Obama Cicero
So which is the real Barack Obama: West Point or Oslo? Dud or dude? After the excruciatingly awkward speech at the military academy this month justifying his Afghanistan policy – a performance that seemed to torture both logic and, from the look of his body language, himself – the hacks were reaching for dimissives to write off the 44th president. Supreme orator of our time? Not that contortionist, simultaneously going gung-ho and heading for the exit.
The setting seemed only to lay bare the self-consciousness of what Mr Obama was doing: trying to sell the least doomed of all the Afghanistan options. Occasionally, the camera would relent from the president’s stolid demeanour and pan across the faces of the cadets in grey. Most had a weirdly far-away look, even though what was being discussed concerned, as Mr Obama acknowledged, their own lives and deaths. After all those months of deliberation, was this prosaic utterance the pay-off?
Unworthy thoughts surfaced. Maybe the Rhetoric B Team had written this one? Were all those references to “no blank cheque”, to rebuilding the nation at home, to the unpersuasive deadline of a mere 18 months before the Afghanisation of the war a sop thrown to the anti-war cohorts in his own party? Was this speech a product of anxious political calculation rather than statesman-like thoughtfulness and courage?
In fact, a cool look at the West Point speech on paper reveals it to be less knotted in its own contradictions than it seemed on delivery. Mr Obama needed to remind America of the 9/11 connection: why this was a war of necessity and not of choice. He needed to spell out the alternatives – disengagement or a more massive troop saturation – and explain why they had been rejected. He needed to invoke the Pakistan element. When you scrutinise the text you see everything was there – except, somehow, the passion which, when the president is at his best, flows from the strength of his moral intelligence.
This was on heady display in the Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech last week, a work of rhetorical art that, in its seriousness, bravery and clarity, was on a par with FDR and Churchill. Mr Obama’s body language was easy without being ingratiating. His pace was considered without being stagey, and he gave the unmistakeable impression that he meant every word he uttered. He was playing philosopher-prince, and Cicero was smiling from the Shades.
In his introductory exordium Obama cleared the decks by fessing up to the embarrassment of a tyro chief executive, engaged in two wars, receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. Moral advantage immediately his. The narratio then proceeded to lay out a history of just war theory, engaging with, among others, Grotius, Vattel and Michael Walzer, yet without making the Nobelistas feel they were taking a midterm exam. If David Cameron is not going to be laid in the dust, he had better spend Christmas back at Oxford on a refresher course with Vernon Bogdanor.
But the mark of the speech’s greatness was not its academic credentials, but its grip on humane realism, the loftiness tempered by its many acknowledgements of the ubiquity of evil in the world, the inability to contain it with mere exhortation to desist. Hobbes and Machiavelli were there in the room along with Niebuhr and Gandhi. It was as hard-nosed an assesment of what humans continue to do to each other as you might have heard from Harry Truman, though the steel-tipped Jack Kennedy was the predecessor invoked. As a man of faith I wish the world were otherwise, Mr Obama said, but as president I must treat it as it is. Brilliantly disarming the rightwing talkshow blowhards, he invoked Nixon and Reagan as predecessors unafraid to engage with totalitarian regimes to unlock the gates of change.
But none of this meant abandoning the moral high ground. As he worked his way from ethos and logos to the pathos of peroration, he bade us think of the connection between deprivation and belligerence, and to do something about it. He took as exemplars neither philosophers nor princes but a soldier who “sees he’s outgunned but stands firm to keep the peace”, a young protester (read Tehran) who awaits “the brutality of her government but has the courage to march on”. Summing up, he told his audience: “We can understand that there will be war and still strive for peace.” Amen to that.