At heart, Obama is not a Westerner, not an Atlanticist. ~Roger Cohen

For Cohen, this is merely an observation, but he has to know that this is one of the most damning insults one could say about Obama. What makes this even worse is that it is utter nonsense. Being a Westerner cannot be measured by the emotional attachment one has to important WWII and Cold War events. If Atlanticism has any value, it is rooted in shared security interests. “Misty-eyed visions” should have nothing to do with it.

Cohen’s remarks are not all that much better than the Ponnuru/Lowry complaint that Obama failed to defend America’s honor when Ortega denounced the Bay of Pigs. All of them are judging Obama on what they assume his emotions to be rather than on the substance of his views. Quite a few pundits seem to have Bush-like vision into the souls of other men, and they seem eager to draw sweeping conclusions from what they think they see. This is inherently unfair, and there is no way to respond to it rationally. Where some find Obama to be lacking in American exceptionalist cheerleading, others find this a sober-minded adjustment to the way the world is, but all of them invest far too much meaning into very slight differences.

Obama believes in American exceptionalism, endorses U.S. hegemony, believes in the inevitability and necessity of global interdependence, and accepts the reality of multipolarity, and for him all of these are interlocking and interconnected ideas. He is both as “post-Western” and as Western as the rest of the political class to which he belongs; he is both an Americanist and a globalist, because it has been the custom in our politics for several decades to be both. This is not hard to understand, but it seems to escape most observers when they try to make sense of Obama’s views. The truth is that Obama’s views are really rather boring and conventional, but then they would have to be for him to be elected President. There is a great desire to make Obama either extremely threatening or extremely interesting, but as far as his public, political persona is concerned he is neither of these things. This may be a relief to some and a letdown to others, but it is reality.