Obama's victory changes the world

By Gideon Rachman

Published: March 23 2010 02:00 | Last updated: March 23 2010 02:00

President Barack Obama has leapt out of his political sick-bed, ripped out his feeding tubes and is ready to dance a jig around the Oval office. The Congressional approval of healthcare reform has reinvigorated the Obama presidency in a way that has implications not just for Americans, but for the world.

By pushing through a social reform that eluded generations of presidents from Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, Mr Obama can now point to a genuinely historic achievement. He has turned around his image as a weak president who cannot get things done - just when it was getting dangerously close to becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Over the past year, the optimistic glow that surrounded Mr Obama when he took the oath of office has faded away. In its place came new and less flattering images: Obama the talker, not the doer; Obama the naive president, who was getting pushed around by the world's tough guys; Obama, the hate figure for the American right, who lost one of the safest Democratic seats in the Senate in Massachusetts.

The president's apparent inability to get healthcare reform passed sapped his credibility, not just in America but around the world. Foreigners were uninterested by the rules of Senate procedure: all they saw was a popular president, with a massive majority, who seemed unable to get his major domestic policy through.

Deadlock over healthcare set a disturbing pattern, which then replicated itself in the Obama administration's dealings with the rest of the world. In his first year in office, Mr Obama fell into the habit of declaring grand goals and then failing to deliver.

The president announced that he would reinvigorate the Middle East peace process and demanded a halt to new Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. But there were no peace talks and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, basically ignored him on settlements. On the night that he was elected, Mr Obama made a "planet in peril" one of his top priorities - but the Copenhagen talks on climate-change ended in fiasco, with the US diplomatically out-manoeuvred by China.

The Obama administration said that it would not tolerate the development of an Iranian bomb - yet the Iranian nuclear programme continued apace and the Americans have so far proved unable to rally the world behind fresh sanctions. When it came to the war in Afghanistan, the Obama administration agonised in public for months - and then announced a new troop surge that even the president seemed unconvinced by.

Increasingly Mr Obama was portrayed overseas as weak, indecisive and ineffective. That is now likely to change - at least for a while - in the wake of the passage of healthcare reform. As a result, Mr Obama now has a chance to re-launch his presidency, abroad as well as at home.

Of course, there is no direct connection between the renewal of Mr Obama's domestic political momentum and his chances of success in foreign policy. But there is an indirect connection. Put crudely, the passage of healthcare reform makes Mr Obama look like a winner rather than a loser. It also shows that he is tenacious and that his stubbornness can pay dividends.

Healthcare looked like a lost battle - but it turned out just to be a long battle. Foreign leaders who have written off Mr Obama's chances of succeeding on the big international issues - Afghanistan, the Middle East, climate change, Iran - will now have to consider the possibility that the president's persistence might ultimately deliver success. That increases the likelihood that leaders who are wavering will listen and try to work with him.

It may also make foreign leaders who are inclined to thumb their nose at the president think twice. This is not a great week for Mr Netanyahu to arrive in Washington - where he is scheduled to speak to the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac). If healthcare reform had collapsed in Congress, the Israeli prime minister might have been emboldened to try to rally US opposition to the Obama administration's Middle East policies. But now that the president has a following wind, confronting him looks riskier.

Success over healthcare may also encourage fickle pundits (I include myself amongst them) to take a more balanced view of Mr Obama's first year in office. The administration did, after all, avert the threat of a complete meltdown of the banking industry. The US economy is now growing at an annualised rate of almost 6 per cent a year - much faster than any comparable western economy.

American conservatives are right that healthcare reform has nudged the US a bit closer towards European ideas of social solidarity - and a bit further away from America's own tradition of rugged individualism. The social and economic costs and benefits of such a move can be debated. But there is likely to be an indirect foreign-policy pay-off for the US.

By committing his nation to providing healthcare for nearly everyone, Mr Obama will undermine the Michael Moore vision of America as a country where big business ruthlessly exploits the downtrodden poor. This is a cartoon version of the US that is wildly popular in Europe and around the world. It will be harder to propagate in the wake of the passage of Mr Obama's healthcare reforms.

gideon.rachman@ft.com