The Audacity of Hope: Blog 7

In Chapter 8 (p. 273) Obama discussed the world outside our country. When he was around 7 or 8 years old, he lived in Indonesia with his mother and step-father. They were all U.S. citizens and had many benefits over being Indonesian nationals, including being paid in U.S. currency. Even as a young boy, he recognized the military, political, and economic influence the U.S. had even in another country. However, many things in Indonesia have changed since then. It used to be a country that was tolerant of different faiths but now it is ruled by Islamic law.
Obama observes that we have promoted American capitalism with multinational corporations and sometimes even corruption when it serves our own interests. We thought that Big Mac and he Internet would lead to more understanding among nations and would even lessen the growing resentment towards the U.S. as the world's sole superpower(p. 280). This is an idea that is not very understandable, except that it may make the world identical wherever you go.
Often, our foreign policies have ended up working against America’s best interests. Today we need to look differently at other parts of the world and we also have to act differently. We need to work on making friends all around the world. The effects of 9/11 should have taught us that.
I also believe that we have been involved in Iraq for far too long. It was a war started because there was a fear of Weapons of Mass Destruction. However, it soon turned out that Iraq was not as big of a danger as Afghanistan and therefore we were in a war that should never have been started.
From a trip he took to Iraq, Obama told of visiting troops in Fallujah. Most of the troops looked "raw" in their late teens and early twenties. And for two or three dollars the insurgents could hire a kid to plant bombs. I think we need to pull our troops out and move them soon because no one else has to die if the government is close to being stable. Unfortunately, no one has come up with any easy answers, and the threats facing our country have not decreased as a result of going to war with Iraq.
Obama says our challenge is to make sure U.S. policies move the international system in the direction of greater equity, justice, and prosperity - that the rules we promote serve both our interests and the interests of a struggling world (p. 316). I believe that is a great challenge and unfortunately it will probably be difficult if not impossible to carry out.