From the Wall Street Journal, “The Foreign Policy Difference” by Fouad Ajami An op-ed piece bylined by Ajami is always cause for excitement. You know you’re about to read something packed with original insights and expressed with great elegance. Today’s work is no exception, as Ajami tackles the real weakness in Barack Obama’s campaign – he has rejected the notion of American exceptionalism that is unique to this country and cherished by the vast majority of its citizens who don’t live in too close a proximity to Harvard Yard:
The Obama candidacy must be judged on its own merits, and it can be reckoned as the sharpest break yet with the national consensus over American foreign policy after World War II. This is not only a matter of Sen. Obama’s own sensibility; the break with the consensus over American exceptionalism and America’s claims and burdens abroad is the choice of the activists and elites of the Democratic Party who propelled Mr. Obama’s rise… The crowds in Berlin and Paris that took to him knew their man. He had once presented his willingness to negotiate with Iran as the mark of his diplomacy, the break with the Bush years and the Bush style. But he stepped back from that pledge, and in a blatant echo of President Bush’s mantra on Iran, he was to say that “no options would be off the table” when dealing with Iran. The change came on a visit to Israel, the conversion transparent and not particularly convincing. Mr. Obama truly believes that he can offer the world beyond America’s shores his biography, his sympathies with strangers. In the great debate over anti-Americanism and its sources, the two candidates couldn’t be more different. Mr. Obama proceeds from the notion of American guilt: We called up the furies, he believes. Our war on terror and our war in Iraq triggered more animus. He proposes to repair for that, and offers himself (again, the biography) as a bridge to the world.
You’ll want to read the whole thing.
