Americas

President Barack Obama has a choice to make - and it is one of Faustian proportions. He needs to decide who he wants to be, and how he wants history - and his children - to remember him. More specifically, he needs to decide whether he wants to be a Great Leader or whether to play it safe in the interest of being a two-term president.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was said to symbolize the end of an era. The world was no longer a bipolar battlefield of superpowers. And without the constant threat of a red invasion, the U.S. would undoubtedly halt its "democracy" promotion and harsh policies toward Latin America, or at least it was assumed. Unfortunately, although the Berlin Wall collapsed two decades ago the U.S. government continues not only to uphold relics of the era, but to promote new laws that force U.S. ideologies upon sovereign Latin American nations.

If staging coups, waging secret wars, suspending civil liberties, or torturing people were merely aberrations pursued by a handful of zealots, Congress could simply punish the offenders and get back to "business as usual." But the obvious, and yet unspoken, truth is that destabilizing other governments, unnecessary (and sometimes covert) wars, and abuses of power - at home and abroad - are standard tactics of the modern presidency.

Remember the panic-inducing headlines of 2008? Government Takes Over Troubled Mortgage Giants, Lehman Brothers Files for Bankruptcy, Bank of America Buys Merrill Lynch, and Stock Prices Plummet - that last one just as the government announced an $85 billion emergency loan to rescue insurance giant AIG. And that was just the beginning.

Nearly three months after being overthrown by a violent military coup, Honduran president Manuel Zelaya has returned to Honduras. "I am here in Tegucigalpa. I am here for the restoration of democracy, to call for dialogue," he told reporters. The embattled road to his return tested regional diplomacy, challenged Washington and galvanized Honduran social movements.