Obama’s Moral-Leadership Balloon Crashes

Realpolitik and misplaced faith in diplomacy keeps trumping human rights.
October 20, 2009
By Mona Charen

The world thinks better of the United States, we are told, because Barack Obama is in the White House. Maybe the world is wrong.

It’s fanciful, of course, to speak of what “the world” thinks about anything. It’s safe to say that among Norwegian prize-givers and Canadian avant-garde filmmakers, Obama is extremely popular. And certainly among bien pensant Americans, the advent of Obama is viewed as the moral pinnacle of American history. It has always been a particular vanity of the Left to believe itself morally superior to others. But the claims for this presidency have been beyond extravagant. Global human rights, morality, and justice took a “great leap forward” (as Anita Dunn’s favorite political philosopher might say) on January 20. But in the space of just nine months, the Obama administration has betrayed the cause of human rights around the globe.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton helped set the tone in February by swatting away a question about human rights abuses in China. Those issues, she said, “can’t interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis, and the security crisis.” Political prisoners, Tibetans, and religious minorities may have been dejected by this stony dismissal, but the Chinese government was delighted. “This type of realistic attitude could be followed by other Western leaders,” an official newspaper noted with satisfaction. the rest