Obama's Age of Atonement

There used to be a joke in San Francisco that the prettiest view of the Bay Area was from the top of the Transamerica building. Why? Because that was the only place in the city from which you couldn’t see the Transamerica building. In a similar way, the rosiest view of globalisation has traditionally come from the American governing classes – from which you cannot see the interests of the major globalisers, only the ideals. Barack Obama’s speech to the United Nations this week is a sign that he is having no more success than his predecessors in figuring out where interests leave off and ideals pick up.