OUR THING:

Obama’s age of atonement (Christopher Caldwell, September 25 2009, Financial Times)

Mr Obama talks about giving “meaning to the promise embedded in the name given to this institution: the United Nations. That is the future America wants.” Well, if he is right, then Americans have been lying to pollsters for a long time. Naturally, there are good arguments that the US should submit to the same international norms as everybody else. But those arguments need to be made to Americans, not to foreign heads of state. [...]

Mr Obama has committed his citizens to an expensive and open-ended period of reparation and repentance, and placed himself in a logical contradiction. He promised in his speech that the US would “be a leader in bringing about change”, “lead by example”, move “from a bystander to a leader in international climate negotiations” and accept an “obligation to lead” on the environment. But US leadership is a political fact, not a law of nature. The thing that the US leads is the world system that Mr Obama wants us to repudiate. If “the old habits and arguments are irrelevant”, as he says, then why should the US lead? Why shouldn’t someone else lead? Systems that elevate one nation over another can indeed be unjust. But the only alternative on the horizon is to let groups of nations with common interests (whether “the international community” or the UN) harass small countries they disapprove of, from Serbia to Honduras to Israel. Some may like the outcomes better. But it is no advance for legitimacy.