Obama in Oslo

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S Oslo speech could have been titled “the ambiguities of history.’’ That the president spoke with self-awareness from within those ambiguities made the speech important.






Barack Obama at the First Presidential Debate 2008, Oxford, MS

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Two notes of ambiguity stood out. First, that his “labors on the world stage’’ have not merited the Nobel Peace Prize. His “accomplishments are slight,’’ yet there he was in receipt of the highest honor. Second, that he was “responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle’’ where they “will kill, and. . .be killed.’’ Since when is the peace prize awarded for war?


Those ambiguities were enough to prompt skepticism and even anger, especially from many who opposed the escalation of the war in Afghanistan. I count myself among those so opposed, yet oddly the president’s stance in the thicket of such contradiction gave his remarks resonance. He spoke, for example, of the just war tradition, and like many war-leaders before him, he drew it around himself as a defensive cloak. Usually, that’s the end of it. Just war rhetoric produces a complacent resignation. Violence is a given in the human condition. “Evil does exist in the world.’’ The solution to violence is yet more violence. Too bad, but that’s the way it is.

Yet President Obama struck a different note. Having invoked just war, he observed how, precisely from within its tradition, “the capacity of human beings to think up new ways to kill one another proved inexhaustible.’’ After the total wars of the 20th century, “it became clear to victor and vanquished alike that the world needed institutions to prevent another world war.’’ Either humans will put an end to war, in John Kennedy’s formulation, or war will put an end to human beings. Following World War II, institutions of a new order were constructed, yet “a decade into a new century, this old architecture is buckling under the weight of new threats.’’ What is required now, Obama said, is thinking “in new ways about the notions of just war.’’