Having heard the Al-Arabiya interview, I will say that there is not much there to scandalize anyone. He committed himself to nothing specific, and he made standard remarks urging respect and understanding. One of the advantages that Obama has in speaking to an Arabic-language network so early in his term is that the novelty of doing it and the priority he gave it are just remarkable enough that he need not say anything significant. He didn’t need to say anything significant, and so he didn’t. Nonetheless, it is no wonder that this American woman’s Muslim in-laws were impressed by the interview. When people have become accustomed to hearing nothing or at least nothing favorable, the slightest acknowledgement of their concerns seems very significant, even though it may be nothing more than sugar coating for yet another bitter pill. The starving man will rejoice over crumbs, which is all Obama is likely to offer the Al-Arabiya audience and Americans interested in significant policy changes. Of course, this Lebanese family may be aware that Obama unequivocally backed Israel’s bombardment and invasion of Lebanon when he was in the Senate, which tends to put his “empathy for Muslim children and their lives” in a rather harsh perspective.

Following John Zmirak’s advice that non-Catholics should not say anything about Pope Benedict’s lifting of bans on four SSPX bishops, I am not going to offer any comments about the decision itself. It is the Catholic Church’s business and a matter of internal discipline and order. It is noteworthy that outsiders in the media seem to be horrified by schism when it is a matter of theologically conservative Christians resisting the introduction of modern fads and deviations from tradition, but regard the healing of schism even more horrifying if it means bringing traditionalists back into the fold.

Ross’ take on the subject is worth reading. What I will say relates to the response to this decision. I agree with Ross that media treatment of such a topic, especially one that has the potential for political controversy, is bound to be superficial, sensationalist and sometimes simply wrong. To make the story seem more relevant, there is always a desire to find a controversial, and preferably political, angle. We in the Russian Orthodox Church discovered this last year when the reconciliation with Moscow was taking place, and we were treated to various breathless reports that Putin was taking control of the Russian Church Abroad. This latter point falls under the “simply wrong” heading, but the reconciliation received this treatment from media outlets, particularly The Wall Street Journal, because it fit with a preconceived story about Russia and reinforced negative stereotypes about the Orthodox. Obviously, the same thing is at work here in the treatment of Pope Benedict XVI and Catholicism.

I am sympathetic with our Catholic friends, as Pravoslavophobia, as Dr. Trifkovic once dubbed it, is probably one of the few other broadly acceptable prejudices in the U.S. besides anti-Catholicism, and it takes many of the same forms and derives from the same sources. In this most recent episode, those inclined to impute the worst motives and willfully misunderstand or distort Catholic history have latched on to the aspect of the story that they believe validates their view and have chosen to pursue the most political reading of a fundamentally and exclusively religious matter.

Quin Hillyer complains about Obama’s first television interview, which Jake Tapper reports will be with Al-Arabiya. This is different, but it doesn’t mean very much one way or the other. At most it means that President Obama was serious when he made irenic remarks in his Inaugural directed to Muslims, but I suspect this has zero significance when it comes to policy. Like the appointment of George Mitchell, which represents an exception to the general rule of administration personnel on regional policy, giving an interview to Al-Arabiya is a conciliatory gesture designed to try to make up for the reality of U.S. policy. It is the sort of conciliatory move that Obama believes he can make because he is confident in his own “pro-Israel” bona fides, as well he might be considering the make-up of his Cabinet, staff and Middle East policy team, just as Obama’s general acceptance of national security ideology gives him the flexibility and the political cover to critique and oppose individual policy decisions.

This Al-Arabiya interview is most likely a case of attempting to “re-package” or “re-brand” the same policy in a more attractive way, which assumes that Arab and other foreign publics are not reacting negatively to the substance of U.S. policy but only to its presentation. More basically, critics of this interview must not understand Obama at all. Obama likes negotiation and consensus-building, and he likes to try to explain one group’s situation to another. This is the peril of his bridge-building instinct that I mentioned long ago: the attempt to convey a message from one side to another is routinely mistaken as a concession to the other side. This is why some other conservatives (usually those who ended up voting for him) made a very different kind of mistake in assuming that Obama sympathized with certain conservative policy proposals that he did not dismiss out of hand. The claim that Obama represents a Rohrschach test, which I have seen so many people make, is really a statement about how badly the people making the claim misread what Obama tries to do. It’s not that Obama makes a secret of what he thinks or does not have a clear record on where he stands, but that very few people on either side of any given debate seem willing to believe that Barack Hussein Obama can really be as establishmentarian and conventional as he is. People project their own hopes and fears onto him not because he is a blank screen, but because they refuse to believe what they see when they look at his record and statements. Like his acceptance of national security ideology that I discussed last week, Obama’s establishmentarian instincts are an important part of the reason why he was able to win the election, but there is no reason to doubt that he will continue to follow such instincts just as he will keep adhering to the ideology of national security.

Hillyer is citing this interview as support for the utterly unfounded idea that “there ain’t no way that Obama is gonna support Israel when push comes to shove.” Never mind that Obama has done exactly this throughout his public career when it has mattered. Hillyer’s complaint is consistent with the tiresome theme developed during the election, again without any basis in Obama’s record or statements, that Obama lacked in appropriate “pro-Israel” zeal. To support this claim, tiny, insignificant quotes and episodes were turned into meaningful signs of how Obama might be more sympathetic (i.e., “too sympathetic”) to Palestinians. As I noted in my post-election article on Obama, both sides of the debate invested these episodes with significance they did not possess–proponents of an “even-handed” approach were hopeful, and conventional “pro-Israel” sorts were fearful, but there was a strong desire all around to imagine that Obama’s view of the conflict was anything other than what he said it was. We see more of this via Leon Hadar’s post on the kind of arcane textual interpretation that some people on the side of reforming U.S. policy are reduced to making to find some glimmer of encouragement.

After all, the thinking seems to go, he was the “change” candidate–how could the “change” candidate be so boringly conventional on such a controversial subject? Therefore, he must be set on making major changes to U.S. policy, which encourages critics of the status quo and frightens defenders of the same. The same people who declare Mr. Bush to have been the best friend Israel ever had warn gravely that Obama will endanger Israel, despite the clear record that Obama and Bush hold exactly the same positions and have supported the very same policies. If you believe Bush is a good friend to Israel, you really must believe the same about his successor. To argue otherwise is as if supporters of Taiwan had run around warning that John “War for Quemoy and Matsu” Kennedy was going to abandon Taiwan to the Chinese. That’s how crazy this sort of criticism of Obama is.

To illustrate how silly this preoccupation with lip service and symbolism really is, consider Obama’s relationships with Rick Warren and Rashid Khalidi. No one, or at least no one sober, believes that Obama’s cordial relations with Rick Warren represent anything other than a friendship the President has with a conservative pastor. No one, save perhaps unduly optimistic pro-life Obama voters, expects Obama to be harboring secret pro-life views that are “revealed” by his association with Warren. Virtually everyone accepts that Obama is very pro-choice and has a record to back this up, and we have no reason to assume that Obama is going to tangle with Democratic interest groups by breaking with his party’s traditional position. When it comes to Khalidi, however, the mere fact of their association and friendship supposedly proves that Obama is not as conventionally “pro-Israel” as he appears to be. This same over-interpretation of the smallest moves is at work in criticism of Obama’s interview, which just manages to miss everything that matters.

Update: James Joyner discusses the interview and reactions to it here.

On an infinitely less serious note, there is quite a lot of discussion about who will replace Bill Kristol as a columnist at The New York Times. It is tempting to ask, “Who cares?” This is perhaps as insiderish and irrelevant as blog commentary can get, on par with academic gossip about who got what job and why, but I think it may merit a few words. However, I think the discussion is helpful as a window onto the thinking of conservatives about the sort of people they want to have representing them in such a venue. Ruffini suggests Limbaugh, which seems appropriate for a movement that wants to anoint Palin as their political champion, and Peter Suderman responds:

The job of the Times isn’t to cater to any of those people. No, the job of the NYT is to sell newspapers; in particular, it’s to sell newspapers to the country’s educated, affluent, urban classes. Being provocative is part of that, of course, but Limbaugh’s more than provocative; he’s hostile.

More to the point, he is not a writer by trade or by training. If the problem with many of Kristol’s columns was the feeling that he was phoning it in, what are the odds that a radio host whose public persona is built to a large extent on mocking establishment media outlets would take the job more seriously? Were it offered to him, his audience would probably accuse him of “selling out” if he took such a position. He has no incentive to do it, and the last thing conservatives need at the moment is to have Limbaugh take an even more prominent place as one of their major spokesmen. There are no doubt many mainstream conservative syndicated columnists who should be considered, as these are people who already write columns professionally, have a well-established readership and frankly have better instincts for what most other mainstream conservatives want to read than various heterodox alternatives do. If the NYT‘s goal was to expand its circulation and increase traffic on its site, while also regularly providing a conservative perspective on its op-ed page, it would look at columnists already familiar and acceptable to the broader conservative movement. If the goal is to find a more “safe” conservative writer who will not antagonize regular subscribers and readers, their options are very limited these days.

Responding to my earlier post on revolutionaries, Ross writes:

There’s a reason that Lincoln has an enormous memorial and, say, James K. Polk does not; there’s a reason that the Washington Mall has a Museum of the American Indian rather than a monument to Philip Sheridan’s Plains campaigns; there’s a reason that the Spanish-American War and the First World War don’t enjoy the kind of “good war” reputations that accrue to the Civil War and World War II; there’s a reason that the Korean War is remembered as a more heroic affair than Vietnam, and that our Filipino counterinsurgency isn’t remembered at all. The American reckoning with the moral questions that surround our wars is incomplete at best, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist – or that the attempt to distinguish good wars from bad ones on the basis of the ends that we sought isn’t a legitimate way to go about making moral judgments.

This seems to mix up the moral question of whether the ends justify the means (I don’t think they ever can) and the political-historical question of why certain wars loom larger in our national consciousness and nationalist historiography. The reasons why we build monuments to certain Presidents rather than others are tied up in how the nation (or at least some parts of the nation) was taught to understand itself and how these leading figures fit in the unfolding of a progressive nationalist history. There are two significant reasons why Polk, who was probably the most successful President in U.S. history when judged on the basis of achieving what he set out to achieve, has no national monuments and is barely remembered except by American historians and inhabitants of Tennessee and the Southwestern U.S. First, the grim reason: his war was not bloody, destructive and total enough to require the sort of dedicated effort to justify and sanctify it as an expression of righteousness, and the enemy–an independent Latin American republic–could not be very easily be turned into villains whose total defeat would raise few moral qualms. In other words, it was too mundane and too limited of a war; there was a post-war settlement that involved the transfer of territory and money, which is too obviously crass to be transformed into a straightforward crusade for liberty. The other reason is more simply political: Polk’s war was perceived as a war for Southern interests primarily, and in the wake of Lincoln’s war Polk and his war, which Lincoln and most of the North opposed, were bound to suffer eclipse and be largely forgotten.

The first is the most important reason, and it is the same reason why most of our wars aside from the two largest wars are not given enormous space in our national memory and the Presidents responsible for the other wars are largely forgotten or are relegated to second-tier status. Large-scale, total war requires full mobilization of the population and the utter demonization of the enemy, and the costs of such a war are usually so great that extensive ideological rationalization is required during and especially after the war. Military campaigns in the West against Indian tribes are not very well remembered, much less valorized, more because they were on a fairly small scale and did not involve the mobilization of the nation in the same way as the ‘Good Wars’. Obviously, the ruin visited upon the Indians also embarrasses and disgusts most people today, so no one is inclined to put a positive spin on these things. While it is more fashionable today to regret our 19th century expansionist wars, this is tied directly to the treatments of the ‘Good Wars’ that were, we are supposed to believe, not ultimately exercises in power projection and national consolidation but were instead fought for higher ideals against ideologically intolerable enemies.

There were obviously attempts to wrap some of the other wars, such as the Spanish war and WWI, in the mantle of liberation and defense of democracy respectively. However, even as great as the loss of life in WWI was and as extensive as the propaganda efforts during these wars were, neither war was enough of a total war and neither had an enemy that could reasonably be viewed in retrospect as an enemy that had to be defeated. The Spanish war stemmed from a dubious provocation that turned out to be an accident, and ultimately saddled the U.S. with colonial possessions that proved to be far more trouble than they were worth. WWI was a bloody, pointless fiasco all around, and we had the bad fortune of entering it when its futility and carnage were already clear to everyone. Wars that end in armistices and negotiated settlements, even as humiliating to the defeated as Versailles and the other treaties were, do not fit into a nationalist vision of total victory over enemies. The official propaganda justifications for the Allied cause in WWI–the rights of small nations, keeping the world safe for democracy, etc.–were all revealed to be either a sham or they led to disastrous results in the years that followed, which confirmed the American public in their earlier view that we should never have entered the war and that the war had all been for nothing.

The imperatives of the two ‘Good Wars’ were rather different. First, the idea of secession offends against a nationalist vision of a consolidated U.S., and abolition offers an attractive justification in retrospect (one might say that were it not for the prevalence of consequentialism the reputation of this war would have suffered greatly over the years). The particularly monstrous nature of the Nazi regime, which we therefore conclude today had to be defeated (whether or not it posed a real threat to U.S. interests then or later), has subsequently invested earlier machinations to enter the war with a degree of virtue they did not obviously possess at the time, and the taint of that regime has then been applied to all of its allies to make the entire conflict into a much more clear morality play than any war ever is.

The total nature of these wars involved wreaking a level of devastation and inflicting a degree of suffering on the civilian population that made it all the more important to emphasize the ends and either ignore or, in some cases, applaud the means used to get there. There is no real moral justification for mass bombing of civilian centers, which is and ought to be considered a war crime in any conflict because of its indiscriminate nature, but we are regularly treated to arguments that insist that these means were not only necessary to win (debatable) but were even positively life-saving in the end (laughable). The reason that most do not let this trouble them, if they think about it at all, is that they have been conditioned to think that the ends justify the means in the ‘Good Wars,’ which were in any case being fought against enemies so ignoble that they, including their civilians, deserve what was coming to them. (That this is also the result of the mass democratic nature of both enemy polities should give theorists of the so-called “democratic peace” pause.)

In other words, the treatment of the ‘Good Wars’ as struggles between fundamentally good and evil causes, rather than more basically as contests for political power (as we are forced to treat most of our other wars), invests victory in those wars with moral significance that we then use to cover over morally dubious means used to achieve victory. What this means is that the same arguments used to rationalize any crimes committed in the ‘Good Wars’ would have been used for Vietnam had we waged the sort of total war, up to and including invasion and occupation of North Vietnam, that had been waged in the others. We did not, because this was a geopolitical impossibility given the constraints of the Cold War, but ultimately what separates Vietnam and the ‘Good Wars’ in national memory was the inability then to engage in the same kind of total war aimed at the destruction of the enemy regime that somehow makes all of the unjust means used to reach that goal fade into the background. It is not how the war was fought, nor even the goal of the war, that puts Vietnam in a different category, but that it did not fit the story in which our side is always supposed to prevail.

P.S. Arguably, one of the main causes of so-called Vietnam Syndrome is this conditioning of our thinking about the ‘Good Wars’ as total struggles between good and evil that must end with the defeat of the latter. The inability to imitate the model of the ‘Good Wars’ causes enormous frustration, but most wars do not end in that way. The experience of total victory is the exception in human history, whereas we have made it into the standard by which and the lens through which we judge all other conflicts.

No one will confuse me for a regular defender of the Turkish government or the ruling AKP, both of which I have criticized often enough, but I have been finding Soner Cagaptay’s one-man crusadeto make Americans distrust Turkey quite annoying. A few months ago, he was complaining in Newsweek that the AKP was stoking anti-Americanism, as if the Turks’ attitudes toward the U.S. had declined so precipitously over the last six years for no other reason beside propaganda by Erdogan’s government. Even if it is true that Erdogan and the AKP are exploiting Turkish anger towards the U.S., this does not explain why Turks have gone from holding generally positive views of the U.S. to being among the most “anti-American” in the world.

Cagaptay’s older article flattered the popular American conceit that if an entire nation suddenly sours on the United States, or more specifically on U.S. policy, it is the fault of the other nation’s government and, no doubt, some deep cultural malady, feeling of inferiority/envy or displaced dissatisfaction with their own quality of life. In other words, anti-Americanism is something that just happens, or it is created by foreign governments for their own purposes; it cannot be a reaction, much less a reasonable reaction, to anything our government does. This is axiomatic. The new article aims to do its best to stoke anti-Turkish feelings by portraying the ruling party and the Turkish government as being too cozy with the “wrong” regimes, and therefore somehow increasingly hostile to the West. The possibility that the political and strategic calculations of an allied government about which regimes are actually worthy of pariah status does not seem to occur to Cagaptay.

Increased tensions in the Israeli-Turkish relationship over Lebanon and Gaza do not indicate to Cagaptay that perhaps it is Israel is endangering a valuable military and political alliance with a Muslim country by engaging in counterproductive, wrongheaded policies toward its Muslim subjects. This cannot be, because Israel, like the U.S., cannot actually be generating the ill feeling toward it by its actions–criticism and opposition to its actions can only be explained by deep cultural reasons, irrational hatred or crass motives (or some combination of the three). Naturally, our boosting of Kurdistan and the shelter the PKK has been finding in northern Iraq go almost entirely unmentioned when understanding why Turkey might find neighbors, such as Iran, that have similar concerns about Kurdish separatism and terrorism to be worth cultivating.

Cagaptay’s list of Turkey’s sins is not very damning. Here was one item:

Last July in Istanbul, for example, I witnessed Turkish joy over the capture of Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, the “butcher of Bosnia” who was indicted for genocide at The Hague tribunal. Just days later, however, the AKP welcomed Omar Al-Bashir, the even bigger butcher of Darfur. Ironically, the visit of the Sudanese president to Turkey coincided with The Hague court’s prosecutor request that Mr. Al-Bashir be arrested for committing genocide in Darfur.

Well, I suppose this might be ironic, but I don’t see how. It seems to me that it was just an accident of timing. Of course Turkey welcomed the capture of Karadzic. Turkey was and is a leading sponsor of the Bosnian Muslims, and they have been more than pleased to assist in every Western and NATO-led humiliation of the Serbs over the past fifteen years or so. Cagaptay seems to think that Turkish jubilation at the capture of Karadzic had something to do with high principle; maybe for some Turks this was the case. More likely, much more direct religious and historic ties with Bosnian Muslims made the Turkish government and Turkish public sympathetic with their cause to a degree that they simply do not feel for Darfuris. No doubt it helped that the Bosnian Muslims were fighting against people with whom Turks have no sympathy and against whom they have old resentments. Arab militias pitted against Darfuri tribes involve no such memories or feelings, and if anything there is likely to be more official sympathy for Khartoum’s position as a central government that portrays itself simply as brutally suppressing separatist rebellion. Given Turkey’s troubles with the PKK over the years, Ankara is unlikely to take the side of separatists and rebels against the government of another Muslim country. The different reaction to Bashir might suggest that official views of war crimes and genocide change according to political necessity–imagine that. It’s almost as if different standards were being applied arbitrarily and moralizing rhetoric was being applied selectively and opportunistically, but the Turkish government would never do that, would it?

The AKP government’s other errors of late? Treating Ahmadinejad deferentially when he was on a state visit, and cultivating good relations with what is now its largest trading partner, Russia. Clearly, these are terrible and evil acts! How dare Turkey develop good relations with its neighbors and pursue its economic interests! Don’t they know that they are our frontline marcher lord state, and it is their job to sacrifice their own interests for the sake of our misguided anti-Russian and anti-Iranian policies? Western media outlets love having “experts” on other countries paint the foreign governments as somehow threatening or malevolent, but Cagaptay has to work overtime to make the AKP government seem even minimally objectionable.

During the winding conversation about counterfactuals, Megan McArdle made a remark almost in passing that is worth revisiting in light of anotherconversation about the new film, Che, and its director, Steven Sonderbergh. McArdle wrote:

Nor does almost anyone in the United States put the IRA, or its cause in the same mental basket as that of the Northern Irish. Imagine, if you will, a blockbuster film being made about a plucky Arab terrorist leader finally winning freedom for his people by slaughtering large numbers of Israeli/British/French soldiers, along with, of course, any informers or traitors in his own organization. In Irish, it’s known as Michael Collins.

If you grew up learning the mythology of the 700 years of oppression, the Easter Rising and how Collins broke the Castle’s intelligence operation, valorizing Collins doesn’t seem so odd. When Americans watch Michael Collins, if they aren’t already familiar with his story, they already know which side they’re supposed to find sympathetic. All of this is true despite the knowledge that Collins was a violent militant who would have appeared to most British subjects (including a fair number of Irishmen in both north and south) to be a traitor and a criminal, because this is essentially what he was in the eyes of the law. However, unless you grow up with a certain brand of left-leaning politics or learned a similar mythology about Latin American history, it makes little sense to treat Che the same way.

As for the plucky Arab terrorist, it is unimaginable that you would ever see such a film. The conventions on this are quite clear and stretch across decades: when Arabs are fighting with Lawrence on behalf of the British, it is permissible to romanticize their struggle to some extent, and if some Arabs can serve as useful diversions against, say, Nazis in The Last Crusade, they can be portrayed favorably, but there would be no audience (especially at present) for stories about leaders of Arab anti-colonial rebellions. For that matter, you would not even be able to have an adaptation of the life of Michel Aflaq, an intellectual and not a man of violence, much less for any of the people who followed his ideas. Irish republican nationalist-socialist heroes will probably always find a sympathetic audience in the West; Arab republican nationalist-socialists, not so much.

Much of this is a matter of cultural and ethnic affinities, but most of all it is a matter of politics. Lincoln, Wilson and FDR–each of them was responsible for far more deaths and far more destruction than Che Guevara or any of a number of Arab nationalist figures ever was, but two important things separate them in the eyes of the general public: they did not personally kill anyone, and the causes for which their armies killed and destroyed are widely considered to be the just and right ones. That is to say, the exact same moralizing, or rather anti-moralizing, that the ends justify the means that Che used in rationalizing revolutionary violence is employed to praise and sanctify approved figures who authorized much larger slaughters for the “right reasons.” Not only have sympathetic, shoulder-shrugging, anti-moralizing stories been told about these men, but we have built large physical monuments to them (or at least to two of the three mentioned above), which is rather more troubling in its way than silly people who wear T-shirts or directors who minimize the moral failings of their main characters.

This Daily Show item pointing out a few lines from the Inaugural that seem similar to Bush’s rhetoric is making the rounds (via John Schwenkler). In fact, there aren’t that many similar phrases in this particular speech, and those that Stewart was able to identify seem like so much standard boilerplate. However, the statements seem to be nothing more than this, because they reflect the bipartisan ideological and policy consensus. Obviously, I think there are much better examples that show clear affinities between the ambitious hegemonist views of the two, but the examples taken from the Inaugural are useful to illustrate a more important point. That point is not merely that “Obama is more like Bush than you want to believe,” or that his election represents no fundamental change in the way the government will make policy. While true, these are no longer in any way remarkable, and they have all been covered many times before. If the transition didn’t made these things clear already, I’m not sure what will.

What is interesting is what these statements show about the minimal differences between the parties and the political class’ embrace of shared assumptions about U.S. power and their acceptance of myths relating to American history. When Obama says that “we” will not apologize for our way of life and Bush said that “the American way of life is non-negotiable,” they are expressing in a simple form the key convictions of what Prof. Bacevich has identified as the ideology of national security. Let’s review those convictions.

Prof. Bacevich writes in The Limits of Power:

Four core convictions inform this ideology of national security. In his second inaugural address, President Bush testified eloquently to each of them.

Here are the four convictions at their most basic:

According to the first of these convictions, history has an identifiable and indisputable purpose….History’s abiding theme is freedom, to which all humanity aspires…..

According to the second conviction, the United States has always embodied, and continues to embody, freedom….

According to the third conviction, Providence summons America to ensure freedom’s ultimate triumph….Unique among the great powers, this nation pursues interests larger than itself. When it acts, it does so on freedom’s behalf and at the behest of higher authority….Only cynics or those disposed toward evil could possibly dissent from this self-evident truth. [bold mine-DL]

According to the final conviction, for the American way of life to endure, freedom must prevail everywhere.

What does this have to do with Obama? Well, of course, Obama accepts the ideology of national security completely, and it has been clear that this is the case for years. Even if you could not locate all four convictions in his Inaugural Address (and I think you might be able to do this), you can certainly find them in his public speeches and written statements over the years. It is doubtful that he could have been elected President had he not accepted this ideology, and it is important to understand that this is an ideology shared by essentially the entire political class. In that respect, it is “mainstream,” regardless of how crazy it seems to some of us. The similarities with Bush are no accident–Bush’s tenure represented an expansion, an exaggerated expression, of past habits, but as has become more and more depressingly evident his administration has not represented a radical break from past practice so much as a redoubling of the same practices.

To say that Obama has accepted this ideology is not a statement about Obama’s flexibility or lack of it, except to say that he is constrained by the assumptions that govern how the political class understands the world and America’s place in it. The belated recognition by neoconservatives that Obama accepts this ideology was inevitable. They feign surprise mainly because it is useful to maintain the fiction that there are meaningful, large differences between the parties on major policies and they have an incentive to perpetuate the idea that they are better adherents of this ideology than those farther to the left. Likewise, there is a strong incentive on the left to emphasize small differences with neoconservatives over means and tactics.

Here is Bacevich on Obama from The Limits of Power:

Like Clinton, Obama was intent on identifying himself [in his Foreign Affairs essay] with the cause that “we stood for and fought for.” Like Clinton, in recounting the heroic narrative in which Roosevelt, Truman, and their successors had figured so prominently he was testifying to that narrative’s essential truth and continuing validity.

Yet almost inescapably he also subscribed to George W. Bush’s own interpretation of that narrative. As Obama went on to explain, “The security and well-being of each and every American depend on the security and well-being of those who live beyond our borders.” Like Bush–like those who had preceded Bush–Obama defined America’s purposes in cosmic terms. “The mission of the United States,” he proclaimed ,”is to provide global leadership grounded in the understanding that the world shares a common security and a common humanity.”

As Bacevich made clear in American Empire, leadership is the not very subtle euphemism that our politicians use to describe U.S. hegemony or the American empire. There is, of course, no meaningful difference between the words hegemony and leadership–the latter sounds more appealing–and there are obvious similarities between a word derived from the word for command and one that refers to direction and leading. There is another passage from Bacevich’s American Empire that could very easily be mistaken for a summary of Obama’s foreign policy statements. This is most revealing, as American Empire came out in 2002 long before most people had ever heard of Obama and before Obama had said much of anything about foreign policy. To the extent that Obama’s statements echo the passage below, it shows how much of the conventional wisdom regarding U.S. foreign policy he has imbibed and accepted. In describing Clinton’s articulation of U.S. strategy, Bacevich identified five ideas that could just as easily be found and have been found in the statements of Obama and Bush:

the identification of interdependence as the dominant reality of international politics; a commitment to advancing the cause of global openness; an emphasis on free trade and investment as central to that strategy and a prerequisite for prosperity at home; a belief in the necessity of American hegemony–while avoiding any actual use of that term; and frequent reference to the bugbear of “isolationism” as a means of disciplining public opinion and maintaining deference to the executive branch in all matters pertaining to foreign relations.

So while there may be hope in some quarters that Obama doesn’t mean what he said in the Inaugural, there is little reason to believe that. It is not only likely that he genuinely means it, but it is politically necessary that the public perceives that he means it.

One theme that othershave picked up on is that the Inaugural had a very serious tone, but also evaded to some extent the inevitability of having to make trade-offs. Up to a point, I agree with this. One of the flaws of Obama’s speeches throughout the campaign was a refusal to prioritize and make choices about what mattered most. Optimism deludes people into believing that they can have and do it all, and Obama is nothing if not an optimist. Just as the speech’s emphasis on pragmatism and the desire for a government that simply “works” obscure real disagreements and competing political visions, Obama’s speech as a whole did not set priorities, but held out the possibility that his administration could attend to all of the problems equally.

That being said, the one place in the speech where Obama specifically attacked false choices by name was in connection with the conventional assumption that there has to be a trade-off between security and liberty and that this exchange is sometimes worth making. This is a false choice. It is false not because one can have both complete security and liberty, and so we need not choose between them, but because the sort of security that supporters of so many excessive anti-terrorist measures promise is itself illusory. It is the same false choice that defenders of the torture regime offer, because they promise something (i.e., reliable intelligence that provides greater security from attack) that the methods they defend do not and cannot deliver.

It was mildly encouraging to hear Obama say that some principles are non-negotiable and cannot be compromised for the sake of what seems expedient, and it represents a welcome departure from the emergency power-grabbing rhetoric that we have had to endure for over seven years. I don’t necessarily invest much importance in this statement when it comes to future policy changes, but this was actually one of the best parts of the speech and was an atypical example of Obama offering an argument that was strongly at odds with the Washington consensus on the subject in question. Contrary to the praise he heaped on pragmatism in other parts of the speech, in this section Obama was clearly making a statement of political principle and made clear that there are some political divisions (i.e., between those who want to compromise civil liberties and those who want to preserve them) that are worth maintaining. It is not actually just a matter of what “works,” because people with different principles disagree about what to do and they disagree about what being pragmatic means. Instead, the important question is one of what the government should and should not be permitted to do. In other words, Obama ended up endorsing the views of some of the very “cynics” whose “stale political arguments” he said were obsolete.