A Working Vacation

Japan is bordering on nuclear meltdown, Gadafi is slaughtering his citizens in Libya, and Charlie Sheen has launched a violent torpedo of truth stateside. As the world burns around him, Obama went on Spring Break 2011.

Well, that’s what his critics would like you to think. To them, the President wasted his time relaxing on the Brazilian beaches and drinking Chilean wine during his diplomatic trip to Central and South America when he should have been seated in the Oval Office saving the world. But Obama was right not to cancel his tour of the Southern cone, despite recent world events; to do so would have been a slap in the face to a region that is historically slighted but presently vital.

It's not as if Obama's trip prevented him from doing what was in our national interest during the situations in Asia and North Africa. In regards to Libya, from the moment the President touched down in Brazil he was involved in briefings, meetings, and conference calls with Washington making decisions about US military action. In fact, strategy meetings on Libya were both the first and last things Obama did in South America. People seem to forget that we live in a highly interconnected world, one in which the President could conduct his necessary business from anywhere. Secure connections to DC were established whenever Obama was on the ground in Brazil, Chile, or El Salvador, and while most of us watch re-runs of sitcoms while we sit through cramped plane rides, he has an entire mobile command center at his fingertips midair in Air Force One. Even in the middle of a state dinner in Chile he was receiving updates about the US fighter jet crash in Libya. Obama is famously our most technology addicted President (remember all the articles about giving up his precious Blackberry when he first entered office?), and, like a teenager waiting for gossip during a family dinner, distance was not going to get in the way of doing what needed to be done.

All of the technology Obama has to communicate with is public knowledge, so it seems like those criticizing the trip south are more opposed to the symbolic disappearance of Our President from Washington, DC during a time of international crisis. Yes, it is still a bit disturbing to think that, while our soldiers are prepping for air strikes in Libya and risking nuclear exposure in Japan, Obama was posing for family snapshots under Cristo Redentor; again, not because he was inactive about the global crises, but because it looks as if he bailed when the going got tough. But for those so concerned about perception, consider what it would have looked like if Obama had cancelled the trip.

The journey took Obama first to Brazil, a state that both the US and the rest of the world acknowledge to be important in the very near future. It is the largest economy in South America and still growing, it will host the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janiero, and it has a huge oil reserve that presents an alternative to exorbitant Middle Eastern petrol prices; it's nominal membership in the Big Four/BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries alone announces its global growth and importance in the coming years. To cancel his visits with the newly elected, first female President Dilma Rousseff would have been disrespectful to a nation that we cannot afford to disrespect--especially as, like the rest of Latin America, it forms stronger ties to China.

Obama then travelled to Chile, where a US president met one-on-one with a Chilean president in Chile for the first time in over two decades. The last time was when Bush senior visited in 1990, to visit with the then-newly inaugurated President Lagos--the first elected Chilean head of state since the US-supported coup that put military tyrant and human rights abuser Augusto Pinochet in power for 17 years. In the time since that last visit, the US has become a huge consumer of Chilean exports, particularly agricultural products such as fruit and wine, and Chile has become the most economically competitive state in its region, even joining the OECD. Plus, just over a year ago Chile experienced an 8.8 earthquake (coming in just under the 9.0 in Japan) and has barely skipped a beat during its recovery. As with Brazil, to slight Chile by canceling his meetings with President Piñera would have been a symbolic backhand in the face of a state the holds rising economic power in our immediate vicinity.

The last leg of the trip was somewhat randomly to El Salvador, but again this is a nation that has symbolic if not material gravitas for the US. The small Central American state is important as more workers migrate to the US and illegal drug activity is pushed south of Mexico, but also because it is controlled by a leftist and Marxist-guerilla backed president that wants to build a strong relationship with the US; President Funes felt that Obama's planned visit was validation of his state's importance and his domestically criticized pro-Washington stance. To cancel would have been to turn back on a state that has gone out on an unprecedented limb to warm to the US despite being far-leftist.

Each of the states that Obama visited hold measurable and emblematic importance to US relations, particularly when it comes to economic and political alliance; securing pan-American agendas that include US interests such as oil, free trade, and democracy is rightfully so a priority of this administration. Plus, one of the blessings of our technology addicted world is this: President Obama can save the world from anywhere.