US Foreign Policy: Why Obama's Outreach to Muslim World is Still Valuable (Lynch)

President Obama's visit to Indonesia this week has received relatively little attention in the US. While --- somewhat ironically --- opponents such as Bret Stephens and Charles Krauthammer have hailed the Obama speech in India for promoting the free market and an alliance to "face the common threat of radical Islam and the more long-term challenge of a rising China", the President's address in the country with the largest Muslim population in the world has come and gone.

Marc Lynch, writing in Foreign Policy, tries to fill in the gaps and provide a wider context for the Obama speech:

President Barack Obama's well-crafted speech in Jakarta [on Tuesday] serves as a useful reminder of some of the early promise of his outreach to the Muslim communities of the world. Praise for his efforts has been rare ever since the crashing disappointment which followed the sky-high expectations raised by his Cairo speech. The litany of complaints is now familiar: failure to deliver on the Israeli-Palestinian peace or on Gaza, little visible follow-through in the months after the speech, the inability to close Guantanamo, escalating drone strikes, the impact oframpaging anti-Islam trends in U.S. domestic politics, and so on. I've made all those criticisms myself, and more. With public opinion surveys showing collapsing approval ratings for the United States in the Arab world and rampant media criticism of Obama's strategy, it's hard to find anyone willing to defend the administration's post-Cairo outreach.

But today it's worth stepping back and offering some praise. The administration has stuck with the president's clear commitment to restoring positive relations with the Muslims of the world despite all the setbacks, when it would have been really easy to give up or change course. And he has quietly made some real progress in many lower profile areas upon which the media doesn't focus. Thepresident made clear yesterday that he understands -- perhaps better than his critics -- that "no single speech can eradicate years of mistrust." But, he went on: "I believed then, and I believe today, that we have a choice. We can choose to be defined by our differences, and give in to a future of suspicion and mistrust. Or we can choose to do the hard work of forging common ground." That quiet, long-term commitment may not be as exciting to the media as the peaks and valleys of high-stakes political battles, and isn't as revolutionary as the Cairo speech seemed to promise, but may ultimately be more important than today's headlines. If it works in terms of building robust and durable networks of interest with this rising generation of Muslims around the world, then we may wake up a decade from now extremely grateful for efforts which didn't seem noteworthy today.

Read full article....