With his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Barack Obama signaled that the world had better get ready for a tougher, less forgiving, more quintessentially American approach from a man who certainly gave the soft touch a try.
The shift in rhetoric at Oslo was striking. Gone was the vaguely left-revisionist language that flavored earlier speeches, highlighting the low points of American global leadership -- the coups and ill-considered wars -- and low-balling the highlights, such as the Cold War triumph. Obama pointedly reminded his European audience of America's central role, with "the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms," in helping to "underwrite global security" since World War II. Instead of treading gingerly around the issue of democracy and the imposition of our values on other peoples, he squarely rejected the "false suggestion that these are somehow Western principles, foreign to local cultures or stages of a nation's development." He went further than he ever had in arguing that for the United States, advancing democracy is not only a moral but also a strategic imperative, because "peace is unstable where citizens are denied the right to speak freely or worship as they please; choose their own leaders or assemble without fear." Nor did he shy away from the Manichaean distinctions that drive self-described realists (and Europeans) crazy, insisting that "Evil does exist in the world" and can neither be negotiated with nor appeased.
The Oslo speech was important not just because it broke rhetorical ground. Obama was following in a great tradition of hawkish Democrats fighting wars both hot and cold: Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John Kennedy, as well as that one-time Democrat, Ronald Reagan. More important, though, the speech heralded a course adjustment, a different approach by the Obama administration to the problems that have bedeviled it this year.
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