Photo by Jeff Luo
Gwynne Dyer asks if Obama is up to the task in recent talk
Ian Kaufman
Features Editor
Gwynne Dyer may be the most accomplished Canadian you’ve never heard of. With newspaper columns in 45 countries, an Oscar-nominated documentary, a boatload of books, TV shows, and radio series tackling international politics, Dyer is the consummate cosmopolitan intellectual.
With that sort of background, it is not surprising that his visit on February 12 packed ATAC 1003, with a teleconference room across the hall about half full. The crowd, of a significantly riper vintage than the usual university class, did not go home disappointed. Dyer’s wit, insight, and complete lack of political correctness make him a compelling speaker: not everyone can expound on the disastrous consequences of war and have a room in stitches in the same sentence.
Dyer’s starting point for the talk was this: “Historically, periods when power shifts from one country or group of countries to another are accompanied by great wars. When the Spanish ceased to be the superpower and the French took their place, there was fifty years of war. When the French finally lost that role to the British at the end of the 18th century, we had twenty years of revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. The First and Second World Wars were about the challenge to British, French, and American dominance by the rising powers of Germany [and Japan in the second case].”
To avoid a similar conflict between the U.S. and China, what must the Obama administration do? The most important thing the President has done, Dyer says, is to support fuel-efficiency legislation. If successful, it could force American automakers to meet the standard of 35 miles per gallon by 2016. Currently, the average car gets around 21.5 mpg. If these measures pass, Dyer believes the U.S. could eliminate its reliance on Middle Eastern oil within about five years.
Secondly, a fair international agreement on climate change is needed. Dyer insists Obama is serious about the issue: “This guy gets it. The fact that he hasn’t done much about it is a reflection of the very difficult position he is in, both with a recalcitrant congress and a largely disbelieving public.”
Any deal must paradoxically be “amazingly one-sided” to be fair. “The deal has to acknowledge that we foreclosed any possibility that they can develop the way we did,” Dyer says. “So industrialized countries [must] accept very deep cuts right up front; the developing countries don’t cut their emissions – at best, they cap them about where they are now.”
Dyer is confident – sometimes surprisingly so - in Obama’s ability to resolve these issues, pointing to his de-escalation of brewing conflicts with Russia and Iran. However, he sees a nation-sized roadblock in the President’s future: Afghanistan is now “his war”. In little more than a year, Obama will have increased the number of American troops in the country from 30,000 to 80,000. Dyer points to parallels between Obama and another reforming President, Lyndon Johnston, who gave up on running for a second term due to the unpopularity of the Vietnam War.
The war in Afghanistan could “destroy” Obama because, according to Dyer, it is unwinnable. “No western army has won a war in a third-world country against a nationalist opposition since 1945,” he points out, despite dozens of such wars being waged. Afghanistan in particular is well-versed in wars of attrition: “Five foreign armies have invaded it in the last 150 years. Four of them have been whipped and sent home with their tails between their legs, but we believe that for some reason – because our hearts are pure, I suppose – it’s not going to happen to us.”
In short, Obama’s work is cut out for him: work out an international climate deal, transition to clean energy, extract America from the Middle East, and avoid a seemingly inevitable conflict with China. More to the point, he must convince Americans to accept their country’s decline from superpower status, something most are loath to even consider: “To smooth the path, accept the inevitable, reassure Americans that the inevitable isn’t terrible […] I think that may be, historically, his most important role.”