be nice of Chávez and Obama could say “hello” as long as they’re both at the same summit. The main point is that it’s nice to be back in a situation where an improved relationship with the United States is considered a popular policy objective.

The Trouble With Propaganda TV

James Kirchick writing about China’s plans to launch a “Chinese CNN” to join the existing English-language propaganda networks from Russia (Russia Today) and Iran (Press TV) remarks:

Of course, there’s no scientific way to gauge whether or not these efforts will work, but I’d like to think that most Americans (if not most Europeans) will not be won over by the crude propaganda of countries that kill journalists and threaten to (or actually) launch unprovoked attacks against their neighbors. Never mind the cheesy production values and propagandistic mien of these stations. As long as countries like China, Russia and Iran continue their internally repressive and externally aggressive behavior, I don’t see how spending massive gobs of money on TV will improve their reputations.

I think the problem is more fundamental than that. I mean, who wants to watch a propaganda channel? There’s already lots of English-language television channels a person could be watching. I’m more sympathetic than most U.S. observers to the Kremlin point-of-view and even appeared once on Russia Today, but I’m never sitting on the couch saying to myself “gee, if only my cable provider carried an English-language Russian propaganda channel!” It’s just a stupid idea on its face. It’s worth noting that al-Hurra, America’s effort to launch an Arabic language propaganda public diplomacy network, has floundered from the beginning for basically the same reason—it doesn’t matter what your message is if nobody’s watching.

In all these cases, countries could, of course, improve foreigners’ perceptions of them by changing the actual policies that lead to the bad perceptions. But alongside that you would, of course, want a communications strategy. But what a country needs to do is go to where the audience is. That would be foreign governments engaging more directly and effectively with English-language media in the United States and American officials engaging directly with al-Jazeera, al-Arabiya and other popular Arabic-language media.

Obama on al-Arabiya

For Barack Obama to go on Arabic language television to directly address the emerging Arab public sphere. America’s image problem in that problematic region needs to be tackled in two kinds of ways. On the one hand, there’s a need for substantive shifts in policy that narrow the gap between U.S. and Arab perspectives on what’s happening in the world and what the problems are. And then on the other hand, I think there’s a need for gestures that set a context of mutual respect in which disagreements about policy are seen as disagreements about policy rather than reflecting a deeper religio-cultural chasm.

This is mostly about the latter, and I think you see it succeeding to an extent in the tone of al-Arabiya’s writeup of what Obama said about Israel—it’s critical, but it doesn’t dominate the discussion and disagreement isn’t taken as vitiating everything else he says. That’s important. The rest, of course, comes down to policy. Closing Gitmo and moving to really bring an end to the U.S. occupation of Iraq should do a lot on that front.

Al-Qaeda’s New Problem

For years now, liberals have had to put up with basic points about the value of not doing stuff that’s hugely unpopular around the world caricatured as the idea that if we just act nicer, al-Qaeda leaders will lay down their arms. The reality, as Joby Warrick reports for The Washington Post is that when American leadership is popular and respect, al-Qaeda keeps on keeping on. But they have a much harder time getting anyone to follow them:

The torrent of hateful words is part of what terrorism experts now believe is a deliberate, even desperate, propaganda campaign against a president who appears to have gotten under al-Qaeda’s skin. The departure of George W. Bush deprived al-Qaeda of a polarizing American leader who reliably drove recruits and donations to the terrorist group.
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With Obama, al-Qaeda faces an entirely new challenge, experts say: a U.S. president who campaigned to end the Iraq war and to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and who polls show is well liked throughout the Muslim world.

The post quotes Paul Pillar, formerly a CIA counterterrorism analyst, as saying that “For al-Qaeda, as a matter of image and tone, George W. Bush had been a near-perfect foil.” With Obama, things are different. Or, more to the point, with Obama we get a chance to make things different. Absent the right policies, Obama’s appeal will fade. But moving back toward the rule of law, and appointing George Mitchell were steps in the right direction. Moving forward with plans to take our troops out of Iraq will do more.