by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
NRO’s\u00a0The Corner<\/em><\/p>\n There is a surprising amount of\u00a0liberal discomfort, here and abroad, with the underwhelming nature of President Obama’s Asian tour.\u00a0Apparently this results from\u00a0displeasure over the lack of any substantive dialogue with the Chinese\u00a0about climate change (and\u00a0China’s inordinate coal burning), censorship, the lack of human rights, Tibet, unfair trade practices, etc. (In the president’s defense, if we are going to borrow at an annual rate of $1.6 trillion for further entitlement spending, some of it floated at low interest from the Chinese, we are not going to have a lot of leverage with our creditors.)<\/p>\n The liberal discontent (even in the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>,\u00a0of all places) is strange, inasmuch as Obama campaigned on exactly this sort of multilateralism and deference to the U.N. In this new approach, America doesn’t try to “get” anything from anyone, but simply listens, and as a guest abroad defers to its hosts. After all, Obama has rejected in explicit language the notion of American exceptionalism. The Nobel Peace Prize committee correctly sensed Obama’s departure from the past and preemptively awarded him the prize, both as praise for his utopian rhetoric and as a reminder than the first multilateral president should govern as if the United States is merely one among many nations in the world.<\/p>\n French president Nicolas Sarkozy sensed this as well at the U.N., in reference to Iran. I think most nations have caught on and\u00a0are making the necessary adjustments, and the Asian tour will be followed by many more like it: inspirational photo-ops, soaring “I am the first Pacific, African, Latin American, etc. president,” assurances that change abroad can happen as it has in America (as exemplified by Obama himself, of course), implicit “reset” criticism of the previous unilateral administration, and hope-and-change rhetoric about new multilateral partnerships, followed by a town-hall question-and-answer session (probably censored).<\/p>\n So again, why the unease with Obama’s trip?<\/p>\n From the trivial expressions like bowing to the more fundamental one of deferring to the Chinese Communist leadership, Obama is merely establishing the outlines of the promised new foreign policy.<\/p>\n France will be as prominent as we are in the Mideast negotiations; Russia will adjudicate regional disputes with former Soviet republics and interests in eastern Europe; progressive nations like Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, Ecuador, Peru, and others will establish a Latin American consensus that favors a statist, anti-capitalist, and less democratic paradigm of indigenous governance. China, naturally, will insidiously begin to shape the regional futures of the Koreas, Taiwan, Japan, and the Philippines. Turkey can sort out its problems with Greece. The U.N. Human Rights Council will be the proper forum in which to express unhappiness with human-rights transgressions abroad.<\/p>\n This new consensus is what Obama promised, and\u00a0it is what Obama is doing his best to deliver.<\/p>\n Exceptional American support for human rights, preeminent worry about a nuclear Iran, democracy abroad, tilts to old friends like Britain and Israel, security guarantees to democratic allies, American enforcement of global commercial and trade protocols \u2014 all that was included under the old American notion of exceptionalism and, logically, should expire with it.\u00a0The Asian tour should have delighted Obama-ites as the proper expression of Obama’s philosophy: two equal nations, neither one more exceptional than the other (or any other), their systems merely “different,” not better or worse, simply chatting about mutual concerns.<\/p>\n \u00a92009 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson NRO’s\u00a0The Corner There is a surprising amount of\u00a0liberal discomfort, here and abroad, with the underwhelming nature of President Obama’s Asian tour.<\/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":[647],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-yh","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1236,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/multiculturalism\/","url_meta":{"origin":2125,"position":0},"title":"Multiculturalism","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 27, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson RightNetwork.com Multiculturalism is now the final arbiter of all liberal sensitivity. 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This is so not important\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Angry Reader"","block_context":{"text":"Angry Reader","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/angry-reader\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9033,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/americas-balkan-values\/","url_meta":{"origin":2125,"position":3},"title":"America\u2019s Balkan Values","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 9, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"White liberals and black careerists vigorously reject the MLK ideal of a color-blind society. By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online The racial spoils industry survives on several requisites. One, Americans must be readily identifiable as being non-white or white. 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Soon after, it was also clear to them that a new type of coronavirus was on the loose, a threat they\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":324,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/too-few-oppressors-too-many-victims\/","url_meta":{"origin":2125,"position":5},"title":"Too Few Oppressors, Too Many Victims","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 21, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Since the election, some fatalistic Washington conservative elites have accepted \u2014 and Obama operatives have rejoiced in \u2014 a supposedly new and non-white-male ethnic electorate: Americans will be categorized, and collectively so, on the basis of largely how they look and, to a lesser\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Identity Politics"","block_context":{"text":"Identity Politics","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/identity-politics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2125"}],"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=2125"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2126,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2125\/revisions\/2126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}