Obama's Moral Challenge in Haiti

Barack Obama began his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech last month by addressing both U.S. citizens and citizens of the world. He hence signaled his goal of balancing U.S. self-inter est -- a necessary thing for the president to pursue -- with a global humanitarian perspective.

As if he needed another degree of difficulty at his one-year mark of leadership, Obama now must apply his national-and-global vision to the Haitian tragedy. If he does not respond generously, America will be seen as overly insular and even inhumane. And, if he does not respond competently and quickly, he will look as incapable as George W. Bush did as Americans watched New Orleanians languish, unaided, in Katrina's wake.

But if Obama is too generous, he will catch the ire of those focused on America's economic woes at home. The Tea Partiers will join this group, but so too will the unemployed and many who fear the effects of mounting national debt. Haiti is terribly unfortunate, they say, but there is suffering in the U.S., too -- so Obama shouldn't spend your money on their problems.

So, as Obama did in Oslo last month regarding war and peace, he should now do for disaster recovery: He must lay out a moral case that transcends but does not overlook national interest.

To do this, Obama must debunk the U.S.-or-Haiti false dichotomy. He has already taken steps in this direction. He has highlighted the bridge-figures, Haitian-Americans, who complicate drawing any simple border. He named a complicated and long history between the two nations. And he has played the geography card, not out of national interest but rather as a moral call to be good neighbors.

The next part of Obama's challenge is to make the United States the leader in creating, almost from nothing, a well-coordinated public, private, and nonprofit network to provide aid and rebuild Port-au-Prince. Without a system that controls things such as traffic flows, water and sanitation flows, and medical care, all of the volunteers in the world will only trip over each other.

In the first week, coordination, not the availability of resources, was the bottleneck for aid. Many organizations and individuals want to help, but none know where to serve. The market mechanism, which helps create efficient allocation in stable times, has only limited capacity in moments of crisis.

Who else is there to organize this work? The Haitian government was ineffective even before the national palace was destroyed. The United Nations resources on the ground were decimated by the quake. The Red Cross and other leading international nonprofits have no serious capacity to play this role. It will be the U.S. or no one. It may well be the latter, but Obama can ensure that disorder does not predominate.

It is not enough for America to have sent search-and-rescue teams to Haiti, and then ships and planes full of medical supplies and food. These are good and necessary but not sufficient steps. It is the very infrastructure of coordination that America can and should provide. Obama has a moment to apply his national-and-global vision of leadership by employing the military and civilian resources at his disposal to rebuild a city. It will be, indeed, a project in nation-building. Some of the logistical lessons learned by the U.S. through coordinating people in war zones may well come in handy in this disaster zone.

Obama must assume this leadership mantle without making the U.S. look either presumptuous or imperialistic. Those criticisms will surely come from political opponents and even from al-Qaida. In the face of this domestic and international pressure, it will be tempting to focus on direct assistance.

But the moral challenge is to build an infrastructure that makes possible efficient cooperation among governments, nonprofits, and businesses. This is a project of not days and weeks, but months and years. It will require moral imagination, and it will require a firm commitment. The surest way for Americans to support Obama's leadership would be for us to understand -- long after CNN has stopped broadcasting from the disaster zone -- that we have obligations as dual citizens: of the United States and of a humane world.

Douglas A. Hicks is associate professor of leadership studies and religion at the University of Richmond's Jepson School of Leadership Studies, and is the author of "With God on All Sides" and "Money Enough." Contact him at dhicks@richmond.edu.