IF HE'S GOING TO BE JUST LIKE W...:

Woodrow Wilson's Heir (Robert Kagan, June 7, 2009, Washington Post)

Obama's policies toward Iran, the Middle East, Russia, North Korea, China, Latin America, Afghanistan and even Iraq have at most shifted only at the margins -- as many in those countries repeatedly complain. So what, for instance, is the source of the "new beginning" in U.S.-Muslim relations that Obama called for in Cairo?

The answer, it seems, is Obama himself. In the speech, The Post reports, "Obama made his own biography the starting point for a new U.S. relationship with Islam." Or as the New York Times put it, while "the president offered few details on how to solve problems around the globe," his basic argument "boiled down to this: Barack Hussein Obama was standing on the podium in this Muslim capital as the American president."

Critics complain that Obama's speeches are too self-referential. If so, this is not a mark of vanity. It is a strategy. Obama believes that his story is a powerful foreign policy tool, that drawing attention to what makes him different, not only from George W. Bush but from all past American presidents, will persuade the world to take a fresh look at America and its policies and make new diplomatic settlements possible.

...he has to be Wilsonian (minus Point XIV).

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 8, 2009 6:52 PM