Militaristic or Moral: Do Governments Have to Choose? | Jelani Cobb | Big Think

There's the kind of power that comes from having military advantages and having a large army and weaponry and so on, and there's the kind of power that comes from, um, having moral authority and having people invested in, um, in your cause. People believing, uh, that you are representative of somehow a better future. In some ways, there's a tension between those two kinds of ideals.

There are people who point to, you know, the United States having this sprawling, uh, military empire and bases all around the world as the basis for American power. And there are people who, uh, look at this as a kind of, excuse me, people who look at this as an example of a society struggling to be democratic—to operate and organize itself as a democracy.

At the beginning of his presidency, and during the campaign, uh, Barack Obama relied more on the latter than the former. He famously, when he was campaigning for a Senate seat, uh, in Illinois talked about his opposition to the Iraq War. Um, he did say he wasn't opposed to all wars, just dumb wars, and he categorized this as a dumb war.

Uh, but when he talked about the United States, what he really, uh, dwelled on was the strength of the U.S. as an example. Which was ironic that people then said that, you know, the people accused him of not thinking that the United States was exceptional or not embracing the doctrine of American exceptionalism.

Uh, and what he actually did was voiced that doctrine but had kind of separated it from the chest-thumping, jingoistic, um, narcissism that we think of, you know, exceptionalism as. When we, um, look at the way his presidency has evolved, it's been a kind of complicated, um, balance of that moral authority and then the military might.

And you saw that transition immediately, like early in his presidency when he used uh, SEAL Team Six to, um, to take out the individuals in Somalia, on the host of Somalia who had, uh, kidnapped Americans. For some people, it seemed paradoxical for this person who had talked about hope and change, uh, to kind of use military might in that way.

There are people who also, uh, thought that kind of same idea about him and the approach they took to, uh, to nullifying the threat that Osama Bin Laden posed by flying into the, you know, sovereign territory of another country and using the military to, uh, to kill this person and, and remove him.

There is, in an ideal world, a way of, you know, using power that does not entail the oppression and exploitation of other people. I just don't know how we get to that world, uh, and in the context of that, I don't know what—I don't know what you prescribe, um, in place of that.

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