Obama’s Diplomacy Relies on Transparency, Trust
In advance of President Barack Obama’s trip to Saudi Arabia and then to Egypt to address Arabs and Muslims at Cairo University, Thomas Friedman spoke to Obama by phone. The interview, detailed in a recent New York Times column, provides a lesson in something we talk about often here at HOW Online: inspirational leadership. Namely, that engaging an audience in a truthful, transparent manner can build trust when leaders live their values.
As Obama told Friedman when discussing his broader diplomatic approach to addressing U.S. foreign policy issues in the Middle East:
If we are engaged in speaking directly to the Arab street, and they are persuaded that we are operating in a straightforward manner, then, at the margins, both they and their leadership are more inclined and able to work with us.
It’s the idea, as Friedman puts it, of going into people’s living rooms and not being “afraid to hold up a mirror to everything they are doing” and engaging them in a way that says, “I know and respect who you are.” That way, “you end up — if nothing else — creating a little more space for U.S. diplomacy. And you never know when that can help,” says Friedman. That “space” can go miles toward creating feelings of tolerance, inclusiveness and trust in any audience as long as it starts from an honest place.
As HOW Online contributor Dov Seidman said in a recent column, extending trust to any group — even one on all sides skeptical and potentially hostile — builds relationships and helps bring people from opposition to receptiveness. That trust can cure sensations of fear, uncertainty and disequilibrium. And people to whom we extend trust to will likely return that trust, even in uncertain times.
But it starts with the leaders themselves. “Leaders have to lead, and, hopefully, they will get supported by their people,” Obama told Friedman.
So will Obama’s mission and speech fall on deaf ears? Not likely, says Friedman:
Do not underestimate what seeds can get planted when American leaders don’t just propagate their values, but visibly live them.
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