For months, some analysts have maintained that Obama’s foreign policy would essentially be a continuation of Bush’s.  No longer can this be said.  Last week’s decision by the Obama Administration to drop plans to deploy a missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic is a final proof of a substantially different approach, one favoring engagement and negotiation over unilateral action.  This despite Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ assertion that the missile defense decision was merely a “flexible..pragmatic” evolution of U.S. policy toward shorter-range sea-based (at first) missile interceptors.  It makes a huge political difference that high-tech deployments in the former Soviet “space” are no longer front and center.  Certainly Putin and Medvedev think so.

While it is too soon to judge how effective Obama will be, it is evident that most leaders and publics welcome the change from Bush’s approach.  The atmospherics at the upcoming Pittsburgh G-20 Summit and the U.N. General Assembly should underline this.  On environment and global warming, engagement with Iran, and now missile defense, Obama has signaled fundamental changes of course that will have far reaching impact on the role of the United States in the world.

Most of these strategic course corrections require years to show distinct results.  For example, although he will meet separately tomorrow in New York with Mahmoud Abbas and Benjamin Netanyahu, Obama and his envoy, George Mitchell, know that Palestinian-Israeli negotiations will be long, complicated and frustrating.  Iran’s behavior — both internally and internationally — will make any kind of international engagement with Ahmedinejad in the interests of international security both difficult and occasionally unpopular.  Moreover, dropping the missile “shield” deployments in Central Europe — intended by the U.S. to deter Iran but welcomed by Poland to deter Russia — risks giving Iran (and Russia) the impression that the U.S. will back down without insisting on concessions from them.  This will not make negotiations easier.

The most immediate international security challenge for the Obama Administration — Afghanistan — requires decisive action in the near term.  Having already committed new troops to the military campaign, Obama’s commanders are now asking for more.  NATO allies with troops committed to the campaign are sustaining losses that their domestic publics are not prepared to accept.

Brought Home to Rome

The American public is frustrated as well.  If we can’t win what Obama has called the “right” war, then what good are our enormous and costly military and intelligence services?

This month has been filled with symbolism and remembrance.  Not just the anniversaries of Hitler’s attack on Poland (Sept. 1) and the Soviet invasion of that country (Sept. 17) in 1939.  Between those dates lies September 11th.  For America and much of the world, September 11th is an occasion to take stock of everything that has happened since that date in 2001.  Every anniversary I do the same thing:  I go back to the 9/11 Commission Report, review its conclusions, and try to figure out whether we’ve made any progress in the past year.  Usually I conclude that there’s not much tangible progress, even if I have to admit that every year without a repeat of September 11, 2001 should be acknowledged with gratitude toward all those who keep us safe.

But the broader reality is disturbing.  We have used all our 21st century technology, all of our political, economic and military might, but we have still not destroyed or even neutralized the forces that attacked us with box cutters eight years ago.  Afghanistan, training ground of the Saudi terrorists who attacked us then, is now an inchoate mass of tribes and shifting allegiances, home to massive corruption, fraudulent elections and the source of deadly heroin.  The President must show a clear relationship between what we are doing in Afghanistan and an end to international terror.  And there must be a clear way forward.

The Obama Administration announced its decision on the missile “shield” on September 17th, a hapless offense to Polish sensibilities.  For Poland, the shield was always about Russia and Russians knew this.  But for the world today, the biggest security threats are those emanating from lands far removed from the Russian-Polish border, and the symbolism is that of 9/11.

VENICE — The latest edition of the Venice Film Festival, at which I’ve been watching new American

America's Road?

films, offers a fairly depressing vision of American society — one that the largely European audience here finds easy to accept.  It is a view of American reality as it is, was, or might be, and is equally disturbing in fact or imagination.

Michael Moore’s new film, “Capitalism:  A Love Story,” which had its world premiere last night, has been warmly received by the hundreds of journalists who’ve seen it so far.   It is a continuation of Moore’s polemics against Republicans and corporate America but, for once, the sympathetic response of the left-minded European Fourth Estate may precede broader approval in America as well.  As Moore catalogs the past year’s headlines and the ruinous management of America’s banking system, his indignation is likely to be shared by an increasing number of Americans, on various parts of the political spectrum, who now agree that things are in a worrisome state, even if they don’t share Moore’s view that “capitalism is evil…” and must be replaced by “democracy.”

Moore follows his heroes and his villains, heroes like Ohio Democratic Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, Vermont “democratic socialist” Senator Bernie Sanders, and progressive Catholic priests in Detroit and Chicago.  His villains are not just George W. Bush, but also Goldman Sachs, Democratic Senator Chris Dodd (and other beneficiaries of Countrywide Mortgage’s “VIP” mortgages), Ronald Reagan’s Treasury Secretary and Chief of Staff Don Regan, those who evict delinquent home and farm owners, and leading banks and businesses (e.g., Wal-Mart) that secretly took out life insurance policies on their “associates,” with the companies naming themselves as beneficiaries.  (Although not implicated in any employee deaths, these corporations realized a windfall whenever an employee died — or so Moore alleges.)

Moore may not be a model journalist (on economic matters, he interviews a friend of his, actor Wallace Shawn, but no economists), nor wildly popular at home in the U.S., but he is vastly

Man on a Mission

influential.  His Fahrenheit 9/11 was shown in schools throughout Germany during the George W. Bush presidency to explain the “why” of the Iraq War.  His books (such as “Stupid White Men”) are widely translated and on sale at the Festival.

It may also be that Moore’s documentaries, which document his viewpoints more than the facts he proclaims, also influence feature film directors to “document” their own take on reality.  Oliver Stone, who wanders frequently between fact-based fiction and fictional reality, has an out-of-competition film in Venice, called “South of the Border,” a hagiographic look at how Hugo Chavez has affected Central and South American politics.  Moore, who likes Cuban health care, would likely approve.

If you think Moore’s documentary version of present-day America is scary, just wait.  John Hillcoat’s “The Road,” based on Cormac McCarthy’s best seller about survival in a post-apocalyptic world, is a frighteningly plausible view of the United States after ecological or nuclear catastrophe.   The unrelieved gray and barren landscape is strewn by the detritus of catastrophe and populated by scavenging bands that for an instant resemble extras from a George A. Romero horror film.  But this is reality as horror, not horror as farce.  The few humans left are desperate, starving and barely able to comprehend their fate.  It is one of the cinematic standouts of the Festival so far.

Another catastrophe, real but in the past, leads to personal disaster in Werner Herzog’s “Bad Lieutenant:  Port of Call New Orleans,” inspired by a 1992 movie but now set in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.  For Herzog and his star, Nicholas Cage, the setting of New Orleans is not just appropriate for a detective film noir, but a tale of Katrina leading to human disaster.  Cage’s character, a police sargeant, starts off with good moral instincts that are deadened after an accident leaves him drug dependent.  Cage’s character ultimately recovers from all manner of risky behavior that by rights should land him jailtime instead of promotions.   Yet, for Herzog there is always a touch of the bizarre in human behavior, yielding literal tales that cannot be taken literally.  A Bavarian who now lives in Los Angeles, Herzog told a press conference that America has a “mysterious ability” to recover from political near collapse, exemplified for him by the McCarthyite period of the 1950s yielding to JFK’s New Frontier or the years of George W. Bush being followed by Obama.  The ending of his film seems similarly inexplicable.  If there is an actual point of view from Herzog, it is seen in the old-school outburst from Cage when a nurse and her elderly charge refuse to get involved to help solve a multiple homicide:  “Its people like you who are running this country into the ground!”  He forces them to help and the house of cards he builds miraculously stays standing.

This trio of films is not the only cinematic version of America in Venice this year — a less than serious film from George Clooney and a Steven Sonderberg feature with Matt Damon are also on tap — but they do say something about the ability of film and other art to reflect our current anxieties and anticipate where we are headed.  Like the early 60s when films like “On the Beach” and “Fail Safe” conveyed our worries about nuclear disaster, a slough of recent films project a fear of some sort of apocalypse.  Much like Alfonso Cuaron’s 2006 film “Children of Men,” set in a Britain of the future, where a baby must be saved and delivered to waterborne safety, for the propagation of the species, “The Road” has a dark vision where a child must survive for us to believe that good stands a chance of retaking root in a barren land.  Surrounded by evil and desolation, the son of Viggo Mortensen’s character has been taught that there are “good guys” still left who “carry the fire.”  But will he find them?

Herzog, the flag waver

In different ways, these dire visions can only be reversed through commitment and trust.  “Democracy is not a spectator sport, it’s a participatory event,” Moore told a news conference. “If we don’t participate in it, it ceases to be a democracy. So Obama will rise or fall based not so much on what he does but on what we do to support him.”  This may not be exactly what fearful and angry Americans want to hear this summer, but for some directors in Venice this week, it’s exactly what they must be told.