Obama Not The Realist Supporters Thought

Late in the summer of 2007, I watched Barack Obama speak to a small crowd gathered in the backyard of a supporter in Salem, New Hampshire. He had a lot to say about foreign affairs. Abroad as at home, he said, we need "a new ethic of mutual responsibility" based on the recognition that "we have a stake in each other." Thus the need to reinvigorate the United Nations, increase foreign aid, and end torture. Afterward I asked him whether that ethic really arose from pragmatic calculation, as opposed to moral duty. "You don't want to oversimplify it," he told me. But it was true, he went on, that U.S. national security was tied to human security across the globe. Failing states produced transnational problems, including massive refugee flows and epidemic disease. And because how people in poor or abused countries felt about their own lives would shape their attitudes toward the West, it behooved the United States to address their suffering. "The hard case," he added, "may be convincing people that we can do anything about it."