오바마를 위한 변명: ‘담대한 희망’ 대(對) 역사

초록

Why has the US President Obama failed to realize ‘the audacity of hope’? This study explores crises that Obama has faced in terms of economy, politics, and foreign policy, with comprehensive, historic, and structural views. Obama’s diagnosis of the economic crisis required the reform of US capitalism that corresponds to Roosevelt’s reformative policy after the Great Depression, but the inertia of existing institutions and ideology has been a critical barrier to the change, and the Tea Party movement and the Republican party locked up Obama’s plan to reform a neo-liberal economic regime in the frame of a partisan struggle. Political polarization means a collective failure of the US democracy. While Obama’s dream for ‘the United States of America’ required bipartisan cooperation, political reality of polarization led to extreme decisions such as a government shutdown. Obama, trapped in a political and economic crisis, could not make a new international order that corresponds to an hegemonic order after World WarⅡ, and sequester and shutdown delayed rebalancing toward Asia. Interventionists’ objection against retrenchment and the historical legacy of the “failed state” security paradigm let the US fall again in the mire of war in Iraq, and make it more difficult to rebuild an hegemonic order in which the US security does not damage its values. The triple crisis of Obama clearly reveals current limitation of the US hegemony, and implies that the future of the hegemony is also not promising.

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