Obama seeks closer ties with ex-foes

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

In his final stretch as president, Barack Obama is driving the United States toward friendlier relations with long-standing adversaries, working to consign bitter enmities with Vietnam, Iran, Cuba and Myanmar to the history books.

Though the reconciliations have been years in the making, Obama hopes he can prove the benefits of his softer approach before he hands control to an uncertain successor in January. Defiant cries of naivete by his opponents have only strengthened his conviction that the U.S. must release itself from an us-versus-them mentality forged during wars that ended decades ago.

The quest for resolution was on display this week in Hanoi, where Obama lifted an arms-sales embargo that had stood as one of the last remnants of the Vietnam War and the deep freeze that persisted until the two nations restored relations in 1995.

Obama’s next gesture will come Friday in Hiroshima, Japan, where he’ll become the first sitting president to visit the site where the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb – helping end World War II but sowing resentments. Seven decades later, those have mostly fallen away. Though his move has rankled some U.S. veterans and some Japanese, Obama’s visit will be a powerful reminder of the intimate alliance between two nations that view China more warily than they do each other.

Speaking to the Vietnamese people Tuesday, Obama dismissed calls for keeping the communist-run country at a distance, the stance of those fecklessly nursing long-forgotten rivalries. He noted that he’s the first president to come of age after the war.

For Obama, the belief that his youth uniquely positions him to turn the page took root long before he was elected president. In his 2006 book “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama wrote that American politics suffered from a case of arrested development, or what he dismissively referred to as “the psychodrama of the baby boom generation – a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago.”

Yet Obama’s critics argue that in his efforts to make peace, Obama has erroneously lumped together countries such as Myanmar and Vietnam, which have gradually moved toward U.S. values, with others like Iran and Cuba, which they say have not.