With his speech to the Muslim world at Cairo University, Barack Obama put a new face on American foreign policy, or at least a face that the world has not seen since the 1970s. This is America’s penitent, humbled and even sycophantic face.
President Obama seeks a “new beginning” to US-Muslim relations through frank self-examination and mutual respect. The US is locked in a battle for the hearts and minds of Muslims, whether it likes it or not. Self-examination can be a sign of strength. But we should not delude ourselves that the Muslim world sees it as such. The Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks for many when he says that it is “the power of Muslims which [has] made the new US administration try to portray a new image”. And there is another problem: the politics of national self-abasement, from Jimmy Carter to Mikhail Gorbachev, is not popular with voters. It cannot be practised for long because it entails a huge – usually fatal – drawing down of political capital.
The US is still, paradoxically, the country that has felt the lash of globalisation least. The president’s trip to the Middle East gave an inkling of what diplomacy is like when someone else has the upper hand. In part it was the atmospherics: the state department memo warning journalists accompanying Mr Obama to Saudi Arabia that they were “expressly prohibited from leaving the hotel or engaging in any journalistic activities outside of coverage of the Potus visit”; the photos of Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, in a headscarf; the invitations extended to members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo.
In part it was the president’s oratorical tics: the greeting of assalum alaykum; describing the Middle East as the region in which Islam was first “revealed” (a formulation usually used by believers, not outsiders); or “peace be upon them” (a phrase many Americans know only from Osama bin Laden’s internet videos). What looks polite to most of the world looks obsequious to American voters. The carefully vetted Cairo audience clapped primarily for Koranic citations or concrete concessions (“I have ordered the prison at Guantánamo Bay closed”), and rarely for the soaring sentiments of which a US listener would be proudest.
“Turning the page on the Bush era” means partly a change in tone. Mr Obama distinguishes the Iraq war (which he opposed) from the Afghan one (of which he plans a major escalation this summer) by calling Iraq a “war of choice”. That is an artificial distinction. The US had other choices at its disposal after 9/11 besides invading Afghanistan. They may have been foolish or ineffective or cowardly, but they were choices. Choosing to invade, even after 9/11, provoked fury in the Muslim world. On Thursday, Mr Obama made important concessions to this fury. The US, he said, would seek no permanent bases in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
But the key point of the speech was to downgrade the US alliance with Israel, to shift US support from the Israeli position to the Muslim one. “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements [in the West Bank],” Mr Obama said. The US suddenly finds itself with roughly the same Middle East policy as the European Union. Israelis will not find the blow much softened by a few tough remarks about Holocaust denial and some warnings to Palestinians against terrorism – a word Mr Obama did not use.
Mr Obama’s criticism of terrorism is two-pronged. On the one hand he sees terrorism as morally wrong, and here he was most eloquent: “It is a sign neither of courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus,” he said. On the other hand, he sees terrorism as ineffective, and here he is far less persuasive. “For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation,” Mr Obama said. “But it was not violence that won full and equal rights.”
What is most inspiring about Mr Obama’s oratory is also what is most disturbing about it. In his oratorical universe, the right thing and the effective thing tend to coincide. In his discussion of the Muslim headscarf he displayed the same highly appealing libertarian conservatism that won him many votes in the centre of the American electorate last fall. “I reject the view of some in the west that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal,” he said. “I respect those women who choose to live their lives in traditional roles. But it should be their choice.”
If “choice” is the way forward, then Mr Obama is addressing his audience not as Muslims but as citizens. Politics is about choice. Religion is not – it is about truth. As soon as there are meaningful free choices about whether to be liberated or traditional, the problem defines itself away. The point of the Cairo speech was to break faith with Israel on peace negotiations, in hope that the move will provoke concessions from Muslims. Wrapped around that realpolitik was an oration which was heartfelt and subtle – but which neither made the US stronger than before, nor made the world safer.
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The Financial Times (abridged).