 |
What would FDR do?
By: Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst
09/27/09 11:20 AM EDT
In my Sunday Examiner column, I quoted from Barack Obama’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly last Wednesday, in a way that indicated a certain disapproval. In a Washington Post blogpost former George W. Bush chief speechwriter Michael Gerson is not so oblique as he issues a searing denunciation of Obama’s UN speech. My favorite paragraph:
Twice in his United Nations speech, Obama dares to quote Franklin Roosevelt. I have read quite a bit of Roosevelt’s rhetoric. It is impossible to imagine him, under any circumstances, unfairly criticizing his own country in an international forum in order to make himself look better in comparison. He would have considered such a rhetorical strategy shameful -- as indeed it is.
I have read quite a bit of Roosevelt’s rhetoric too, and Gerson is absolutely right. Roosevelt could eviscerate Herbert Hoover and the Republicans in campaign speeches in the United States, and did so deftly and with great glee. But criticizing his own country in a universal forum was something he never would have done.
One additional note on Roosevelt and Obama. Obama went out of his way to extol the idea that every country should count exactly the same—the principle behind the United Nation’s General Assembly, in which every nation has one vote. But Roosevelt in setting up the UN carefully avoided giving the General Assembly the power to pass resolutions binding on member nations. Instead, he saw that that power was confined to the Security Council, in which the United States would have a veto.
So Roosevelt, while perhaps conceding the concept of equality of sovereign nations, did not believe that it should have practical application. Rather, as Charles de Gaulle argues in his memoirs, Roosevelt conceived the United Nations as an instrument of American power, and in practice that is what it has been in its useful moments (Korea 1950, Iraq 1991). The presidents then might have been asking a question it would be useful for Obama to ask himself from time to time: What would FDR do?
Follow The Examiner
