Obama’s Exceptionalism
By ROGER COHEN
NYT
LONDON — Near Carthage, in Tunisia, there’s an American cemetery where 2,841 military dead rest, victims of the North African campaign in World War II. Among them is a young man from Stillwater, Minnesota, named Robert Lund. He was 25 when he was killed on March 29, 1943. A long time ago, I would sit on a porch in the pretty town of Stillwater and wonder at the gale that could lift a young man from the middle of a placid continent to death on a faraway shore.
America is a restless nation. It was built by taking in the people of the world and so it cannot turn its back on the world. Decades after he was killed, Lund’s death still haunted the family of my first wife. With the return of the resonant datelines of the “Desert War” against Hitler — Tobruk, Benghazi, Trfipoli — and the return of U.S. forces to Libya, I’ve been thinking about Lund and American power.
The limits of that power confronted President Barack Obama. He was always a realist onto whom idealism was thrust. He adheres, by instinct and experience, to the middle ground. Taking office in a nation drained by war, he found arguments aplenty to bolster his inclination for ending conflicts.
American exceptionalism — the notion of the United States as a transformative moral beacon to the world — made him uneasy. Atlanticism, the fruit of the war that took Lund’s life, had little emotional hold on a man not yet 30 when the Cold War ended. The disappearing jobs of the home front were his domain.
(More here.)
NYT
LONDON — Near Carthage, in Tunisia, there’s an American cemetery where 2,841 military dead rest, victims of the North African campaign in World War II. Among them is a young man from Stillwater, Minnesota, named Robert Lund. He was 25 when he was killed on March 29, 1943. A long time ago, I would sit on a porch in the pretty town of Stillwater and wonder at the gale that could lift a young man from the middle of a placid continent to death on a faraway shore.
America is a restless nation. It was built by taking in the people of the world and so it cannot turn its back on the world. Decades after he was killed, Lund’s death still haunted the family of my first wife. With the return of the resonant datelines of the “Desert War” against Hitler — Tobruk, Benghazi, Trfipoli — and the return of U.S. forces to Libya, I’ve been thinking about Lund and American power.
The limits of that power confronted President Barack Obama. He was always a realist onto whom idealism was thrust. He adheres, by instinct and experience, to the middle ground. Taking office in a nation drained by war, he found arguments aplenty to bolster his inclination for ending conflicts.
American exceptionalism — the notion of the United States as a transformative moral beacon to the world — made him uneasy. Atlanticism, the fruit of the war that took Lund’s life, had little emotional hold on a man not yet 30 when the Cold War ended. The disappearing jobs of the home front were his domain.
(More here.)
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1 Comments:
In his fawning to praise President Obama, Cohen forgot to mention that President Obama accepted a “transparency” award from the open government community,... in a closed meeting. Priceless.
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