Obama in Oslo -- Half Dove and Half Hawk

Long after Barack Obama leaves the White House, his presidency will be judged, in part, by the standards he set for himself with his Nobel Prize address in Oslo.

As the only president who, in effect, wrote himself into the job (with an autobiography and his 2004 convention speech), Obama has always been unusually self-conscious about his words. That explains both his slavish devotion to TelePrompTers and his intense involvement in his own speech texts. But even the most blasé political leader would feel daunted by weight of his words -- and the weight of the world -- on receipt of a Nobel Peace Prize.

Hypocrisy is an occupational hazard for all presidents, since the tough-minded realities of governing trump the foolish consistencies of the campaign trail. But in giving his Nobel address, Obama appeared animated by a passion to acknowledge the limitations of laudable words and high-minded sentiments in a world marred by terrorism, strife and murderous dictators. There was a naked intellectual honesty to Obama's oratory, as if he knew that future historians would someday be parsing this speech looking for deceptions, contradictions and blatant hypocrisy.

Obama's boldest decision was to directly confront the criticism that he was unworthy of the world's highest honor for statesmanship and moral courage. The real problem was not Obama's brief tenure in the Oval Office and the politically inconvenient reality, according to a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll, that 80 percent of American voters believe that he does not deserve the Peace Prize. Instead, the stain of hypocrisy that haunted Obama was far more grievous: "Perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am Commander-in-Chief of a nation in the midst of two wars."

By that standard, Obama is the most morally compromised American Nobel laureate since Henry Kissinger won the 1973 prize along with Vietnam's Le Duc Tho. Kissinger chose to remain at a NATO conference in Brussels rather than fly the 675 miles to Oslo. In order to accept the prize on Kissinger's behalf, the American ambassador to Norway had to endure a fusillade of snowballs from anti-war demonstrators.

In Europe and at home, Obama is perceived as representing the antithesis of the realpolitik cynicism advanced by Kissinger during the Nixon years. Yet both to appease American political necessities and to rouse Europeans out of a smug antiwar torpor, Obama felt compelled to dispel the illusion that he is a dreamy theorist uncomfortable with the use of military power. As a result, Obama's Oslo speech can be read as an intellectual biography charting the maturation (and hardening) of his views on global security.

At its core, Obama's speech was an ambitious attempt to grapple "with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace, and our effort to replace one with the other." Coming on the heels of Obama's West Point speech, the Nobel Prize address was a sustained argument designed to justify the expansion of the war in Afghanistan and America's armed struggle against al-Qaida. Obama did not fully succeed in making an airtight intellectual case for the wider Afghan war, since his logic was occasionally undermined by bellicose boilerplate: "I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people." The president invoked the 9/11 attacks as a rationale for acting in "self defense" in Afghanistan, but never explained why that war had been neglected for seven years after the Taliban were routed in late 2001.

There was also a note of American triumphalism in Obama's speech, which was probably unanticipated by most of his Old Europe audience in Oslo. Putting it bluntly, Obama declared, "Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms." It was unfortunate, however, that Obama never bothered to mention in this section the two wars that since Korea have cost the most American blood – Vietnam and Iraq. Even as Obama declared that the U.S. has taken up its global role "out of enlightened self-interest," he ducked an opportunity to discuss (and rebut) the common European belief that America's motives have not always been that laudable and selfless.

Obama's speech grew stronger as he moved away from his self-appointed task of justifying himself as a wartime president receiving the ultimate peacetime prize. In one of the most insightful passages in the Nobel address, Obama said, "Given the dizzying pace of globalization, and the cultural leveling of modernity, it should come as no surprise that people fear the loss of what they cherish about their particular identities – their race, their tribe, and perhaps most powerfully their religion."

As a president born from the unexpected connection between Kenya and Kansas, Obama is naturally sensitive to the quest for identity in a chaotic world. But that passage presumably also represents the fruit of many hours of reading and briefings about the roots of Islamic fanaticism. What Obama was saying, in effect, was that America's greatest non-military strength (our unsurpassed ability to dominate global culture) has triggered our greatest challenge (religiously based terrorism threatened by modernity).

For those looking for a guide to future American foreign policy decisions, the most important element in the Nobel Peace Prize address may have been Obama's full-throated embrace of humanitarian military interventions. The tragedy of September 11 and the debilitating wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have partly erased the memory of the Dayton Accords that brought peace to Bosnia and the NATO air assault on Serbia that ended ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. As Obama put it, "I believe that force can be justified on humanitarian grounds, as it was in the Balkans, or in other places that have been scarred by war." Nothing that Obama said offers relief to the people of Darfur and Zimbabwe (both mentioned in the speech), but it does hint at the direction of the president's long-term dreams.

There is a near-irresistible temptation to view every event during the Obama presidency in short-term, up-down political terms. But it is difficult to argue that Oslo changed anything for the troubled president. The damage from Obama's too-much, too-soon Nobel Prize has already become part of the political narrative -- and the speech did little to alter that. At the same time, it is hard to believe that there remains an American voter -- liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican -- who was surprised to discover Thursday morning that Obama can deliver an eloquent and thoughtful speech in a foreign land.

In a classic Obama formulation, the president said, "Within America, there has long been a tension between those who describe themselves as realists or idealists...I reject this choice." At moments like this, it is tempting to sniff, "There he goes again, President Split-the-Difference."

But there are moments when this approach works both rhetorically and as a practical guide to grasping a complex world. In a memorable speech, accepting a puzzling Nobel Peace Prize as a wartime president, Obama managed to bring together both sides of America's national character -- the realism of Nobel Prize laureate Henry Kissinger and the idealism of Nobel Prize laureate Woodrow Wilson.