A couple weeks ago, Charles Krauthammer wrote a column entitled “The Vacant Presidency” the gist of which was that Obama was convinced that the bad guys always lose in the end, but that this happens in some metaphysical sort of way.
Obama’s passivity stems from an idea. When Obama says Putin has placed himself on the wrong side of history in Ukraine, he actually believes it . He disdains realpolitik because he believes that, in the end, such primitive 19th-century notions as conquest are self-defeating. History sees to their defeat.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” said Obama in June 2009 (and many times since) regarding the Green Revolution in Iran.
Ultimately, injustice and aggression don’t pay. The Soviets saw their 20th-century empire dissolve. More proximally, U.S. gains in Iraq and Afghanistan were, in time, liquidated. Ozymandias lies forever buried and forgotten in desert sands.
. . .
The arc of history may indeed bend toward justice, Mr. President. But, as you say, the arc is long. The job of a leader is to shorten it, to intervene on behalf of “the fierce urgency of now.” Otherwise, why do we need a president? And why did you seek to become ours?
At the time, I thought Krauthammer was going a bit too far, but Obama’s press conference today has me giving more credence to his theory. According to the National Review’s summary, he confidently announced, “People like this ultimately fail, they fail because the future is won by those who build and not destroy.”
Here’s the reality: whenever good triumphs over evil, this is not the result of “history see[ing] to their defeat” but the result of actual living, breathing human beings fighting back. The Nazis were not defeated by “history” but by American, British, and Russian soldiers. (I typed “GIs” first, but that’s specific to American soldiers, isn’t it?) Slavery ended due to, first, abolitionist activists who went from being seen as much a bunch of crackpots as anti-abortion protesters today to being a serious force, and second, in the United States, due to (sorry, revisionists) the Civil War.
But in the meantime, to take just this example, many a slaveowner prospered in what was to them, the here and now, and many a slave suffered. Would it have been good enough to console the slave by saying, “someday, slavery will end” without taking any action?
And this I also believe: the “arc of history” does not “bend toward justice” — this may or may not be a nice way of expressing the fact that the world appears to be a more just place than decades, centuries, or millenia ago, if indeed you are confident that the democratic institutions of the “First World” countries are here to stay, but there have been so many times and places in which truly awful things have happened that it’s a bit presumptuous to think that all that is over with, that God and/or the great cosmic force of the universe (depending on your belief) has foreordained that we’re following an inevitable path towards a brighter world.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In