Steve Clemons: Obama’s Wall Speech Should Have Been About Israel, Not Berlin

Barack Obama spoke before an audience of over 200,000 people in Berlin, Germany on Thursday in the largest rally held by any presidential candidate this year. In his address, Obama discussed the importance of the Berlin Wall being torn down. We speak with Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation, who writes, “Had he given those remarks in Israel, at any of the checkpoints that have been added since the Annapolis process began, or at the large dividing wall Israel has constructed, or just about anywhere frankly in Israel or Palestine—it would have been a ‘game-changing speech.’” We also speak with author and journalist Tim Shorrock about his article, “Hawks Behind the Dove: Who Makes Obama’s Foreign Policy?”

AMY GOODMAN: Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama is heading to Paris and London today, the latest stops on his week-long tour of the Middle East and Europe. On Thursday, before an audience of over 200,000 people in Berlin, Germany, Obama said the world must tear down walls dividing people.

       SEN. BARACK OBAMA: That is why the greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another. The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes, natives and immigrants, Christians and Muslims and Jews, cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.

AMY GOODMAN: The rally in Berlin was the largest held by any presidential candidate this year. While Obama spoke in Berlin, his Republican rival, John McCain, campaigned in Ohio. McCain stops on Thursday included a German sausage restaurant in Columbus, Ohio. A McCain spokesperson accused Obama of taking premature victory lap in Berlin. The spokesperson, Tucker Bounds, said, "John McCain has dedicated his life to serving, improving and protecting America. Barack Obama spent an afternoon talking about it.”

Obama’s speech in Berlin was short on specific policy goals, but he urged closer US-European ties and for NATO nations, including Germany, to send more troops to fight in Afghanistan. He also discussed the importance of the Berlin Wall being torn down.

       SEN. BARACK OBAMA: History has led us to a new crossroad, with new promise and new peril. When you, the German people, tore down that wall, a wall that divided East and West, freedom and tyranny, fear and hope, walls came tumbling down around the world. From Kiev to Cape Town, prison camps were closed, and the doors of democracy were opened. Markets opened too, and the spread of information and technology reduced barriers to opportunity and prosperity. While the twentieth century taught us that we share a common destiny, the twenty-first has revealed a world more intertwined than at any time in human history.


The fall of the Berlin Wall brought new hope. But that very closeness has given rise to new dangers, dangers that cannot be contained within the borders of a country or by the distance of an ocean. Think about it. The terrorists of September 11th plotted in Hamburg and trained in Kandahar and Karachi before killing thousands from all over the globe on American soil. As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya. Poorly secured nuclear material in the former Soviet Union or secrets from a scientist in Pakistan could help build a bomb that detonates in Paris. The poppies in Afghanistan come to Berlin in the form of heroin. The poverty and violence in Somalia breeds the terror of tomorrow. The genocide in Darfur shames the conscience of us all.


In this new world, such dangerous currents have swept along faster than our efforts to contain them. And that is why we cannot afford to be divided. No one nation, no matter how large or powerful, can defeat such challenges alone. None of us can deny these threats or escape responsibility in meeting them. Yet, in the absence of Soviet tanks and a terrible wall, it has become easy to forget this truth. And if we’re honest with each other, we know that sometimes, on both sides of the Atlantic, we have drifted apart and forgotten our shared destiny.

AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about Senator Barack Obama’s tour of the Middle East and Europe, I’m joined by Steven Clemons in Washington. He’s the director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, runs the popular blog thewashingtonnote.com.

Your thoughts on, well, this historic presidential candidate address? I don’t know if any other has ever gathered that many people outside the United States, not president, like John F. Kennedy, but presidential candidate, Barack Obama in Berlin. Steven Clemons?

STEVEN CLEMONS: Well, good morning, Amy. This speech and Barack Obama’s tour have been mesmerizing to watch and to see. It’s very strange in American politics when you see the need that a candidate feels he has, in this case, to connect with so many foreign citizens beyond our borders as a way to prove to American citizens that their future in foreign policy and national security issues will be different than what they’ve seen under President Bush. And I think Barack Obama delivered that on this tour, and he punctuated it with his speech yesterday. What—it was a terrific oratory, and I think that he should be given enormous applause for it.

What I found a little disappointing in his call for a world without walls, however, was that this speech nonetheless was still a safe speech. It was given in a safe place. If he had given this kind of speech in Israel or Palestine and talked about a different sort of walls and a divided society, it would have been even a greater game changer in that environment. So, on one hand, I certainly applaud Barack Obama for this speech and what he’s been able to achieve, and I think it shows—it’s a real foil to the kind of world we’re living in under the George W. Bush administration. But it also reminds us that the Middle East, which I think is the defining challenge for America in this era, remains quite complicated with walls and settlements and a divided society that is echoing and ricocheting through the Middle East and creating, I think, an enormous hemorrhage in the region and for us that his speech might have addressed there, rather than in the safe venue of Berlin.

AMY GOODMAN: You mean tearing down the walls in the West Bank, in—

STEVEN CLEMONS: Well, between—yeah, in the West Bank and really—you know, the most powerful part of the speech was the part calling for walls between Christians and Muslims and Jews to come down. And to some degree, I think that’s what we need to see in a lot of the Middle East.

But nonetheless, I had Mustafa Barghouti in Washington yesterday, one of the former presidential aspirants for Palestine and a good guy, a secularist who’s trying to move forward an internal issue in Palestine, and he shared with me—he says, you know, Barack Obama was in Ramallah for forty-five minutes and in Israel for about thirty hours. And had he given that kind of speech—a lot of Muslims listened to that speech yesterday—they would have loved to have heard any comment of that sort in Israel. And again, I’m not highly critical of Barack Obama. This is an election season, and you need to stage a lot of visuals. But his speech was so powerful, so important, that it was sad that echoes of it did not play in Israel.

AMY GOODMAN: You also talk, Steven Clemons, in your pieces about, well, where, yes, Barack Obama is going, has gone, and where he’s not going in Europe.

STEVEN CLEMONS: Yeah, exactly. You know, one of the things I found interesting is in his—really, I mean, I think he’s checked off a lot of countries, and I think it was great to get him out on the international stage and not to be shy about it. But at the same time, Europe is vital to us as a place. It is becoming, I think, increasingly important in showing other societies around the world what civil liberty creation and civil society creation can look like as Europe expands.

But Europe’s institutional heart is no longer Berlin or Paris or London. While those are power centers, Brussels is. And so, when you’re reaching out to 500 million people and trying to show what the promises tomorrow of what Europe is struggling to become, not to spend a couple of hours and check off that Brussels box, I think, was a big mistake.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Steve Clemons, director of American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. Now, Barack Obama has an interesting position in the Senate. He’s chair of the European Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Explain its significance.

STEVEN CLEMONS: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain its significance.

STEVEN CLEMONS: Well, any committee in the United States Senate has very important subcommittees that deal with various topics. And when the Democrats came into the majority in the Senate, Barack Obama became chairman of the European Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. This same subcommittee was the one that Joseph Biden used to chair in the past.

And I wrote a piece once where I was trying to look at the executive skills of legislators and comparing, at the time, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. I had assumed that Hillary Clinton hadn’t had much time for these and that Barack Obama, who was relatively new to the Senate, would have been drilling into some of the policy issues by chairing committees and hearing them. And I found somewhat the opposite. It wasn’t an effort to try and undermine Obama, but I was astonished that he had never chaired a policy hearing in the subcommittee.

And when I dug deeper, I talked to Senator Obama’s advisers; they said, “You know, Steve, you realize we have to get permission from the chairman”—meaning Joe Biden—“to hold these committees.” And I dug into it. Senator Biden would have been happy to provide any of that permission. So, the important thing is, this subcommittee could have talked about anything dealing with Europe, or Europe or NATO’s responsibilities. And most importantly, those responsibilities, in the near term, had been Afghanistan.

And I think that it was just a part of Barack Obama’s profile that he hadn’t filled out yet. And I think he responded honestly. He said when he got his campaign going, he didn’t have a lot of time and didn’t do it. But I think it’s very important, and I think the Obama team realizes it’s important, that when they have responsibilities of that sort, they need to run in a lot of parallel tracks, particularly given his Senate responsibilities and his government responsibilities, to—you can’t just focus on one area and then neglect a portion of your key responsibility as chair, which I think, unfortunately, was the case.

But I think this has been a little bit overplayed in the press. I do think that he knows quite a bit about Europe. And I suspect that before the year’s out, even before he runs, you’ll find a subcommittee hearing this next season.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Steven Clemons, director of American Strategy Program at New America Foundation, runs the blog thewashingtonnote.com. We’re going to go to break, and when we come back, he’ll be joined by Tim Shorrock, investigative journalist. He talks about Barack Obama’s advisers, “Hawks Behind the Dove: Who Makes Obama’s Foreign Policy?” and also has a new piece on a database that could lead, he says, to a Church-style investigation on the scale of Watergate, at least that’s what he’s calling for. Stay with us.