Victor Davis Hanson: Our Confessor-in-Chief
[Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and editor, most recently, of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome.]
The first duty of national leaders is to worry about the interests of their own countries; utopian internationalism can come later. German chancellor Angela Merkel, despite her soaring European Union rhetoric, is relearning that lesson.
German voters in a recent parliamentary election rebuked her for bailing out the spendthrift Greeks with hard-earned German money.
Barack Obama should take note.
Last year, Obama won a Nobel Peace Prize not for what he did, but for what he represented to the European judges — a new post-national American president. His subsequent apology tours abroad have emphasized American sins without much discussion of the context of the times.
In Cairo last year, the president inaccurately claimed that Islam helped to foster Western achievements like the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.
In such moments, Obama sounds as if he thinks America has to be perfect to be good, while other nations merely need to be okay....
Read entire article at National Review
The first duty of national leaders is to worry about the interests of their own countries; utopian internationalism can come later. German chancellor Angela Merkel, despite her soaring European Union rhetoric, is relearning that lesson.
German voters in a recent parliamentary election rebuked her for bailing out the spendthrift Greeks with hard-earned German money.
Barack Obama should take note.
Last year, Obama won a Nobel Peace Prize not for what he did, but for what he represented to the European judges — a new post-national American president. His subsequent apology tours abroad have emphasized American sins without much discussion of the context of the times.
In Cairo last year, the president inaccurately claimed that Islam helped to foster Western achievements like the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.
In such moments, Obama sounds as if he thinks America has to be perfect to be good, while other nations merely need to be okay....