NYT Op-Ed: “Obama, subtly but persistently, is talking down American Exceptionalism”

You can learn a lot about those with whom you disagree by just listening to what they are saying about Barack Obama. Strangely, sometimes they say the same thing you do, but they see it as positive instead of disastrous.

That’s the case with an op-ed in the New York Times today, where writer Roger Cohen sums up what he calls “The Obama Doctrine” very well. Cohen agrees with Obama, and believes his approach to the world is realistic and correct, but his description of “The Obama Doctrine” really sums up Obama’s ideology when it comes to America, and our place in the world (bolding below is mine):

NEW YORK TIMES: “. . . . . Power, in this Obama doctrine, is not for winning the day, vanquishing the enemy. Its purpose is more modest: the pursuit of America’s interests or those of its friends.

Obama is a realist in the image of Britain’s 19th-century statesman Lord Palmerston, who once declared: “We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”

What inhabits Obama is the conviction that the United States “is still the biggest power but not the decisive power,” said Jonathan Eyal, a British foreign policy analyst. “And Americans will only accept that with time and with bumping against buffers.”

This is not the stuff of heroic American narrative, of shining citadels or beacons to mankind. Obama, subtly but persistently, is talking down American exceptionalism in the name of mutual interests and mutual respect, two favorite phrases. He is downsizing American ambition — the eventual Afghan exit is now pre-scripted along neither-defeat-nor-victory Iraqi lines — in the name of American rebuilding.

Here is where Republicans are going to batter him all the way to 2012. They are going to batter him in primary colors, not Oval-Office creamy tones. They are going to call him an equivocator.

They are going to say he compromised with the Islamist radicals rather than defeating them as America defeated Nazism or Communism. They are going to accuse him of selling American power short. They are going to cast him as a peacenik light on patriotism. They are going to call him the socialist-secular sermonizer who wants to steer America to Euro-sclerosis. . . . . . ” Read More

He’s right – Barack Obama is “steadily but persistently talking down American Exceptionalism.” That’s because in Obama’s world, America is really not “exceptional” when compared to other nations. We’re just another kid on the block, and not the leader of the Free World. It is not our place to seek to advance liberty and freedom throughout the world. We really are not a “shining city on a hill.”

It’s good to know that those of us on the Right are not the only ones who can see what Obama is doing. It’s sad to know there are many Americans who agree with Obama that America is really not the “exceptional” place she is. Republicans should make the argument against Obama’s re-election for all the reasons Cohen describes – because it will be the truth. We need a President who believes in “American Exceptionalism” instead of a President who seeks to guide America down the long, slow march to “Euro-sclerosis.”