I agree with Pete Wehner’s article below and the opinion of Charles Krauthammer expressed in it…for the most part. We don’t want to play down to the lowest common denominator of world leadership. We need to see that many in the world want to undermine America, and it is deeply disquieting to see our President not only make such statements about his country, but also to be rewarded for it with a Nobel Peace Prize. This makes me wonder, Do these people really understand peace? Am I off, but to me this brings into question the whole award process and its philosophical basis.
On the other hand, the election of a Black man as President is a massive achievement for what many perceive America to be–bigoted. This is a very revealing award about our perception in the world, from that perspective.
Yet, can we not also say that we need to understand the underlying reasons why reasonable people in America and across the world agree with Obama’s narrative, namely, that America has a history of heavy-handedness and oppression? We must not forget that for all our progress and prosperity, the existence of slavery, elitism in all its forms, and abortion is a sad part of American history.
And it still exists in America today, because these sinful tendencies exist each human heart today. We need to talk about these things–not just blast the other side–even as we recognize the clear historical realities of America’s unparalleled leadership for freedom, prosperity, and human dignity in the world, which are undeniable as well. Man is born noble but has fallen, and everywhere he is in tension.
Krauthammer Nails It
Earlier this week, Charles Krauthammer delivered the 2009 Wriston Lecture for the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. Titled “Decline Is a Choice,” the Weekly Standard has adopted that lecture and published it in the forthcoming issue. (A video of the full lecture can be found here.) It is a brilliant and important address, providing as it does a kind of unified field theory when it comes to Obama.
In his address, Krauthammer says,
as he made his hajj from Strasbourg to Prague to Ankara to Istanbul to Cairo and finally to the U.N. General Assembly, Obama drew the picture of an America quite exceptional — exceptional in moral culpability and heavy-handedness, exceptional in guilt for its treatment of other nations and peoples. With varying degrees of directness or obliqueness, Obama indicted his own country for arrogance, for dismissiveness and derisiveness (toward Europe), for maltreatment of natives, for torture, for Hiroshima, for Guantánamo, for unilateralism, and for insufficient respect for the Muslim world.
That, in two sentences, explains why Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize today. Now the Nobel Committee couldn’t quite come out and say that directly; it decided to couch the award in this language, taken from the citation: “[Obama’s] diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.”
There you have it: Barack Obama has given voice to what many of the world think about America — and it’s not flattering. That much of the world — composed as it is of autocrats and dictators and weak and wobbly defenders of human rights and human dignity — isn’t happy with the United States is not news. What is news is that an American president would validate many of those charges. I find that deeply disquieting. The Norwegian Nobel Committee, not surprisingly, considers it worthy of its highest honor.
“decline is a choice” couldn’t wrap it up more succintly, methinks. goes back to our conversation about “does Obama want America to succeed?” …and how his vision of “success” might differ from what the average person would expect