Dan Calabrese

We find out a lot about a president’s priorities by what he says in an address he considers major. And while we can take some solace in the fact that President Obama often just says what he thinks will sound good to his audience, it’s hard to miss – in his United Nations address this week – the profound difference in emphasis between Obama and his predecessors on the subject of freedom and democracy.

I'm not too worried about it.

Obama told the assembled throngs at Turtle Bay that he sees “four pillars” as crucial to the supposed agenda of the entire world and its leaders. They are: 1) getting rid of nuclear weapons; 2) the “pursuit of peace”; 3) “protecting the planet”; and 4) the global economy.

Freedom? Democracy? Oh, it got a shout-out, but in a relegated-to-the-kids’-table sort of way, and with a rhetorical emphasis that essentially apologized for the attempts of his predecessors – particularly the most recent one – to promote freedom and democracy around the globe.

Indeed, he didn’t seem at all sold on the idea that freedom and democracy are important for everyone:

Democracy cannot be imposed on any nation from the outside. Each society must search for its own path, and no path is perfect. Each country will pursue a path rooted in the culture of its people and in its past traditions.

And I admit that America has too often been selective in its promotion of democracy. But that does not weaken our commitment; it only reinforces it.

Scratch head. OK. So we’re against “imposing” democracy, although, when you think about it, that’s impossible. Democracy requires the free people of any nation to make a choice about how and by whom they will be governed. An outside nation – even an invading force, you might say – can remove the tyrants who stand in the way of the exercise of this freedom, but you can’t force people to freely choose something. That’s impossible by definition, which, of course, doesn’t stop Obama from apologizing for the U.S. having supposedly done it.

This, of course, is the left’s favorite re-telling of the liberation of Iraq – the notion that the U.S. forced unwilling Iraqis to write and adopt a constitution based on free and fair elections, when they would have somehow preferred to continue living under the sadistic despotism of Saddam Hussein.

And by Obama’s lights, freedom is no great shakes anyway, since everyone needs to “pursue a path rooted in the culture of its people and in its past traditions.” So hey, 1,000 years of czarist rule? Why stop now? Centuries (or more) of heavy-handed autocracy under kings, emirs and sultans?

It is now the official policy of the United States that one is just as good as the other.

And as to the charge that the U.S. has been “selective in our promotion of democracy,” Obama embraces the usual nonsense that we cared about democracy in Iraq – because we invaded it – but we didn’t care about it anywhere else.

This, of course, completely ignores the underground movements we supported in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, not to mention efforts like the one undertaken in Nicaragua – and bitterly opposed by Democrats – to force the Marxist Sandinistas to at least hold a free and fair election if they wished to maintain power.

But never you worry. The U.S. won’t be selective about the promotion of democracy under Obama. We’ll be consistent in not giving a rip about it. That’s why we seek to restore Manuel Zelaya to power in Honduras, even though the people don’t want him and the constitution says he can’t serve. That’s why we slap skin with Hugo Chavez. That’s why we don’t lift a finger to help those demonstrating for freedom in Iran.

It’s the Obama Doctrine: We don’t care about freedom and democracy. They don’t qualify for the vaunted “four pillars,” not when there’s carbon to fight and nuclear weapons to eliminate (our own, sillies; not the Iranians’).

To each his own, and no one system is any better than any other.

No wonder Obama doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism. To him, there’s nothing exceptional about our system of government. Freedom. Despotism. Whatever. Just cut those carbon emissions and pass the peace, baby.

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