20 Jan 2009 : Survival
So this is the big day, to put it mildly. Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, just entered St. John’s Episcopal Church for a brief service before driving to the Capitol steps for his swearing in. More than a million Americans are standing on the frozen Mall doing whatever they can to keep warm until they can hear the inaugural speech of a President who, five years ago, was an unknown state legislator in Springfield, Illinois. There is talk – one can’t know how loose it is – that the global audience will be on the order of a billion. This is one of the meanings of the ‘global politics’ that is in the subtitle of our journal, Survival: Global Politics and Strategy. Here is the piece I wrote, on the meaning of Obama’s triumph, for the most recent issue.
Dana Allin, Editor, Survival, Senior Fellow for US Foreign Policy and Transatlantic Affairs
