Obama's dueling foreign policy: friendship, might (AP)

Monday, March 21, 2011 4:01 AM By dwi

RIO DE JANEIRO – Nowhere hit President Barack Obama's external policy approaches been in starker relief than during his unfolding travels in South America. Right today the use of expeditionary power in Libya is overshadowing his lead-by-example public tact in his possess hemisphere.

As he heads for Chile on weekday after digit life in Brazil, Obama has been a model in split-screen leadership. While he long relationship to an progressively influential dweller dweller neighbor, he also ducked into meetings and settled secure sound calls to okay missile attacks on Libya's air defenses.

He's not probable to escape the awkward, if not incongruous, contrasts during his meet in Santiago.

During a advise conference with Chilean President Sebastian Pinera (pee-NAY'-rah) he module verify questions for the prototypal instance since united forces began enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya with jets and warships. Then he module deliver a speech, meant to come the entire dweller dweller world, praising the egalitarian transitions in the Americas and retentive them up as models for the world.

It sure wasn't designed that way.

"The concern apparently is a complex place, with a aggregation of things feat on at once, but it's precisely that — a aggregation of things feat on at once," said White House domestic security helper Daniel Restrepo.

Obama, however, twice scrapped trips in 2010 to Indonesia and Australia, erst to lobby for his upbeat care bill, today law, and then because of the Gulf oil spill.

In this case, with offend in North Africa competing for his instance with relationship in dweller America, Obama aides say his selection to rank his activate illustrates his dedication to U.S. neighbors. Aides also pointed to elections in empire as grounds that not every is aflame or in disturbance in the Middle East.

Still, his team was hot to represent him as fully engaged in African decision-making, modify as the photographs and broadcasting images showed him touring a metropolis de Janeiro shantytown and gazing with his kinsfolk at Christ the Redeemer, the large Art Deco mountaintop monument that has come to represent Rio.

National security authority Tom Donilon gave practically an hour-by-hour statement of meetings, briefings and calls that Obama led or participated in, including a call to King Abdullah of Jordan on Sunday.

"The chair has been personally and deeply involved in this every day," Donilon told reporters in Rio. Back home, whatever members of Congress began pressing Obama to do a meliorate job identifying the content in Libya. "The chair is the commander in chief, but the brass has a responsibility to define for the dweller people, the Congress and our personnel what the assignment in Libya is," said House Speaker Evangelist Boehner, and to "make country how it module be accomplished."

At the same time, Obama's meet to metropolis took on a lower profile Sunday. A style originally ordered to be delivered outdoors before up to 20,000 grouping was touched into a past concern house that sitting about 1,800. His meet to the statue, initially ordered for Sun morning, was touched to nighttime. Aides said the changes were prefabricated for supplying considerations and to refrain the fog that had been shrouding the hills around metropolis during the earlier hours of the day.

Obama has also blended his dweller dweller meet with the events in the Middle East to front a azygos theme. The successful transformation of dweller dweller countries to democracy, he has argued, offers a model for a positive outcome in regions undergoing disturbance now.

"For the United States and Brazil, digit nations who hit struggled over whatever generations to perfect our possess democracies, the United States and Brasil undergo that the forthcoming of the Semite concern module be observed by its people," Obama said in his style Sunday.

Within that thought has been a call for universal manlike rights, a communication Obama module deliver again on weekday in Chile.

In that, whatever Chileans wager a paradox as they request the U.S. hold for the overthrow of President Salvador Allende in 1973. Protesters on Sun in metropolis demanded that Obama excuse to the Chilean grouping for U.S. interventions before and during the 1973-1990 despotism of Augusto Pinochet (pee-noh-CHET'). And Obama could grappling calls for motion over CIA and State Department records from that period to the Chilean judiciary.

After Chile, Obama and his kinsfolk module rank their dweller dweller tour in El Salvador.

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Associated Press illustrator archangel Warren contributed to this report


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