To give credit where it is due: President Obama did strike idealistic notes reminiscent of the best of John F. Kennedy’s rhetoric. He did invoke the centuries-long Western tradition of thinking about "just war." He rightly declared, "no Holy War can ever be a just war; for if you truly believe that you are carrying out divine will, then there is no need for restraint" in warmaking—a moral distinction, crucial to the just-war tradition, that eluded his predecessor, whether for reasons of intellectual laziness or moral disinclination.
But the president evacuated these stated principles by failing to apply them honestly or analytically to the real world. The result is that his speech, stripped of its rhetorical finery, is yet one more assertion of American unilateralism. The occasion, and the president’s virtuoso display of moral gravitas as the world’s most reluctant warrior, simply offered a more impressive performance of an old theme than President Obama’s relatively tone-deaf predecessor could have made.
The Myth of Permanent War
For all of his stated respect for Mahatma Gandhi and Dr Martin Luther King Jr, President Obama’s explicit rejection of their teaching sounded the clearer theme. "As a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation," he declared, "I cannot be guided by their examples alone." Indeed, he is not guided by them at all; rather, he proceeds immediately to explain their irrelevance. Presenting himself as more realistic than either of those moony-eyed idealists, he condescended to his audience: "I face the world as it is. . . . For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world." To package that moral banality as a gritty insight that somehow escaped Gandhi, who faced down the brutality of British imperial rule in India, or King, who confronted the grinding interlocking machinery of racism, militarism, and capitalism in the United States, seems both narrow-minded and self-indulgent.
Instead of thoughtful engagement with their teachings, strategies, and achievements, we get the hackneyed old repudiation, "a nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies." In fact, we will never know what might have been achieved if the German churches had simply refused to hoist swastikas over their altars; if pastors had refused to march in Nazi parades; if clear denunciations of anti-Semitic rhetoric and of the violence of Kristallnacht had rung out of German pulpits; if the communion rail had been forbidden to Nazis; if Christians had been organized to lock arms to protect synagogues and Jewish homes and businesses from attack. We’ll never know because those simple nonviolent tactics weren’t tried; instead the vast majority of Christian pastors simply acquiesced in the tidal wave of Nazism.
Despite his call for "the continued expansion of our moral imagination," the president’s speech shows little interest in historical imagination. He appeals rather to the rhetoric of myth: "War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man. At the dawn of history, its morality was not questioned." No archaeological evidence is presented to defend that proposition (nor could it be: altruism and aggression have equal claims to antiquity in our species). The assertion might plausibly find a basis in the mythology of ancient Babylon, where warfare was one of the first sciences taught human beings by the gods, but it flies in the face of the more relevant text in Western culture, Genesis, where (in a stark repudiation of the Babylonian combat myth) "the first man" and woman are planted in a paradisal garden with neither a king’s throne or a city’s fortified walls in sight. Those innovations—and the invention of warfare—are stipulated as later developments, after the fateful expulsion from the Garden. The president’s ruminations on the warmaking proclivities of "the first man" depend neither on archaeological science nor on biblical text, but echo the naked assertion of neocon policymakers that "war, not peace, is the norm" of international affairs (Ronald Reagan’s advisers in the Santa Fe Document, 1980). In contrast, the premise of Christian just-war thinking has always been that a different order is both attainable and "natural" to human beings and that the assumption that peace can be achieved only through force is "error" (Pacem in Terris, Introduction, 6).
American Exceptionalism
A different theology informs the president’s speech: the myth of the innocence of U.S. power. It is for him simply a truism that "the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades . . . We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest—because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if other peoples’ children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity."
This declaration of humble altruism might come as a surprise to the peoples of nations laid waste by United States military power or its local proxies, nations where "freedom and prosperity" remain the privilege of a small minority (if they exist at all). "America has never fought a war against a democracy," President Obama exclaims, apparently not finding relevant the proxy wars and coups d’état in which the U.S. overthrew democratically elected governments in Iran (Mossadegh), Guatemala (Arbenz), Indonesia (Sukarno), Chile (Allende), Nicaragua (Ortega), or Haiti (Aristide), to name but a few. The standard imperial pretext has always been that of protecting the natives from their own bad choices, but distinguishing anti-democratic displays of force from "imposing our will" requires a powerful rhetorical alchemy indeed.
Military Unilateralism
That a case can nevertheless be made for justifiably going to war and justly conducting warfare is of course the burden of the just-war tradition. That tradition, usually credited (as by the president) to "philosophers, clerics, and statesmen," belongs more properly to Christian theology with its clear premises that war is neither desirable nor inevitable. ("Philosophers" and "statesmen" have more usually dissolved those premises in the acid of expedience and "military necessity.") That tradition has nevertheless informed the Western understanding of "civilization" and is enshrined, most significantly, in Article 51 of the United Nations charter, of which the U.S. is a founding signatory. It is all the more remarkable therefore that President Obama found no occasion to mention that Article and that his discussion of its principles is most notable for his claims to exemption from them.
"There will be times," he declared, "when nations—acting individually or in concert—will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified." But the Charter allows no such latitude to individual nations to determine whether war is justified. "I believe that all nations—strong and weak alike—must adhere to standards that govern the use of force," the president declared, but he immediately continued, "I—like any head of state—reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation." The imagined equality is only pretended: no weak nation would dream of the sort of unilateralism that the U.S. practices as a matter of course. At any rate, any weaker nation would swiftly earn the condemnation of the world body for violation of the Charter, a censure that other nations could not sustain (as the Reagan administration did in its defiance of the World Court when it condemned the mining of Managua’s harbor).
The president tried to present U.S. unilateralism as a matter of consensus, claiming that "the world" united behind the U.S. adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. But this elides both the massive anti-war demonstrations around the world and the coercive measures by which the U.S. has regularly secured the acquiescence of other governments in the General Assembly (on which see Phyllis Bennis, Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today’s UN, 2000). His repeated assertion of the right to "self-defense" means that commitment to international law will be selective at best, and always carried out on the basis of perceived self-interest.
What is explicitly at stake for the president is not a solemnly binding obligation (as the U.S. Constitution refers to international treaties, alongside itself, as the "supreme law of the land"), but expediency. In the face of an international crisis of legitimacy ("a reflexive suspicion of America, the world’s sole military superpower"), he declares, "America cannot insist that others follow the rules of the road if we refuse to follow them ourselves. For when we don’t, our action can appear arbitrary, and undercut the legitimacy of future intervention—no matter how justified." But the emphasis seems to be upon the appearance either of legitimacy or arbitrariness, not its substance; else the president would quickly join the international community by signing and urging the Senate to ratify participation in the International Criminal Court and the international treaty banning landmines. These are only two of many instances in which U.S. intransigence justifies the "reflexive suspicion" of the world’s peoples.
The Things That Make for Peace
Whether or not the United States has ever appeared "a standard bearer in the conduct of war" to any nation other than itself, President Obama is certainly to be commended for expressing commitment to closing Guantanamo Bay, prohibiting torture, observing the protocols of the Geneva Conventions, and working for nuclear disarmament (an ironic goal, surely, given that the United States both holds the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons and is the only nation to have used them against civilian populations in war).
But more than these commitments—more than determined action to bring them about—is necessary. The "reflexive suspicion" of the United States has as much to do with its economic policies in concert with the G-7 nations and, with them, its defiance of the world community regarding climate change. Economic relationships—especially as these determine control over vital resources like air, water, food, land, medicines—are at the root of many of the world’s conflicts. It appears disingenuous, then, to refer only to "ethnic" and "religious" motives for warfare, as the president and his predecessors repeatedly have done.
President Obama is quite right to speak of "freedom from want" as an inalienable human right. In this way he diverges markedly from many of his predecessors, for whom the pairing of politicaland economic rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (and, not coincidentally, in Catholic social teaching) was a dangerous threat to the "freedom" of the powerful to grasp ever more of the earth’s resources for themselves. But taking this right seriously will mean costly change. Given his administration’s record to date—regarding climate change; regarding what was once a campaign promise of "universal" health care; regarding a "preferential option" for the financial industry—we have seen little evidence that "freedom from want" is much more than a slogan. Securing greater economic equality is foremost among "the things that make for peace"—and the last thing those in positions of greatest power will tolerate. President Obama’s closing exhortation rings true: striving for justice, for dignity, for peace remain our most important work and—for heirs of the biblical legacy—our most important vocation. The false doctrine of American exceptionalism is at the least a terrible distraction from that vocation; at worst, one of its greatest obstacles.
President Obama’s landmark speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize has been widely hailed as a sober ethical reflection on the perennial quandary facing heads of state, "the relationship between war and peace." Despite its eloquence and idealism, his speech never strayed far from those core doctrines of American exceptionalism that constitute major impediments to peace in our day. To the contrary, the president’s failure to describe accurately the role of the United States in recent history shows the powerful gravitational force of that Manichean ideology that poses the U.S. as the savior of a benighted world. Again and again the speech presents American warmaking as the only sufficient response to the moral incapacity of others.
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