World leaders gather in Berlin this week to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, that iconic symbol of the Cold War. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is hosting current leaders like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as well as past Cold Warriors George H.W. Bush and his counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev. Prominent news organizations are offering retrospectives (CNN, The New York Times) of that epic moment in 1989 when the structure of world politics changed overnight. So much as been written about the Cold War, how it ended and why it ended when it did, that I’m hesitant to offer any new synthesis here. I did, however, note this interesting personal reflection from Chancellor Merkel in her recent address to the U.S. Congress:

Angela Merkel, the first leader of reunited Germany to grow up under communist rule, has worked as chancellor to warm up ties with the United States — a country she couldn’t travel to until she was in her mid-30s. [...] Merkel is the daughter of a Protestant pastor who moved his family to the east when she was very young. She told Congress Tuesday that America “was simply unreachable to me” until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. “The wall, barbed wire and orders to shoot limited my access to the free world,” she said, adding that films and books smuggled in by relatives from the west helped form her picture of the U.S. “I was enthusiastic for the American dream — the opportunity for everyone to be successful, to become something through their own efforts,” she added. Merkel said she flew to the U.S. for the first time in 1990.

In as much as historians will debate the causes of the end of the Cold War for years to come, Merkel’s comments and personal reflections remind us that no matter what they ultimately credit as the cause, the U.S. role as a beacon of hope and a champion of freedom for those living under Communist oppression can never be underestimated.

Photo Credit: The New York Times

The U.S. Role blog generally examines U.S. actions in the international context and only rarely is our focus on domestic politics. The passing of Senator Edward Kennedy provides an opportunity to note how this important domestic event is reverberating in the world at large. This report from the Associated Press offers some insight into how world leaders saw Kennedy and notes his involvement in promoting peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland as one of his greatest international achievements:

Nowhere outside of America has the Kennedy legacy been more deeply felt than in Ireland, where photographs of the family adorn homes and hundreds claim to be distant relations of the glittering dynasty that brought the first Roman Catholic to the White House. Here, Senator Edward Kennedy is largely known as JFK’s brother. But he was also a power broker who mobilized Irish Americans and their political views on Northern Ireland — a kingmaker whose actions in the years before the Good Friday peace talks served to lay the groundwork for a lasting accord.

I would also suggest that as a dynamic leader of one of our political parties, Kennedy was an example to the world of the vibrancy of the two-party system in America. As someone famous for his ability to reach across party lines, build coalitions, and forge pragmatic solutions to complicated problems he was also a symbol of the strength and resiliency of the democratic process.

Photo Credit: AP

Summer weekends can be rather distracting, so if you missed it, President Obama gave a historic speech during his visit to Africa and several websites have great coverage to get you caught up on events. The speech has been widely seen as an outline of U.S. policy toward Africa. I’ve been impressed the the coverage of his visit to Ghana from the Voice of America (text and video) and America.gov, which offers a downloadable 12-page booklet with photos and quotes from Obama’s trip. Much of the media coverage of the trip noted that Obama is in a unique position to speak to Africa and as someone who has lived in Africa, I do hope that his influence is able to inspire a new generation of leaders to set a new course and build strong democratic institutions and fight the corruption and bad government that have impeded development in so many countries.

Photo Credit: America.gov

A friend forwarded me an e-mail, one of those that are making the rounds as the Independence Day holiday nears, you may have also received it. The subject is “The Price They Paid,” and it describes the high price that the signers of the Declaration of Independence paid for their rebellion. It relates what we all know, that they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, but also says that many of them were captured, tortured, and killed by the British, and those that survived lost their families, their homes and died in poverty. Intrigued, I looked up this e-mail on Snopes.com to see if it was an urban legend and sure enough, it was. To be sure, some of it was true, but it mixed in some exaggeration (no torture) with the truth of our shared history. The Snopes report can be found here and I encourage you to take a look at it as it demonstrates clearly that even if it is easy to exaggerate the risks and dangers the signers faced (and there were many), there is no exaggerating the power of the idea that they unleashed upon the world. The American Revolution was not a revolution of ideology, and unlike the French, Communist or Islamic revolutions it did not unleash forces of persecution or pogroms, nor did it sacrifice entire generations to ideological fervor. Quite the opposite in fact. The American Revolution stood in opposition to the idea that government could or should ever visit such horrors on the people. The idea that government is a contract entered into by the people to protect their pre-existing rights and remains always subservient to the people is a perpetually revolutionary idea, one that challenges us today as much as it challenges the legitimacy of other governments. As we look back upon 233 years of independence let’s take time to honor the founders of our republic, those who defend it today, and look forward to a future enriched by the promise of liberty. Long live the revolution!

President Obama held a news conference this morning in which he used some of his strongest language yet to criticize the recent Iranian election:

The United States and the international community have been appalled and outraged by the threats, beatings, and imprisonments of the last few days. I strongly condemn these unjust actions, and I join with the American people in mourning each and every innocent life that is lost.

I have made it clear that the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and is not at all interfering in Iran’s affairs. But we must also bear witness to the courage and dignity of the Iranian people, and to a remarkable opening within Iranian society. And we deplore violence against innocent civilians anywhere that it takes place.

Though these remarks forcefully condemn the violence and repression that has taken place, the press was reportedly frustrated in their attempts to get President Obama to explicitly state what he thinks the U.S. or the international community should do if the demonstrations and violence continues. The issue is complicated not only by President Obama’s desire to engage Iran on the nuclear issue, but also the history of U.S. - Iran relations, which places any attempts by the U.S. to interfere in Iranian domestic affairs in a different light, one easily manipulated by propagandists seeking to blame the U.S. for the election turmoil.

I’d like to recommend an upcoming discussion concerning Iran’s presidential election and the future of U.S.-Iran relations hosted by The Asia Society. The discussion will feature two leading Iran experts, Farideh Farhi, an Independent Scholar and Affiliate Graduate Faculty at the University of Hawaii at Manao, and Arang Keshavarzian, a professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University.  Arang Keshavarzian was in Iran for the presidential election and its immediate aftermath. Suzanne DiMaggio, Asia Society’s Director of Policy Studies, will moderate the discussion, which will take place on Thursday, June 25, from 6:30 PM - 8 PM EST, at the Society’s New York headquarters and will feature a live webcast. Internet listseners will be able to ask questions and offer comments by e-mail ( moderator at asiasociety.org) during the webcast.

Photo Credit:  The Associated Press

I’ve been watching the election protests in Iran (see the dramatic video from BBC News below) and like many of you, I’m alarmed at how events have unfolded. The disputed election presents the U.S. with something of a challenge, Obama knows he will have to deal with whoever is eventually declared the winner, so like Vice-President Biden said, the U.S. is waiting and watching without issuing any forceful denunciations of the Iranian government or direct support for the protesters. The only overt move the U.S. made was to encourage the social networking service Twitter to delay a maintenance outage in a nod to how vital the service has become for the protesters.  That seems to be a very timid response and I’m sure many Americans would like to see their government be much more forceful in support of democracy in Iran.

Should the U.S. do more to support the protesters? The answer may depend on how legitimate the election turns out to be. As this report in Time Magazine notes, there are good reasons for suspecting that the election was rigged. That said, there are also good reasons for believing that the election outcome reflected the true will of the Iranian people. As this Stratfor analysis notes, the composition of the Iranian electorate suggests that a landslide for Ahmadinejad may not have been outside the realm of possibility. By all accounts the rival candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi draws his support from the wealthy elite and students, while President Ahmadinejad’s base includes the urban working class the the provincial poor. As in any Western democracy, the working class and rural voters greatly outnumber the wealthy elite and students. So, assuming that Mousavi did win almost all of the elite and student vote, he would still have lost in the provinces and among the urban poor, and thus lost the election.

Is there any evidence to support this idea? I would suggest that the fact that protests are not spontaneously breaking out in other cities and towns across Iran indicates that the protest movement is not a popular movement, but one indeed being driving by the elite and students in the capital city of Tehran. The fact that protesters are using Twitter confirms that we are dealing with a small group of technically savvy people who have access to cell phones, computers and the internet and are using social networking as a force multiplier to rally the many thousands in the city who do not have such access. That’s not to say there was no election fraud, as NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel pointed out in his report, the election ballots were handwritten without the aid of election machines, and all of those ballots would have to be counted by hand and given the size of the Iranian electorate, that process could reasonably have been expected to take days or weeks. Instead, the results were announced hours after the polls closed. It’s simply not possible for all of the ballots to have been counted in time.

Given that that there was massive election fraud AND that Ahmadinejad probably did win a majority of votes, the U.S. will have to tread very carefully in expressing support for the protesters knowing that regardless of the outcome of the protests, President Obama will be negotiating with President Ahmadinejad in pursuing his engagement policy. Change has not come to Iran.

What does the Ahmadinejad victory in the Iranian election mean for U.S. diplomatic efforts to engage Iran? According to this analysis from Mark Fitzpatrick, Senior Fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, it means efforts will be complicated with long-term prospects looking rather grim:

I’m surprised at the regime’s audacity in declaring such a large margin for Ahmadinejad, given that in the run-up, the momentum seemed to be in the other direction. The hardliners in the regime seem to have exercised all their levers of power to keep Ahmadinejad in place. Undoubtedly, one of the key reasons was their concern about losing control of the country through policies such as willingness to engage with the United States. All of the candidates wanted U.S. engagement, including Ahmadinejad and the Supreme Leader, but the Supreme Leader wanted it to be on his timetable and his agenda. So Ahmadinejad’s victory does not mean there cannot be engagement. He just wants credit for it. What it does mean is that there will be no change in the management of the nuclear portfolio. Ahmadinejad wants engagement with the United States without making any concessions at all in the nuclear program. So it doesn’t augur well for an early and peaceful settlement of the nuclear dispute.”

Of course, this analysis assumes Ahmadinejad is able to consolidate his victory and move past the legitimacy questions raised by allegations of fraud in the election, and that is far from certain at this point.

This post is not about foreign policy, it’s about business, but it’s still about the U.S. role in the world. My question today is: Do American companies have a responsibility to be representatives of American values when they operate internationally? This question has often been posed in relation to pollution and environmental protection, labor practices, corruption and the rule of law. I’m thinking about this question today in the general context of promoting the basic values of freedom and liberty, and specifically in terms of this report in The New York Times today about China requiring new computers sold in that country to have censorship technology pre-installed. Of course, they don’t call it that, they call it an ant-pornography initiative, and who can argue against that, until one realizes that the same software that blocks pornography can also block other, more politically sensitive sites as well. As this news report puts it:

Although porn sites are initially targeted, the software could be used to block other Web sites, too, including those based on keywords rather than specific Web addresses [...] China, which has the world’s largest population of Internet users at more than 250 million, also has one of the world’s tightest controls over the Internet. Through such mechanisms as network-level filters installed at the nation’s Internet service providers, the government routinely blocks political sites, especially ones it considers socially destabilizing such as sites that challenge the ruling Communist Party, promote democratic reform or advocate independence for Tibet.

Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square democracy protests that ended violently in 1989. Students in China today can’t read about the democracy movement in their textbooks, nor can they study this event on the internet, it has been effectively removed from history by Chinese censors. Perhaps I should note here that the Chinese government has good reasons for doing this, they are making difficult choices and balancing a desire for social order and stability with competing desires for increasing political and economic freedom. While we may hope that the long term trend is in favor of greater freedom, my concern is the role that U.S. companies take today in promoting or undermining freedom and liberty and thus influencing those long term trends.

How far should computer-makers Dell, of Round Rock, Texas, and Apple, of Cupertino, CA, go in promoting censorship in another country? How far should Cisco, of San Jose, CA, go in providing the network technology that allows for an almost totalitarian control of the internet in another country? How far should Google, of Mountain View, CA, go in removing certain words (like democracy) from searches in another country? When American companies say that they strive to be good corporate citizens, should we then ask, citizens of what country? Should U.S. companies birthed in freedom trade in the tools of repression?

The media has been saturated with 100 day retrospectives and most of them (understandably so) have focused on economic policy and the financial crisis. I found this analysis focused on foreign policy at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace website. In A Thousand Envoys Bloom, Carnegie scholar David Rothkopf compares and contrasts the economic and foreign policy teams advising President Obama and warns that in their present form they may not offer him, and the country, the guidance needed to successfully navigate a crisis that will require a fundamental reappraisal of the tools and resources available for the implementation U.S. foreign policy. Perhaps we need (to jump on the media narrative of all things green), a green foreign policy, not in an environmental sense, but in the sense of focusing on alternative tools and strategies to cope with scarcity induced conservation. American foreign policy in the near-term will have to do more with less.

In this post to the progressive site Foreign Policy in Focus, John Feffer examines Obama’s first 100 days of foreign policy with a reference to Twitter (practically unavoidable these days) inspired brevity:

The score for foreign policy isn’t so clear-cut. In TwitterWorld, the temptation is to evaluate change on the basis of headlines and rhetorical flourishes. Accordingly, the new president would seem to have sharply broken with the international policies of the last administration. Obama issued executive orders to close the Guantánamo Bay prison in a year and end the U.S. use of torture. He stopped using the phrase “Global War on Terror” (GWOT). He promised to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. He embraced the agenda of nuclear abolition. He has shaken Hugo Chávez’s hand. That’s five tweets right there, each under 140 characters.

He goes on to delve deeper and notes Obama’s remarkable continuity with Bush foreign policy and fears among the left and hopes among the right that Obama is actually a closet neocon. Only the next 100 days will tell the tale.