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A mix of idealism and national self-interest has often marked American leadership in the world. But not many US presidents have put the golden rule at the center of their foreign policy.


What President Obama calls the "law of love" – or do unto others as you would have them do unto you – was a focal point of his sweeping speech in Oslo after being awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize on Thursday.


He often uses this religious idiom in his loftier speeches. It reflects a desire to give moral imperative to activist government – mostly at home. And he readily admits, after only 10 months in office, that his moral stances, rather than any concrete action, won him the prize.


But one particular action – sending more troops to Afghanistan even as he was being honored as a peacemaker – required him to speak of the differences between a "just war" and one waged outside global "standards that govern the use of force."


He painted the war in Afghanistan as one of self-defense for the United States and its Western allies – against what he calls "a few small men with outsized rage [who] murder innocents on a horrific scale."


But the US is not just any nation in citing self-defense. He used the occasion to remind the world that America, as a superpower built on universal ideals, has had to use force again and again over six decades to help "underwrite global security" out of "enlightened self-interest" but also often from a moral imperative.


What's more, the threats to security are now very different – rogue states with nuclear weapons, civil wars with massive killing, and jihadists using destructive force on the innocent.


The US must increasingly share the burden in countering these new threats. That's one reason he referred to the most successful military alliance in history, NATO, as indispensable to peace. The US must also find a balance between fencing off the world's moral outcasts with sanctions while engaging them with negotiations to offer an "open door" toward a new path, as he put it.


Such steps are especially necessary for the US as its people appear to be returning to an isolationist view of America's role, according to a recent poll, which denies what Mr. Obama calls "our sense of possibility."


But the most difficult challenge to his vision of leadership by golden rule is Iran's nuclear ambitions and the dangers of a Middle East arms race. And Obama is faced with a decision soon on whether to abandon his approach of engaging Tehran's clerics and either impose sanctions – that may not work – or order a preemptive strike on Iran's atomic facilities.


Such a choice makes this speech more than an abstract thesis. Obama seems eager to warn the world of religious extremists who resort to violence in the name of God and show no restraint. But he also provides an antidote: the law of love and a faith in human progress.


Moral imagination and the spark of the divine, as he calls it, can wrestle down the temptations of pride, power, and evil.


Lofty goals, indeed, from a young war president who, like his predecessors, struggles with the limits of US idealism.




Christian Science Monitor

Rotlieber

It is highly ironic that the Christian Science monitor sees something positive and "hopeful" in Obama's invoking religious language to justify the wars waged by the US, while it basically dismisses as bloody murderers the Islamists who fight in the name of religion. What exactly is the difference between them? Is the Christian Science Monitor so "Christian" that it fails to see that both positions are bigoted self-righteousness?
And when millions of Americans - like other human beings - express their revulsion and rejection of US wars - from Viet Nam to Iraq to Afghanistan - the Christian Science Monitor says that these Americans are "reverting to isolationism." But perhaps they are simply repulsed by the kind of "engagement" that imperial America insists on practicing, an "engagement" that boils down to the "holy" principle: 'either you take US domination or we bomb you.'
If the US really wanted to do something about the bloody extremists in Afghanistan it would not have created a NATO enclave there; it would have attempted in real terms to deal with the problem through the United Nations and in accordance with international legality. Obviously neither China nor Russia nor the other Central Asian countries are eager to see extremists and terrorists running rampant in Afghanistan. But neither are they interested in the way that the US has pursued a policy of alternately backing and then fighting, and then backing extremists and terrorists, depending on when the gunmen "come in handy" for Washington's geopolitical manoeuvers against "enemies" or "rivals" of the US - as it did when the CIA backed Bin Laden in the 1980s, or when certain separatist leaders receive encouragement there to carry on campaigns under the guise of "defending religious freedom" against China in Tibet and Xinjiang, or in Central Asian countries, or Russia's Northern Caucasus.
Many issues confront humanity today. Among those are terrorism and extremism. But since these problems are not limited to only one or two countries, the solution to them must ultimately be one of collective action and responsibility. So far, however, the US leaders are still fighting the Cold War and still view the world in Zero-Sum terms and the Christian Science Monitor here seems to be following along with that approach, still thinking in terms of "US power versus the rest of the world" rather than contributing to common goals in constructive ways.