Even Woodrow Wilson might have blanched at the mushy-headed exhortations to world peace and collective action better suited to a college dorm-room bull session or a holiday-season Coca-Cola commercial.

“No nation can or should try to dominate another nation,” Obama intoned. “No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold.”

Has an American president ever expressed such implicit hostility toward his own nation’s pre-eminence in world affairs? Or so relished in recalling its failings, or so readily elevated himself and his own virtues over those of his country? ~Rich Lowry

The sentences Lowry chose as his examples of Obama’s supposed mushiness are lifted directly from Obama’s Cairo speech. I noticed those lines and said this at the time in my column for The Week:

Even if one is inclined to accept Obama’s analysis and his prescription for active American involvement around the globe, it should be easy to see why a skeptical audience would react poorly when the president said: “Given our interdependence, any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail.” For a president who claims to prize empathy, he certainly failed to put himself in the other’s shoes when he composed that line. It should be obvious that many in his target audience see the present world order as the elevation of America and its allies over them. Indeed, many of the more accommodating, diplomatic parts of the president’s speech can easily be read as attempts to reconcile his audience to this unwelcome arrangement.

The sentences Lowry quotes are indeed galling, but not because they express “implicit hostility toward his own nation’s pre-eminence in world affairs.” The audience of assembled delegates and dignitaries probably got a good laugh out of these lines, not because they proved Obama to be weak or naive or gullible, but because these lines are ridiculous when uttered by an American President at the present time. The galling thing about them is that they are loaded with all the arrogance other nations resent in American conduct overseas, and it is an arrogance concealed as empathy. Everyone knows that our government has sought to dominate (and has succeeded in dominating) several other nations in recent years, and many other nations take it for granted that the current world order is organized to elevate the United States and its allies above all others and to hold them to different standards of behavior than we hold the rest. If anything, the remarks that Lowry quotes are bad because no nation on the receiving end of our “leadership” can take them as anything other than window-dressing for the maintenance of U.S. hegemony. No rival major power will take calls for cooperation seriously when Washington seeks to aggrandize itself at their expense, but perhaps by sugar-coating the way things are Obama hopes to make it easier to accept the bitter reality. If I were a hegmonist, I would find it very useful that Obama puts a friendly, accommodating face on the status quo, as this will make it easier to perpetuate our unnecessary deployments and entanglements abroad. Naturally, Lowry is more interested in scoring the lame partisan point against Obama in the ongoing campaign to paint him as another Carter, so he misses how potentially helpful to Lowry’s preferred policies Obama’s disingenuous rhetoric can be.