by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
National Review Online<\/em><\/p>\n At any time in the 2,500-year history of Western diplomacy, has a head of state been advised by his host not to apologize for a long-ago act? I cannot think offhand\u00a0of any instance until, apparently, two years ago.<\/p>\n According to a controversial leak provided by WikiLeaks \u2014 and picked up in stories by news outlets from AP to NPR \u2014 Barack Obama\u2019s administration was politely advised by the Japanese in September 2009 that there would be no need for the presidential entourage to go to Hiroshima, apparently to apologize for the dropping of the atomic bomb 64 years earlier.<\/p>\n If the story is true, Obama seemed intent on showing the world that his predecessors had long ago done wrong. The intended gesture was of a piece with his bowing to the Japanese emperor and his novel dispatching of a delegation to the commemoration of the 65th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing the following year.<\/p>\n The Japanese, if we can believe the leaked cables, called the proposed apology \u201ca nonstarter\u201d and stated that they feared blowback, in the form of encouragement for anti-nuclear and anti-American domestic forces \u2014 especially at a time when Japan is sensitive about its geostrategic vulnerability in a neighborhood that includes China, Russia, and North Korea. (Perhaps the Japanese would have preferred from Obama instead a stronger reiteration that they still reside safely beneath the US defense umbrella.)<\/p>\n We can assume as well that the last thing the Japanese wanted was a sort of tit-for-tat cycle of apologies \u2014 given things like Nanking, Pearl Harbor, Bataan, the 20 million Chinese dead, the Korean \u201ccomfort women\u201d corps, and Unit 731.<\/p>\n A Pattern Here?<\/strong><\/p>\n Unfortunately, Obama\u2019s presidency has been characterized by a habit of apologizing for his country. Indeed, in his first year in office alone, he offered regrets to Europe for past US \u201carrogance,\u201d to the Muslim world for not being \u201cperfect\u201d in our prior relations, to Latin America for trying to \u201cdictate our terms,\u201d to Turkey for America\u2019s slavery, segregation, and, apparently, genocide of the Native Americans, and, indirectly, to Iran for the Mossadegh coup (\u201cthe United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government,\u201d and thus, presto, there has been \u201ca tumultuous history between us\u201d).<\/p>\n Note the difference between such existential historical apologies and more direct and targeted presidential\u00a0mea culpas<\/em>\u00a0over particular transgressions \u2014 things like Bill Clinton saying he was sorry for not doing anything to save Rwandans, or for hitting the Chinese embassy in 1999 during the bombing in the Balkans, or for the Tuskegee syphilis experiment (or, for that matter, his serial expression of \u201cI\u2019m so sorry\u201d for the Monica Lewinsky imbroglio).<\/p>\n Instead, we are now dealing with the existential apology for America\u2019s past sins. In this regard, Obama\u2019s confessionals follow Bill Clinton\u2019s own other examples of broad-brush atonement for his less than noble ancestors \u2014 slavery in Africa, anti-Communist politics in Central America, support for the 1967 Greek coup. What, then, drives President Obama to want to apologize for his country?<\/p>\n More Confident and \u201cStronger\u201d?<\/strong><\/p>\n Sometimes, the president thinks apologetics are in our strategic interest, as if America alone should apologize to set a moral example. Former press secretary Robert Gibbs defended Obama\u2019s Central American lamentations on the ground that they \u201cchanged the image of America around the world\u201d and made the US \u201csafer and stronger.\u201d<\/p>\n In the Al-Arabiya interview, his first after taking office, Obama offered a paradigm of critiquing the Bush administration (\u201call too often the United States starts by dictating \u2014 in the past on some of these issues \u2014 and we don\u2019t always know all the factors that are involved\u201d). He implied general regret (\u201cwe are ready to initiate a new partnership based on mutual respect and mutual interest\u201d) and emphasized his own particular identity (\u201cI have Muslim members of my family. I have lived in Muslim countries\u201d). All of that would usher in a new era of relations with the Muslim world.<\/p>\n Of course, that did not happen. Iran responded with the continued killing of Americans from Afghanistan to Iraq, and most recently by attempting to do the same in Washington, DC \u2014 amid a long litany of threats to destroy the Jewish state. Most polls do not reveal a marked upsurge of pro-American feeling in the Middle East. North African protesters often blamed Obama; he is the least liked US president in Israeli history; and he has enraged Pakistan.<\/p>\n In fact, there is no empirical evidence that apologizing \u2014 as distinct from learning from one\u2019s mistakes and trying to avoid them in the future \u2014 makes a state \u201cstronger.\u201d Given the tragic nature of humankind \u2014 go back to Thucydides\u2019 explorations of the topic \u2014 states, like people, are just as likely to interpret apology as weakness, all the more so when the atonement refers to an event before their own times, and raises the question to the proposed recipient: \u201cHmmm, why now and for what reason?\u201d<\/p>\n Them, Not Me<\/strong><\/p>\n Second, Obama, even more than Clinton, seeks to distance himself from the main currents of America\u2019s past, by picking and choosing what he might and might not have done in retrospect. The president stakes out a higher moral ground by telling the world that he was not responsible for, and indeed, in his singular wisdom, would never have committed, such sins. Most notoriously, Obama replied to a near-hour-long anti-American tirade by Daniel Ortega not by questioning Ortega\u2019s own anti-democratic and often bloody record, but by meekly offering, \u201cI\u2019m grateful that President Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was three months old.\u201d Apparently, the concern was not that a thug had unfairly trashed his country, but that Ortega might have included among his targets the innocent toddler Obama as well.<\/p>\n But such distancing is tricky. It opens a Pandora\u2019s box of flawed assumptions. Is any nation free of sin? Apologizing for both ancient American sins and George W. Bush\u2019s more recent ones while in Turkey \u2014 perpetrator of mass killings of Armenians, Greeks, and Kurds \u2014 is surreal. The Arab world, to which Obama offered contrition, since World War II has systematically ethnically cleansed Jews and Christians from the Middle East. When an American apologizes for something in the 19th century to those who commit horrific acts in the 20th and 21st centuries, the message is not necessarily strength and confidence, but either uncertainty about one\u2019s own history, or an insecure need to win affection from the far more culpable.<\/p>\n And if Obama sees the story of America as largely one of slavery, segregation, racism, and class and gender exploitation \u2014 rather than the amelioration of such universal human sins \u2014 coupled with commercial greed abroad, can he so easily separate himself from the dividends of those sins? Does his ability to enjoy Martha\u2019s Vineyard, to jet into tony resorts, or, for that matter, before he was president to buy a Chicago mansion and find lucrative employment, have nothing to do with the singular nature of the American commercial system?<\/p>\n An apology for other Americans\u2019 sins is easy and cheap, while changing one\u2019s lifestyle to reflect a presumed penance for unfairly acquired benefits is much harder. Yet without the latter, we are reduced to carnival \u2014 something like multimillion-dollar celebrities or rich students at exclusive schools screaming about Wall Street greed and the unfair distribution of wealth, or a Noam Chomsky, from his comfortable Cambridge digs, tenured and salaried by the defense-contract-receiving MIT, blasting American military and economic transgressions.<\/p>\n Third, historical ignorance \u2014 a symptom in part of the college therapeutic curriculum \u2014 prompts many of the Obama apologies. Almost everything in his infamous Cairo speech was historically inaccurate, from the bogus Muslim tolerance in C\u00f3rdoba during the Inquisition (there were virtually no Muslims present at that time in the city) to the idea of Islamic catalysts for the Western Renaissance and Enlightenment. His assertion that democratic governments cannot be imposed by force implies that Japan, Germany, and Italy willingly evolved into states with liberal constitutions.<\/p>\n Clearly, Obama knows nothing of the bad\/worse historical choices in the decision to drop the bomb. Was America to lose hundreds of thousands of men in an invasion of Japan, to settle for a negotiated armistice that left the Tokyo militarists in power, to continue the far more deadly fire raids (enhanced by closer Okinawa runways and, soon, the transference of American heavy bombers from postwar Europe), rather than drop the atomic bomb?<\/p>\n Did Obama grasp that Turkey is the inheritor of 500 years of Ottoman colonialism \u2014 far longer and more brutal than the European brand? Is it so easy in the present to cast aspersions on the Cold War against a nuclear Soviet Union \u2014 a country that had previously destroyed 20 million of its own, and gobbled up Eastern Europe \u2014 when America was understandably sometimes less than perfect in the selection of its anti-Communist allies? Only an unschooled mind offers such ahistorical apologies \u2014 an all too common phenomenon in today\u2019s academic world, where abstraction rules and cold realities do not intrude on tenured lifestyles.<\/p>\n Penance for Thee, But Not For Me<\/strong><\/p>\n Apologizing for the sins of long-dead others, in psychological fashion, obviates the need for present contrition for one\u2019s own personal shortcomings. For example, Obama blasts past racism, but to this day has never apologized for subsidizing, by attendance and tithes, the abject racist and anti-Semite Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It is easier for Obama to apologize for America\u2019s action in World War II than to apologize because as an irresponsible youth (\u201cteenage boys are frequently confused\u201d), he used cocaine (\u201cmaybe a little blow\u201d) \u2014 a felonious practice that has long subsidized the murderous Latin American drug cartels. To cast stones at the dead, one must first be free of sin while alive.<\/p>\n In short, anytime an American president offers apologies for supposed transgressions in his nation\u2019s long distant past, it tells us more about the apologizer than it does about the purported sin.<\/p>\n \u00a92011 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online At any time in the 2,500-year history of Western diplomacy, has a head of state been advised by his host not to apologize for a long-ago act? I cannot think offhand\u00a0of any instance until, apparently, two years ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[116,536],"tags":[233,366,612,12,57,207,1033,1055,391,1028,570,539,1044,134,30,1016,58,1068],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-v8","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":10516,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-fire-and-fury-of-presidents\/","url_meta":{"origin":1930,"position":0},"title":"The Fire And Fury Of Presidents","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 25, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Defining Ideas \u00a0 Image credit:Barbara Kelley \u201cWe could, obviously, destroy North Korea with our arsenals.\" \u2014Barack Obama, April 2016 The media recently went ballistic over President Trump\u2019s impromptu promises of \u201cfire and fury\u201d in reply to the latest North Korean threats\u2014and even more so when\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Media"","block_context":{"text":"Media","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/media\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3165,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/campaign-rhetoric-and-presidential-reality-a-brief-history\/","url_meta":{"origin":1930,"position":1},"title":"Campaign Rhetoric and Presidential Reality: A Brief History","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 28, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services American presidential election rhetoric always paints the incumbent as incompetent in foreign policy, the challenger insightful and skillful. A look at recent history, however, shows that once the opposition gains office, the world suddenly becomes not so black and white. The outsider Dwight\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "December 2008"","block_context":{"text":"December 2008","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2008\/december-2008\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2103,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/resetting-the-reset-button\/","url_meta":{"origin":1930,"position":2},"title":"Resetting the Reset Button","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 5, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"As promised, Obama has set our diplomacy on a new track. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online After ten months of \u201cBush did it\u201d diplomacy, the Obama administration needs to reset its reset button. Europe On substantial issues, relations with Europe have not improved. The governments in France, Germany,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "December 2009"","block_context":{"text":"December 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/december-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":461,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/storming-embassies-killing-ambassadors-and-smart-diplomacy\/","url_meta":{"origin":1930,"position":3},"title":"Storming Embassies, Killing Ambassadors, and ‘Smart’ Diplomacy","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 14, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online The attacks on the US embassy yesterday in Cairo and the storming of the American consulate in Libya, where the US ambassador was murdered along with three staff members \u2014 and the initial official American reaction to the mayhem \u2014 are all reprehensible,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Benghazi"","block_context":{"text":"Benghazi","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/benghazi\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3072,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/hope-and-change-in-the-middle-east\/","url_meta":{"origin":1930,"position":4},"title":"Hope and Change in the Middle East","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 20, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner This was the sort of split-the-difference address that the president is now famous for \u2014 long on Icarus-like soaring phraseology, very short on down-to-earth realities. The first third of the president\u2019s speech was a good summary of prior (dare we say it?) neoconservative analyses:\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Diplomacy"","block_context":{"text":"Diplomacy","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/geopolitics\/diplomacy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":885,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-virtual-rose-garden\/","url_meta":{"origin":1930,"position":5},"title":"Obama’s Virtual Rose Garden","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 22, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online When Barack Obama went into hibernation in December and vacationed in Hawaii, we noted that his poll numbers edged back up some. His advisers probably noticed the anomaly too: that the less the people hear and see of Obama, the more they seem\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Campaign 2012"","block_context":{"text":"Campaign 2012","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/campaign-2012\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1930"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1930"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1930\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1931,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1930\/revisions\/1931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}