America the Righteous

President Obama's Nobel Prize acceptance speech can be read here.

I just read the speech and it was about what you would expect an American President still in office to say.  It sounded to me more like portions of an inaugural speech: idealistic but still very American.  Also very Niebuhrian, with its emphasis upon moral realism, limits of human perfectibility, tragedies of history, but also hopeful that progress can be made in history.

Frankly, this speech is not all that different from what the neo-cons would advocate.  It looks to me very much like something Richard John Neuhaus or Michael Novak, neo-con theologians and Niebuhrians, would write.  Anyway, there is really not that big a difference between neo-conservatives and liberal hawks.  Neo-conservatives are well known for calling themselves 'liberals mugged by reality.'  I'm betting the conservative hawks and neo-cons in the Republican Party will really like this speech.

One thing that bothers me about this speech is that there is very little sense that America has ever done anything wrong.  We only react to other's aggression: in World War II, in Korea, in Kuwait, at 9/11.  I would think that a little more humble acknowledgement of our own errors in Vietnam and Iraq, not to speak of our covert interventions all over the place since WWII, would have 'leavened the loaf' a bit.