Excerpts from Barack Obama's new book 'A Promised Land'

Excerpts from Barack Obama's new book 'A Promised Land' 

 

"Both of us (he and his wife) were drained, physically and emotionally, not only by the labors of the previous eight years but by the unexpected results of an election in which someone diametrically opposed to everything we stood for had been chosen as my successor.

....Perhaps most troubling of all, our democracy seems to be teetering on the brink of crisis — a crisis rooted in a fundamental contest between two opposing visions of what America is and what it should be; a crisis that has left the body politic divided, angry, and mistrustful, and has allowed for an ongoing breach of institutional norms, procedural safeguards, and the adherence to basic facts that both Republicans and Democrats once took for granted.

I’m convinced that the pandemic we’re currently living through is both a manifestation of and a mere interruption in the relentless march toward an interconnected world, one in which peoples and cultures can’t help but collide. In that world—of global supply chains, instantaneous capital transfers, social media, transnational terrorist networks, climate change, mass migration, and ever-increasing complexity—we will learn to live together, cooperate with one another, and recognize the dignity of others, or we will perish. 

Manmohan Singh, the prime minister of India, meanwhile, had engineered the modernization of his nation’s economy. 

A gentle, soft-spoken economist in his seventies, with a white beard and a turban that were the marks of his Sikh faith but to the Western eye lent him the air of a holy man, he had been India’s finance minister in the 1990s, managing to lift millions of people from poverty. 

For the duration of his tenure as prime minister, I would find Singh to be wise, thoughtful, and scrupulously honest. Despite its genuine economic progress, though, India remained a chaotic and impoverished place: largely divided by religion and caste, captive to the whims of corrupt local officials and power brokers, hamstrung by a parochial bureaucracy that was resistant to change.

And then there was China. Since the late 1970s, when Deng Xiaoping effectively abandoned Mao Zedong’s Marxist-Leninist vision in favor of an export-driven, state-managed form of capitalism, no nation in history had developed faster or moved more people out of abject poverty. Once little more than a hub of low-grade manufacturing and assembly for foreign companies looking to take advantage of its endless supply of low-wage workers, China now boasted topflight engineers and world-class companies working at the cutting edge of advanced technology. 

Its massive trade surplus made it a major investor on every continent; gleaming cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou had become sophisticated financial centers, home to a burgeoning consumer class. Given its

growth rate and sheer size, China’s GDP was guaranteed at some point to surpass America’s. When you added this to the country’s powerful military, increasingly skilled workforce, shrewd and pragmatic government, and cohesive five thousand-year-old culture, the conclusion felt obvious: If any country was likely to challenge US preeminence on the world stage, it was China.

And yet watching the Chinese delegation operate at the G20, I was convinced that any such challenge was still decades away—and that if and when it came, it would most likely happen as a result of America’s strategic mistakes.

OF ALL THE BRICS leaders in attendance at the G20, I was most interested in

engaging with Medvedev. The US relationship with Russia was at a particularly

low point. The previous summer—a few months after Medvedev had been sworn

into office—Russia had invaded the neighboring country of Georgia, a former

Soviet republic, and illegally occupied two of its provinces, triggering violence

between the two countries and tensions with other border nations.

For us, it was a sign of Putin’s escalating boldness and general belligerence, a

troubling unwillingness to respect another nation’s sovereignty and a broader

flouting of international law.

(Obama rakes up 'divisive nationalism' of BJP)

"At dinner that night, Sonia Gandhi listened more than she spoke, careful to defer to Singh when policy matters came up, and often steered the conversation toward her son. It became clear to me, though, that her power was attributable to a shrewd and forceful intelligence. 

As for Rahul, he seemed smart and earnest, his good looks resembling his mother’s. He offered up his thoughts on the future of progressive politics, occasionally pausing to probe me on the details of my 2008 campaign. 

But there was a nervous, unformed quality about him, as if he were a student who’d done the coursework and was eager to impress the teacher but deep down lacked either the aptitude or the passion to master the subject.

....it was getting late, I noticed Manmohan Singh fighting off sleep, lifting his glass every so often to wake himself up with a sip of water. I signaled to Michelle that it was time to say our goodbyes. The prime minister and his wife walked us to our car. 

In the dim light, he (Manmohan) looked frail, older than his seventy-eight years, and as we drove off I wondered what would happen when he left office. Would the baton be successfully passed to Rahul, fulfilling the destiny laid out by his mother and preserving the Congress Party’s dominance over the divisive nationalism touted by the BJP?

Somehow, I was doubtful. It wasn’t Singh’s fault. He had done his part, following the playbook of liberal democracies across the post–Cold War world: upholding the constitutional order; attending to the quotidian, often technical work of boosting the GDP; and expanding the social safety net. 

Like me, he had come to believe that this was all any of us could expect from democracy, especially in big, multiethnic, multi religious societies like India and the United States. 

Not revolutionary leaps or major cultural overhauls; not a fix for every social pathology or lasting answers for those in search of purpose and meaning in their lives. Just the observance of rules that allowed us to sort out or at least tolerate our differences, and government policies that raised living standards and improved education enough to temper humanity’s baser impulses.