【外交政策 20150226】奥巴马何时会放弃？

满仓

【中文标题】奥巴马何时会放弃？
【原文标题】WHEN DID OBAMA GIVE UP?
【登载媒体】外交政策
【原文作者】JAMES TRAUB
【原文链接】http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/02/26/when-did-obama-give-up-speeches/


六年前，一位远见卓识的总统用罕见的演讲天赋入主华盛顿，试图改变世界。现在怎么样了？



2009年，巴拉克•奥巴马总统第一次在联合国大会上致辞。他公开认同所有在做的联合国代表都心知肚明的一个问题——那就是美国，在他的前任乔治•W•布什的带领下，经常采取“单方行动，不考虑其它国家的利益”。他说，这是一种损人不利己的做法，“从2009年开始，人类历史上将第一次共同分享所有国家、所有民众的利益。”他的发言中最重要的隐含思想是，美国准备与其它国家就全球重大问题，包括防止核扩散、环境变化、经济发展等，展开“商谈”。

奥巴马的发言被掌声打断了12次。

2014年9月，奥巴马第6次在联合国发表讲话。他的头发变得花白，他的脸更加消瘦、绷得更紧。相比于上任后的首次发言，他传达出一个完全不同的信息。这次讲话的主旨是，全世界已经站在一个“十字路口”，面临“战争与和平”和“恐惧与希望”的选择。他给全世界提出了一个挑战。他宣布，美国已经准备好扮演起传统的角色，成为全球秩序的捍卫者。

在提到乌克兰时，他说：“我们会让俄罗斯为它的侵略行为付出代价。”美国将会联合盟国，对伊斯兰圣战“死亡网络”——也就是伊斯兰国——进行联合军事打击。打击的对象还包括其它敌对势力，首当其冲的是穆斯林世界，改变当地的局势，防止恐怖主义滋生。他说：“如果年轻人生活在一个只能选择任由国家支配，或者受地下极端组织势力引诱的环境中，无论什么反恐战略也不会奏效。”他并没有明说，但是毋庸讳言，这正是很多国家目前所不得不做出的选择。

这一次，总统的讲话一次也没有被掌声打断。

巴拉克•奥巴马今天所面对的世界，与他在2009年所面对的，或者说他认为自己所面对的世界判若云泥。如果回顾奥巴马自从2008年竞选以来所发表过的外交政策讲话，几乎让我们见证了在强大的演绎推理与扑面而来的厄运之间的挣扎。那个曾经慷慨地向全世界伸出援手的总统，现在给出了一个严酷的挑战。那个曾经让自己，也让听众们着眼于远在地平线的全球问题的总统，现在谈到了需要立即采取行动才能解决的危机。给人以希望和改变的领袖，现在只能谦逊地应对一两个具体问题。总统已经被现实彻底剥光了。

人们在奥巴马9月份的讲话中，似乎依然可以看到那个头发依然乌黑，希望仍然在燃烧的奥巴马。他说：“在人的问题上，我们拒绝接受宿命论和玩世不恭的态度。”他握紧左拳，在表示确信的时候，他经常会做出这样下意识的动作。“我们要让这个世界恢复它本来的面貌。”之后，他开始假设与“穆斯林世界的年轻人”对话，就像他在2009年的开罗演讲中一样。似乎与他想象中的那些决定未来的人讲话，就真的能呈现出一个不同的未来。奥巴马的确说过这些话，但是让人感觉到，他在一厢情愿地相信自己一度抱紧的真理。

传统观点认为，一个被视为典型外交政策“理想主义者”的人，必将尝到现实主义的苦果。这种说法过于简单化了。今天的奥巴马——总统任期刚开始的奥巴马也同样——对于军事力量推动现实世界中政治格局变化的能力，有着根深蒂固的怀疑。与此同时，他依然相信外交手段、个人激情和逻辑推理，这是理想主义的典型特征。但这也是一个更加痛苦的信仰。奥巴马就像一个天赋异禀的演说家，突然发现长久以来自己演讲稿实在太啰嗦了。

克林顿政府的演讲稿撰写人迈克尔•沃德曼发现，伟大的外交政策演讲总是会呈现出“美国价值观的普世化”。伍德罗•威尔逊在他的著名演讲中宣布“世界应该让民主享有安全”，这位第28任总统试图说服美国参加欧洲战争。接下来的话很少有人引用，他说：“世界和平应建立在政治自由历经考验的基础上。我们没有什么私利可图。我们不想要征服，不想要统治……我们只不过是为人类权利而战的斗士之一。”罗斯福、杜鲁门、肯尼迪和里根都曾经祭出这把至高无上真理的尚方宝剑。狂妄自大往往就隐藏在豪言壮语之中。乔治•W•布什沿袭了这样的语调，用他特有的信心、莽撞的置之不理和好斗的心态，让这些不和谐的声音浮出水面。巴拉克•奥巴马所跟随的步伐，就是这个让美国普世价值蒙灰的总统。他之所以当选，部分原因是有人希望他可以遏制这种草率的倾向。这或许是一个坚实的政策立足点，但不适合夸夸其谈。这位极富天赋的演说家怎样才能炮制出一份与前者论调背道而驰的演讲稿呢？

奥巴马在竞选期间和入主白宫之后的外交政策演讲稿，都是出于本杰明•罗德斯之手，他现在是国家安全战略通讯顾问。在近期的一次采访中，我问罗德斯他是如何处理这个问题的。罗德斯说，彻底“切断”乔治•布什高调华利的辞藻与草率、冒进的政策之间的联系，这种做法让外交政策演讲“贬值”。奥巴马必须从其它地方寻找威尔逊及其继任者所使用的语言，来与美国人和全世界人们沟通。“其中一个就是他独有的气质，他既可以谈论美国的普世价值观，也可以迎合全世界人的观点。对他们千差万别的视角表示认同，展现出愿意站在他们的角度观察美国的态度。这是宝贵的品质。”

在美国历任总统中，这是一种非常少见的品质。很多选举人发现，奥巴马承诺在美国与其它国家之间建立起沟通的桥梁，是挽回布什恃强凌弱作风必需之举，就像他们认为吉米•卡特的空开透明政策是治愈理查德•尼克松昏暗自闭政策的一剂良药一样。奥巴马所许下的承诺不仅仅是政策的变化，而且是语调和姿态的变化——即使这是他的刻意之举。2007年8月1日在华盛顿伍德罗威尔逊中心，是他参与选举后的第一次公开演讲，他明确提到了这一点。

这次演讲的内容具有激动人心的文学色彩，完全适合一名刚刚站在公众眼前的政客，通过唤起感情记忆引起人们的关注。他说：“历史应该翻起崭新的一页，是时候重新书写我们如何对待911事件的新篇章。”他挑战的对象不仅包括布什政府的恐怖战争，而且包括美国人和布什所引申出的故事情节。奥巴马说，这样的故事让恐怖分子数量无比庞大，离间了美国与其盟友之间的关系，让民主之名蒙灰。美国需要向全世界，向它自己讲述一个新的故事。他用一个生动的场景来阐述这一点。他说，作为一名参议员，他曾经看到从一架直升飞机涌出的难民那些绝望的面孔。在这里他停顿了一下，撅起嘴唇，或许说在思考下一句演讲词，或许是希望更加生动地表达这种印象。他说：“这样的场景不禁让你思考，当这些面孔仰望美国的直升飞机的时候，他们看到的是希望，还是仇恨？”

我刚好就坐在听众席里，奥巴马对于美国在被人眼中形象重要性的描述深深打动了我。他提到，在后911时代，美国扩展自身国家利益的能力不仅依赖于强大的盟友，而且取决于如何挑战普通人对美国的态度。这是本•罗德斯的第一份外交政策演讲稿，他把奥巴马罕见的敏感度与美国权力受众方的感受联系起来——因为这位候选人在海外生活过多年，并且精心准备出一种迎合他人信仰和思想的语气。让奥巴马幕僚沮丧的是，这些内容都没有出现在媒体的报道中，他们主要关注的是候选人花费比较长的篇幅讨论他是否愿意动用武力的段落。奥巴马说，如果他掌握了巴基斯坦“高价值目标的可靠情报”，而且佩尔韦兹•穆沙拉夫总统拒绝采取行动，那么“我们会采取行动”。媒体比奥巴马的幕僚更了解公众的情绪，因为这个问题一直困扰着他的任期。事到如今，他的全球化观点已经缩减为一个非常简单的问题，那就是什么时候对谁使用武力。

但是，奥巴马作为一名竞选中的演说家，像旋风般地席卷美国，神奇地整合了分歧最为严重的问题——包括种族关系——在恰当的时间把一个国家凝聚起来。这个年轻、未经世事的人首先说服了民主党，之后又说服了美国人民，他才是翻开新篇章的那个人。他的就职演说全部奉献给一个新的开始，无论是在国内还是在国外。奥巴马提到了早先的政策，让听众们自己去和乔治•W•布什作比较。他说：“他们知道，仅凭手中的权力，我们不能保护自己，也不能让我们为所欲为。他们知道我们的权力必需要审慎地使用，我们的安全来自于正义的理由、榜样的力量、人性的光辉和对克制的理解。”美国人应当放弃过去8年里积累起来的好斗和自以为是心态。

自从奥巴马自2009年1月开始执政，罗德斯就成了他的御用文字大师。罗德斯并没有外交政策方面的学识，但他是核心小组的一名重要成员，矢志于保持奥巴马超越传统的政治和政策层面，展示出超前的预言天赋——用他自己的话来说，保护这种可贵的品质。在奥巴马的国务院的白宫就职的丹尼斯•罗斯说：“本总是在理想主义者中寻找灵感。”作为一名理想主义者，前国家安全委员会主任、现任美国驻俄罗斯大使的迈克尔•麦克福尔印证了这个观点。他说：“本执笔，我们出主意。几乎每篇演讲稿中都有我的建议。”

但是，出主意的范围没有脱离白宫，国务卿希拉里•克林顿和国防部长罗伯特•盖茨对于演讲稿几乎没有任何贡献。一位前国防部高级官员告诉我：“白宫有时候会问我们一两个问题，很明显是在确认什么事。但是我们从未事先得到过演讲内容，白宫将其严格把控起来。”如果演讲不仅仅要公布奥巴马的政策，而且还要展现他的声音和感情，如果演讲要把他讲给美国人的故事转达给全世界，那么演讲稿必然要由最了解他的人来进行修缮。



在入主白宫的第一年，奥巴马发表的外交政策讲话次数创下了纪录，而且几乎都是在海外发表讲话。他和他的顾问所感觉到的紧迫性，不仅仅是讲述一个后布什时代的故事，而且是要促成一个全人类对后911时代需要采取什么行动的理解。他们相信，美国面临最大的问题布什传统的国家与国家之间的问题，而是惠及全球，并且需要全球合作的问题——气候变化、能源供应、摇摇欲坠的国家、防止核武器扩散。就是在这些问题上，他需要各个国家的公民和领导人的支持。

奥巴马展示出一种独特的能力来深入美国民众的内心信仰，给他们点燃希望。对于海外听众他也能产生同样的效果吗？奥巴马和其身边的幕僚认为，他的面孔（非白色）、他的故事，可以带领全世界人民进入更高一个层次。正如他在2007年所说：“我想，如果你可以告诉人们：‘我们在白宫有一位总统，他的祖母依然在住在维多利亚湖的一个小棚屋里，她的妹妹有一半印度尼西亚血统，丈夫是华裔加拿大人。’他们或许会觉得，这个人或许更了解我们的国家、我们的生活。的确如此。”竞选期间的经历加强和他的这种使命感。丹尼斯•罗斯在2008年夏天陪伴奥巴马前往柏林和其它欧洲主要城市，他说奥巴马所受到的近乎狂热的欢迎——实际上，可以说是自从威尔逊在1918年12月来到巴黎之后所受到最热烈欢迎的美国领导人——让这位候选人感到：“人们渴求这种领导模式，而我就能是这种领导者。”

奥巴马于2009年在布拉格发表了他的第一次外交政策演讲，主题是防止核武器扩散。乔治•W•布什几乎从未就核武器非扩散条约中美国的减少核武器库存问题费过嘴皮子，其它国家也因此顶多含糊其辞地表示与美国合作，打击核流氓，比如伊朗和朝鲜，或者倡议缔结新的协议来降低核武器的威胁。奥巴马提到，核武器非扩散问题，恰恰是一个新的领导人应当阐述的一个新的故事内容，因为这可以在冰封的海域中开辟一条通道。

布拉格的场景更像是一次集会，而不是演讲。一个阳光灿烂的春天下午，数量庞大的民众挤满了这座古老城市的市中心广场，奥巴马站在他们中间。挤满广场的年轻欧洲人狂热地拥护奥巴马的承诺。当他打开麦克风，他们挥舞美国小国旗，热烈地欢呼，总统几乎有点笑得合不拢嘴了。奥巴马的开场白和往常一样，介绍自己，说自己就是听众当中的一员。“几乎没有人，”他说，又是一片欢呼声，“能想象像我这样的人有一天会成为美国总统。”他们同样也经历了一段不可思议的里程，在几十年的残暴统治之后迎来了自由。奥巴马说：“我们今天在这里，因为有太多的人拒绝听从别人告诉他们，说这个世界不能改变。”冷战似乎永远不会结束，美国黑人所面对的限制似乎也永远无法突破。奥巴马颇为激动，他罕见地用食指在空中挥舞。

在长篇大论的开场白之后，奥巴马才提出演讲非同寻常的主题：“那么今天，我带着美国人的承诺，明确地寻求一个没有核武器世界的和平与安全。”总统继续说，当然，这个目标需要一代人，甚至更长久的努力。但是他断定，只要国家和人民决定改变自己的命运，这个目标就一定能实现。那些主张现实无法被我们的思想所左右的宿命论是“死敌”。奥巴马在布拉格所传达的核心思想并不是防止核扩散，而是一个超越自我、敢于相信自己的新开端。奥巴马在数千人的欢呼中说：“我们必需坚持‘是的，我们能做到’。”如果普通民众可以让希望和热情战胜悲观和冷漠，是的，我们能做到。

奥巴马列举出一系列承诺，包括美国将会降低核武器在其国家安全战略中的作用；与俄罗斯商谈武器削减计划；批准重要的条约。与此同时，各个国家需要协调一致，加强核武器非扩散条约的执行力度，合作打击违反条约内容的国家，建立国际核燃料银行。奥巴马转而谈起这项计划可能遭遇到的障碍：就在那一天，朝鲜试验了一个可以搭载核弹头的远程弹道导弹。他说，但是国家和人民必需搁置争议，去谋取共同的利益。让核武器从地球上小时是至高无上的国际利益所在。他的最后一句话“我们一起可以做到”的声音就像是牧师布道一般带有吟唱的色彩，在竞选的过程中，他一直充分利用这种语气的辉煌效果。



两个月之后，奥巴马在开罗发表了他最具雄心壮志、万众最为期待，以及在他的第一任期，或者到目前为止的总统职业中花费最多心血准备的外交政策演讲。2009年6月4日的演讲涉及到该地区几乎所有的敏感问题——恐怖主义、伊拉克战争、巴以关系、伊朗，但这些都不是它演讲的真正主题。在进入主题之前，奥巴马足足讲了15分钟。他首先谈到“美国与全世界穆斯林之间的紧张关系”，不仅仅是国家之间，也是人民之间。他做出了一个罕见的让步姿态：“剥夺众多穆斯林权利和机会的殖民主义，以及穆斯林占主体的国家往往被视为傀儡、对其自身意愿鲜有顾及的冷战，都加剧了这种紧张。”除了吉米•卡特这个可能的例外，奥巴马的所有前任从未公开承认过美国和西方的政策失误。共和党人说奥巴马这是一次“道歉之旅”。实际上，他是在向对方阐明他真的理解美国势力受众的感受，从而博得充满怀疑的外国听众的同情。

承认紧张关系的存在，就是为了战胜它。奥巴马继续说，“暴力极端分子”利用“少数但强大的穆斯林少数民族”制造冲突。911袭击和其它恐怖事件让一些美国人把伊斯兰教视为对西方和人类的“不可回避的敌人”，“这造成了更多的恐惧和不信任”。接下来就是开罗演讲的真正主题。他放慢了语速，强调接下来的每一个字：“只要我们之间的关系决定于我们之间的分歧，我们就会让那些播种仇恨而不是和平，宣扬冲突而不是合作的人得势，而合作会帮助将正义与繁荣带给所有人。我们必须打破这种怀疑与不和的恶性循环。”

与他在布拉格的演讲一样，奥巴马在开罗明白无误地说明了他的目的：“我来到这里是要在美国和穆斯林世界之间寻求一种以共同利益和相互尊重为基点的新开端──基于美国和伊斯兰教并不相互排斥、不必相互竞争的真情。”总统并没有提出某些新的政策，他与乔治•布什一起支持埃及总统侯赛因•穆巴拉克，他也没有能力超越前任的努力，为以色列和巴勒斯坦带来和平。他在布拉格和竞选期间所能做到的，是带来一种新的语调——他自己独有的语调。副国务卿、前白宫演讲稿撰写人安东尼•布林肯说：“语调不仅仅是一种形式，语调很重要，尤其是当你身处于一个特殊的环境，屈辱的历史让你的伤痛感油然而生。”

奥巴马因此特别留意“assalamu alaikum”（译者注，阿拉伯语“愿安拉赐你平安”）的正确发音，他不说“可兰经”，而是说“圣可兰”。开罗的听众与布拉格比起来不大兴奋，尤其是当奥巴马提到捍卫巴勒斯坦人的权利。但是他在这里也提到了有关一个不同的美国人的故事，以此来证明，美国并不是穆斯林世界所想象那那种“粗野的传统形象”。实际上，他本人，巴拉克•侯赛因•奥巴马，一个隶属于他们的世界、隶属于他自己的人，正在提出一个跨越双方巨大鸿沟的计划。

演讲中措辞最精妙的段落，无疑是奥巴马同等呼吁以色列和巴勒斯坦达成双方都认可的和解。几位官员告诉我，部分原因是这份演讲稿从未经过国务院审核，奥巴马无意中给美国安排了一个新的立场。他说美国并不承认以色列定居地的“合法性”，也不认为这是通往和平道路上的一个障碍。很多以色列人和亲以色列人士不愿承认奥巴马的假设，也就是让犹太人可以居住在以色列的理由是大屠杀，而不是他们与这片土地一千年来的纽带关系。但是，这些问题并不是关键所在，或者至少不是奥巴马的主题，他的主题是在这个错综复杂的问题上汇总双方各自的原则。每一方都要通过对方的角度来看待冲突，心理活动是对外交行为的暗示。奥巴马热情洋溢地给双方传达出一种平衡感——再没有更好的词语来描述他的姿态了。当他说“双方人民”时，他把两只手都举起来，好像是一架天平。

奥巴马2009年的出行计划，就是给全世界的听众讲解一个新的美国故事，不仅仅是布拉格和开罗，还有阿克拉和莫斯科。时任俄罗斯总理的弗拉基米尔•普京在听到奥巴马说“追逐权利已经不再是一个零和游戏时”，一定在暗自偷笑。实际上，奥巴马内心坚信，国际社会新出现的这些问题让国家之间的合作更关乎国家利益，而不仅仅是一首浪漫的诗歌（当然，威尔逊也说过类似的话）。2009年联合国大会上的致辞中，“让步”的内容就是对这种观点的一个实质性姿态。

12月，奥巴马发表了一次计划外的演讲——在他被授予诺贝尔和平奖仪式上的演讲。或许这是一个他可以任意选择阐述自己感兴趣话题的机会。作为曾经的法律学教授，奥巴马与他在开罗发表演讲时一样，根据特殊区别理论组织发言的内容，但是用来表述其观点的语言似乎模糊了核心内容。但是，奥斯陆的演讲传达出一个非常明确的概念，就像奥巴马曾经在教室里的授课一样。他说，哲学家和政治家一直试图通过“正义战争”的理论来遏制暴力，但是20世纪的“全面战争”概念已经让前述理论基本被废弃。我们成立了联合国这样的组织，试图结束国家之间的战争，但是这种“旧的组织架构在新的威胁面前无所适从”。总统的发言与威尔逊和他所无限敬仰的雷茵霍尔德•尼布尔的理论相距甚远。但是，他说：“这个道理必需和另一个现实共存，那就是，无论多么正义的战争，都是人类的悲剧。”实际上，一个领导人的“消极能力”——用约翰•济慈的话来说——能同时容纳两种矛盾的理念，的确是很罕见。

本•罗德斯提到，奥巴马在诺贝尔颁奖仪式上的致辞，“非常强硬地”把战争描述成一个悲剧。在之后的演讲中，即使对那些“热烈欢呼美国军事行动”的听众谈到使用武力的问题，奥巴马“拒绝美化战争，而是一直在强调战争的悲剧性质”。当然，在这一点上，他的情绪与国内人民在伊拉克战争之后的痛楚感受一致。尽管如此，在之后的几年里，奥巴马一次又一次地被要求向美国民众解释，究竟为什么要走上扩张和敌对的道路，“消极能力”已经不再是一个可以随手拈来的概念了。在这些演讲中，奥巴马努力在寻找一种可以像威尔逊或者布什那种具有说服力的语言，同时还要避免他自己厌恶的措辞方式。

以客观的标准来看，诺贝尔演讲体现了奥巴马个人的远见卓识。他在临近结尾处说：“我们不需要认为人类是完美的，完美到相信人类所处的境遇是无可挑剔的程度。”这里，奥巴马使用了一个他在日后会频繁使用的比喻——同时出现“现实”和“本应”两个词。他说，领导力来自艰苦的现实，走向伟大的思想——走向“每个人的灵魂深处时刻迸射的神圣火花”。奥巴马实际上是想让这份荣誉变得没有那么崇高，从而证明自己是配得上的。



到2009年底，奥巴马完成了向全世界介绍自己的任务，开始着手兜售新的外交政策。这些政策基于合作的思想，名义上的目的是解决国际问题、直面敌人、缓和美国权势在某些情况下带来的危害，以及公开承认这种权势的力所不及之处。向欢呼鱼跃的人群传道的时代已经结束了。他之后所发表的主要外交政策演讲都是在国内，目的是与美国民众分享一系列的政策，并赢得他们的支持。

首当其冲的是奥巴马在2009年12月1日西点军校发表的演讲，内容是针对阿富汗。以往的演讲都有大段不着边际的开场白，但是这一次的内容既清醒又具体。奥巴马和他的团队几个月以来纠结于阿富汗的未来计划，现在，他宣布将增兵3万，镇压当地的暴乱分子，然后在18个月之后召集回国。一取一舍的计划让鹰派和鸽派同时大失所望。他试图让这种带有反对伊拉克战争、反对乔治•布什过分依赖武力色彩的决定站得住脚，说：“在阿富汗和巴基斯坦，我们的安全遭到严重的威胁。”——好像在伊拉克就没有危险一样。

说服人们看到让一场已经胶着了7年的战争再次卷土重来的好处，的确是太难了，军校的学员们怀着敬畏之心，庄严地听着，没有表现出任何喧嚣的热情。但是奥巴马所面临的深层次问题是，他的目标听众——美国民众，不是海外的仰慕者——希望听到他如何挽救崩溃的经济。他说，派往阿富汗的军队数量不会太多，“因为我最有兴趣建设的国家是美国”。所以，奥巴马似乎认同，他的国内政策和国际目标是一种零和的关系。如果是这样，那可是个新闻。奥巴马在竞选期间主张加倍海外援助，认为加强那些存在内部宗派冲突、极端主义思想和公共健康威胁的弱国的力量，关乎国家利益。但这都是2008年经济衰退之前的事了。美国已经不能再经历一次奥巴马所主张的外交政策了——或者说，美国民众也不打算为此支付任何费用了。奥巴马因此只好用一个贬义的“国家建设”措辞来描述他曾经主张的思想。

本•罗德斯说，他告诉那些认为奥巴马不应该给阿富汗驻军限定具体时间的批评者，“如果不让美国民众感觉到每况愈下，你就不会得到足够的支持来执行这项政策。”换句话说，奥巴马不得不提出一项他或许并不认可的政策，如果他认为这有机会让美国在一个艰难的问题上达成共识。他已经遇到了一些语言方面的障碍，让他无法改变政治局面。选民不买账，他干脆就不提建议。罗德斯说：“这种微妙的平衡，目的是通过表明我们的有限的能力来争取足够的时间和资源。从修辞学上来看，做到这一点很难。”

与此相比，2010年8月奥巴马宣布伊拉克军事行动结束的讲话就像是他的辉煌时刻，总统成功兑现了他在竞选期间的一个承诺。他的举止、措辞极为冷静。他坐在椭圆形办公室的办公桌后面，他提到，就是在这张桌子上，布什总统宣布战争的开始。他把双手交叉放在身前，第一句话似乎就像是在履行一个仪式——“我们需要重建我们的国家”。他提到了战争的痛苦和经济衰退，伊拉克战争耗空了国库、带来了“紧张的”国际关系、“检验”了我们“内部的团结”。奥巴马承认国内筋疲力尽的状况：“在暴风骤雨之中，试图建设未来的努力……似乎是我们力所不及的事情。”他很快补充到，其实并布什的，因为我们正在缩减这些劳民伤财行动的规模。奥巴马再一次用到了他在威尔逊中心的比喻，但表达的是不同的意思：“是时候翻开新的一页了。”他指的是从海外回归本土。



奥巴马阳光灿烂的演说辞中所浮现出的第一丝阴影，来自国土前线，但是他不久之后就发现自己在思考海外政策的局限性。他曾经相信自己可以帮助以色列和巴勒斯坦打破僵局，就像他在开罗演讲中所说，如果双方都承认对方的合法地位和要求。但这最终还是一厢情愿。直到2010年，奥巴马的中东地区特使乔治•米切尔无法在和平谈判上取得进展，这件事情算是明确下来了。当年1月，奥巴马接受《时代周刊》的采访，他承认自己“冒失地认为有能力”让双方各退一步。如果他理解当地局势的复杂程度，“或许不会报有过高的期望”。

布拉格演讲之后的第二年，奥巴马在防止核扩散问题上取得了重要的成功。他在2010年“核峰会”上取得了《反核武器扩散条约》执行层面的重大进展，与俄罗斯达成了削减核武器的一致意见。更重要的是，说服了包括俄罗斯和中国在内的其它国家同意对伊朗的严厉制裁。这项制裁一直持续到现在，在某种程度上促成了目前遏制德黑兰核浓缩计划的谈话。但是奥巴马在布拉格所展望的宏伟计划却搁浅了。他本来期望通过与民众直接对话来改变政策制定的方向，因为这些人可以转而影响当地的政策制定者。但是在这个问题上，奥巴马找错了谈话对象——欧洲人已经对他表示了支持，而发展中国家的民众对于《反核武器扩散条约》的执行根本不感兴趣。世界上其它国家的领导人不为所动。奥巴马的首席核谈判专家罗伯特•艾恩宏说：“事先没有沟通过的国家领导人嘴上说，如果美国和其它国家解除自身的武装，他们也会加紧去核化的进程。”美国几十年来不愿削减核武器库存和改变其核方向的态度，是其不采取行动的“方便的借口”。奥巴马在美国方面说服了一些人，但是他需要的合作伙伴没有加入。

所有关键角色几乎都认同奥巴马所坚信的目标。尽管俄罗斯大肆兜售“重启”的概念，但弗拉基米尔•普京明确表示，他对于奥巴马所倡导的进一步削减核武器计划没有兴趣。国会中的共和党没有批准旨在减少核武器的新的削减战略武器条约，并且直言不讳地拒绝考虑其它类似条约。甚至总统自己的高级军事安全官员，尽管参与了核武器战略的每一步改变，但他们都承认这听起来似乎和布什的政策没什么区别。依赖于多的政治家和思想家都认为布拉格讲话是充满激情、大胆的政治声明，但它所达到的真正目的小于奥巴马的期望。
开罗讲话的目的也没有达到，但是以不同的方式。奥巴马基于“共同利益、相互尊重”基础上的“新开始”依然还在当地回响；奥巴马的个人魅力，以及美国的受欢迎度，在之后的几个月持续升温。但是当人们发现奥巴马政府对于当地的政策其实与布什政府如出一辙，与他的讲话内容判若云泥时，改变的希望逐渐退却了。奥巴马依然在支持当地的独裁政府，伊拉克依然有美国驻军，他早已不再试图促成巴以和平。几个月的时间里，他的支持率陡降。（他在伊斯兰世界中依然比乔治•W•布什受欢迎，但远低于比尔•克林顿，他因积极参与巴以问题而广受敬仰。）

开罗演讲的失败之处，在于奥巴马富有远见的语言与他手中可供使用的方法之间的差距。从这个意义上讲，本•罗德斯并不承认这是一次失败，但他的确有些后悔。他说：“我们让听众保有过高的期望，我们可以使用的资源比较紧张。如果我们身处另外一个时代，你或许会看到他宣布一些不可思议、野心勃勃的发展计划。我们已经尽力尝试了所有的可能。”奥巴马在开罗演讲中没有提出任何政策解决方案，也没有任何“交待”，除了“企业家峰会”。但是紧张的资源并没有让奥巴马缩减他的改革设想，也没有让听众降低期望。大规模改革的希望似乎不仅仅依赖政策的变化，而且取决于奥巴马超自然的变化能力，也就是让美国的声音变成全世界的声音。这种在思想和感受层面的变化最终会带来政策层面的变化。

但是，演讲不能充饥。国家安全委员会前战略计划主任肖恩•布里姆利说：“白宫有那么一小群人，希望总统能通过演讲来制定政策。演讲的确能说明一些问题，描绘某些前景，但演讲与行动之间有什么关系呢？”两年时间过去了，国家安全委员会还没有出台任何在开罗演讲中承诺目标的细节计划。布里姆利说，他经常被政府内部缺少跟进的行动所阻碍。2011年初，他从五角大楼被调往白宫，专门关注政策执行的流程。布里姆利记得曾经对一位朋友说：“我想看看亚洲战略的机密文件。”那位同事“看着我，就像看着一个傻瓜。他说：‘你去看看2009年总统在东京发表的演讲。’”奥巴马在这次演讲中澄清，美国并不会“遏制”中国。



2011年初，一个在早年前圣诞节袜筒里只会收到煤块礼物的总统，终于得到了历史赐予的一份大礼——阿拉伯春天。在开罗演讲中，奥巴马仅仅简单地提到阿拉伯世界渴望挣脱独裁的束缚，但像乔治•W•布什一样，并没有承诺采取行动打击独裁者。但是现在，奥巴马带领着成千上万年年轻人走上阿拉伯世界的街头。2011年2月初，奥巴马仅凭自己的直觉，没有听取他那些相对务实的顾问的意见，甚至包括国务卿克林顿的意见，呼吁埃及的独裁统治者侯赛因•穆巴拉克下台，并插手安排了他的解职日程。在早期令人陶醉的日子里，阿拉伯春天像极了1989年的布拉格春天，但它毕竟布什。2月，利比亚强人穆阿迈尔•卡扎菲出动军队镇压武装叛军和手无寸铁的平民。

奥巴马首次遭遇到他在诺贝尔颁奖仪式上涉及的问题：针对那些对美国没有直接威胁的独裁行为，何时使用武力。利比亚把选择摆了在他的面前，他非常清楚，面对卡扎菲的军队而行袖手旁观和一厢情愿地认为美国的炸弹可以搞定一切的想法，都极为危险。在他最亲密的顾问强烈建议下，奥巴马授权开始空中打击。3月28日，敌对行为开始的9天之后，他向美国民众发表了一次所谓的“汇报”——更像是宣读一个公告，而不是一个演讲。

奥巴马在国防大学发表演讲，两面美国国旗垂在他的身后。他平静地讲述了卡扎菲的暴行和盟国的一些回应。他并没有发布威尔逊式的武装动员，恰恰相反，奥巴马给美国的军事行动设置了很多限制条件：美国将在“行动的第一线扮演一个支持性的角色”，与其它国家合作，并逐渐把主动权转交给盟友。奥巴马说：“的确，美国无法在任何一个暴行发生地都采取军事行动。鉴于行动的成本和干涉的风险，我们必须衡量自身的利益所在。”这时，奥巴马做出一个具有个人特点的动作，或许也是下意识地。他放低音量，好像是整个演说乐章中最弱的一个小节，似乎是在强调接下来的每一个字：“但是，这并不是永远不采取行动捍卫正义的原因所在。”

这句话是演讲的核心。一方面给出了明确的方案，包含在“保护的责任”教义中——奥巴马并没有明说，也就是国家有不可推卸的责任来干涉海外大规模的暴行。另一方面也顾及到了国内怀疑的声音，包括筋疲力尽或者漠不关心的心态。奥巴马承诺，他不会试图让比利亚的政权更迭。奥巴马说：“坦率地讲”，似乎这样的提醒很有必要，“我们在伊拉克毫无斩获。”他声称遏制卡扎菲对美国有“重要的战略意义”，他还试图解释意义何在。他说，大屠杀将会导致一大批难民，潜在威胁到埃及和突尼斯的稳定。他给人一种感觉，似乎并不是在按照道德良知来采取行动，而是必须要用有限的国家安全词汇让美国民众接受他的决定。奥巴马说：“在利比亚这个国家，在目前这个时刻”，所有的因素汇总起来，让干涉行动既具有道德方面的正确性，又有具体的可操作性。演讲听起来就像最高法院的判决书，在没有判例的情况下斟字酌句。

在开罗的演讲中，奥巴马表示愿意与对方国家和人民建立相互尊重的关系。但是，阿拉伯春天让中东地区的人民与他们的领导人反目成仇。奥巴马在前期积累了太多的美国声望，对于伊斯兰世界，他必须要澄清美国支持领导人还是支持人民。2011年5月，他发表了一个有关中东问题的演讲，这次演讲的地点不是在当地，而是在国务院，他力图向美国民众解释政府对阿拉伯春天的态度。他说：“几十年来，美国一直在追求当地的核心利益”——看空、反核扩散、以色列与巴勒斯坦的和平。“我们还将继续这些工作，并且坚信美国的利益并不与当地人民的希望相抵触。”他对利比亚也做过类似的表态——美国追求自身的利益。他继续说：“但是，我们必须承认，仅仅基于这些狭隘追求利益行为的战略无法填饱饥饿的肚子，也无法让人们畅所欲言。”

在“但是”之后，奥巴马开始使用他驾轻就熟的套路：“几十年来我们接受了这个地区目前的状态，我们终于有机会让世界变成它本应的样子。”世界已经发生了变化，美国利益已经与普通人的抱负紧密联系在一起。美国在当地对“政治和经济改革的支持并不是次要的”，而是“最首要的任务”。奥巴马接下来发誓要解决他一直在回避的问题，他明确地说，美国不但会支持新兴的民主运动，而且会严惩独裁者。他断言“大规模的逮捕和暴行违背了巴林人民与生俱来的权利”，并且说政府“必须”要与反对派对话。但是奥巴马并没有说如果对方不采取行动，美国将会如何。仅仅在5天之前，美国的独裁盟友沙特阿拉伯和阿联酋向巴林派兵，镇压国内骚乱。事实迫使奥巴马在“利益”与“价值观”之间做出明确的选择，而他以前并不认为这很有必要。经过内部激烈的争论之后，政府倒向利益一方，发表了一个温和的表态，对巴林人民的政治权利表示担忧。

国务院的讲话比开罗演讲包含了更多实质性的内容，包括来自国际货币基金组织和世界银行贷款的紧急资金援助，以支持埃及和突尼斯艰苦的民主转换进程，还包括贸易伙伴关系的承诺。对于一个面对财政预算危机的国家来说，不啻于雪中送炭。但是这番讲话让白宫内外期望总统热情洋溢地回应阿拉伯春天的人不免有些失望。开罗演讲并没有迫使奥巴马在人民和政权中做出选择，也不需要他掏出真金白银来兑现他的承诺。现在，他不能用一贯的态度对待人民，也没有足够的力量支持政权。

奥巴马本不希望被卷入中东地区的漩涡。正如几位白宫助手所提醒我的，纵观整个世界，奥巴马在他2009年演讲中所展望的未来，其实已经到来了。政府急于推行“亚洲轴心”计划，并且继续向美国人和亚洲人表明它正在做这件事。2011年11月，奥巴马终于开始了他多次推迟的亚太区访问日程。在雅加达，他被当作是载誉回归的英雄，他在那里发表了重要讲话，还在堪培拉对澳大利亚议会致辞。奥巴马宣布：“战争的大潮已经退去，美国正在展望一个我们必须共同起来的未来。”中东的战争浪潮有起有落，在那里搞建设，尤其是国家建设，恐怕不是个安全的建议。但亚洲不是这样，奥巴马说：“在这里，我们看到了未来。”他接下来着重强调讲话的核心内容：“作为总统，我在这里宣布一个经过深思熟虑的战略决定。作为一个太平洋国家，美国将会在改变地区局势和未来方面扮演一个更重要、更长期的角色。坚持我们的核心原则，与我们的盟友保持紧密的合作关系。”

亚洲讲话的本意是表示资源和关注点的改变。但是，这不行呀。美国刚刚从伊斯兰世界的冲突里抽身而出，阿拉伯春天衍生出的问题又把美国人牢牢地吸附住。利比亚的干涉行动算是成功了，但利比亚这个国家失败了。2012年9月，美国大使克里斯多夫•史蒂文斯在班加西被害。至少对美国人来讲，担心整个地区会陷入宗派混战的局面终于变成了现实。这是奥巴马两周后在联合国全体大会上致辞的主题。他毫不客气地对各国领导人说，班加西的暴力行为“是对联合国基本理念的公然挑衅”。所有成员国都必须“宣布联合国绝不容忍这样的暴力”。他还会继续保持美国对国际问题的参与度，但是他还提到“必须保证我们的公民的安全，我们的努力必须要被当地人所接受”。候选人奥巴马说服了美国民众，如果他们能改变对外的腔调和姿态，他们就能赢得那些仰望直升飞机的孩子们的信任。现在，他把矛头指向世界领导人，说他们才是应该改变腔调和姿态的人。总统似乎是在转达美国民众的不耐烦和怨气，或许他想说的是：中期选举还有6个星期就要开始了。



当然，奥巴马赢得了中期选举。他的第二次就职演讲显然比第一次更加克制。有关外交政策的简要介绍仅关注了气候变化和能源安全两个新问题，阿拉伯世界每况愈下的政治局面只字未提。毫无疑问，阿拉伯世界逐渐陷入了暴力和镇压的局面。到2013年夏末，只有突尼斯在向多元化和政治稳定迈进。埃及已经恢复军政统治，叙利亚变成了杀戮之地。高层官员多次要求武装叙利亚叛军，都被奥巴马拒绝。但是，他在未经仔细思考的情况下公开声明，如果大马士革动用化学武器，他将采取行动。于是，8月21日清晨，大马士革果真这样做了，大马士革郊区1000明平民死亡。现在，奥巴马不得不进行干预，并划出一条红线。在此之前，他似乎一直对冲突抱着事不关己的态度。8月31日和9月10日，奥巴马试图阐释他对叙利亚的政策，这两次演讲可以说是他任职期间最痛苦、最没有说服力的演讲了。

第一次演讲奥巴马站在白宫的草坪上，旁边是副总统乔•拜登。奥巴马宣布了一个不大常见的决定，以表示政府内部在恐惧中的团结，以及对敌对势力进行打击的一致意见。总统的话语似乎带有难以平息的怒气：“在一个充满危险的世界里，我们必须要面对这样的威胁。”实际上，这里面有相对比较温和的潜台词：奥巴马准备使用武力，但仅仅针对这个威胁，在目前这个时刻，其它情况不适用。他同时提出了一些用来抚慰听众的限制性条件，这种做法现在已经变成了他的第二天性：没有地面部队，设置具体期限等等。

接下来风向大转：“我将会向美国人民在国会的代表寻求授权动用武力。”奥巴马知道他并不需要授权，他也并不打算得到授权，但是民意调查结果显示，如果国会授权，民众会更加支持军事行动。他的幕僚长丹尼斯•麦克多诺劝说他让国会投票。当然，奥巴马知道两党不愿意就轰炸叙利亚的决定投票，而且他相信很多共和党人早就打算削弱他作为总司令官的权威。他给出了明确的忠告：“我请各位国会议员要考虑一些比党派分歧和政治斗争更重要的一些因素。”

总统在叙利亚问题上一直在走背字——本有机会改变局势的时候拒绝采取行动，之后又宣布了一条他本以为绝对安全的底线。但他的确也在面临一些反对的声音，有人把他视为——实际上也在这样对待他——一个根本不合法的人物。这不仅仅是奥巴马面对根深蒂固反对的国内政策层面的问题，国会民主党几乎一致反对他改变核武器会谈条件、对中东和平的预期、试图与伊朗接触，以及他使用“共同利益和相互尊重”的措辞等做法。这有损于美国总统的形象。罗德斯说：“大部分人或许没有意识到，缺少了那种民众齐聚国旗之下的传统感觉，国际关系将会遭到侵蚀。冷战时期总统对全国讲话的那种感觉已经不复存在了，你看到的只有巴拉克•奥巴马代表总统职位的讲话。”如果一个总统不能代表他的国家，他如何改变国家的态度呢？全世界的人都看到，奥巴马在任职第一个星期就宣布要关闭关塔那摩监狱，但现在一切保持原样。实际上，奥巴马已经不能代表美国了。

8月31日的演讲之所以失败，是因为奥巴马已经无法让冷漠的民众团结一致，也不能有效遏制国会的敌意。越来越明显，他无法赢得授权使用武力的投票。与此同时，俄罗斯向巴沙尔•阿萨德施加压力，说如果叙利亚清除化学武器库存，奥巴马会同意暂停军事打击。9月10日，奥巴马大步走出椭圆形办公室，来到白宫东厢的一个小讲台。为了表示坚决的态度，他的第一句话不是呼吁采取行动，而是解释以往不采取行动的原因：“我多次拒绝在叙利亚采取军事行动，因为用武力无法彻底平息其它国家的内战，尤其是我们有伊拉克和阿富汗的十年经历之后。”他继续说，此处非彼处，此时非彼时。与以往的讲话不同，他用严密的逻辑和激动的情绪来说明为什么化学武器攻击会导致军事回应。但是他又不能，或者不想，把话题引得更深来得出必须采取军事行动的结论。讲话中最荡气回肠的部分是他发誓，尽管他计划的军事行动“有明确的结束期限”，但绝不会不痛不痒。奥巴马宣布，美国“绝不做不痛不痒的事”。

接下来又是一个风向大转：总统分享了俄罗斯的建议。他说，鉴于这个提议，他已经要求国会推迟投票。对于一个不想投票决定使用武力的国会，和一个不打算按自己意愿行事的总统来说，俄罗斯不啻于一个救世主。这一刻，凝聚了过去四年半以来积累的仇恨。一个凭借改变的倡议、凭借海内外“是的，我们可以做到”的口号起家的总统，现在面对一群无精打采、脾气暴躁的民众、一个公开表示敌意而且呈分裂态势的国会，以及一个分崩离析的中东，已经完全丧失的前进的动力。他被迫接过另一位领导人丢过来的救命绳，而这个人递给他的下一件东西将是一个绞索。



在第二任期里，奥巴马几乎没有发表任何值得回忆的外交政策演讲，他发现做的越来越多的事情是捍卫自己使用武力和胁迫手段的决定，这个主题与他的演讲天赋并不搭配。尽管如此，他在去年很幸运地选对了一些敌人。轰炸伊斯兰国在伊拉克和叙利亚的极端分子的决定得到了国会和民众的欢迎，对俄罗斯入侵乌克兰采取严厉的制裁也颇受称道。与此同时，奥巴马依然试图以他的外交政策大方向为依托，寻求使用武力的机会。

2014年5月，奥巴马回到西点军校，在他2009年发表有关阿富汗讲话的地方，谈论美国领导世界的含义。他的手势和语言依然极为节俭——皱起的嘴唇表示思考，轻握的拳头表示确信，交叉的双手表示平静。他依然很含蓄。

奥巴马试图把他的美国领导权概念，放在两种过于僵化、不能适用于当前混乱世界的思想体系之间。他说，“那些自以为是的现实主义者”坚持认为外国的冲突“不是我们要解决的事情”。“很多美国人都秉持”这种观点。另一方面，“左翼和有意的干涉主义者”认为“美国对叙利亚的暴行和俄罗斯的挑衅不采取行动，不仅违背了我们的良心，而且会招致未来更进一步的挑衅。”奥巴马经常用卡通式的词汇来描述这种矛盾，人们或许认为这种公平、明了的总结应该是由学者，而不是由政客做出的。这让我们看到他内心根深蒂固的学术冷静。

奥巴马接下来提出了他的主题，也就是美国“在一个越来越自由、越来越包容的世界中的持久自身利益”，但是过于频繁地诉诸武力来达到这些目标。他说：“自二战以来，一些让我们付出最惨重代价的错误不是来自于我们的克制，而是来自于我们过于草率地采取军事行动。奥巴马对军事行动效果的怀疑态度帮助他入主白宫，从诺贝尔颁奖典礼开始，他一直在讨论这个话题。他提到，当美国的“核心利益”遇到威胁，就必须要准备用武力还击，而且“如果有必要，可以采取单方行动”。但是当面对“全球问题”时，比如大规模的暴行，或者“让世界走向危险”的危机时，美国应当“动员盟友采取一致行动”，动用外交手段和武力手段。可以想象，如果奥巴马在1994年当选美国总统，他一定不会对卢旺达采取行动，除非他能得到像利比亚行动时那些盟友的支持。所以，这就是利益和价值观等级制度的明确解释，至少是武力方面的解释。

在奥巴马和盘托出他演讲的结论之后，他再一次使用了几乎已经变成他的口头禅的公式化表达，领导全世界的责任感需要美国把世界当成自己的家，当成它本应出现的面貌，“应当由希望，而不是由恐惧来主宰。”他谈到了“国际道德准则”、“多方渠道”、联合国维和任务和“保护地球的全球合作框架”。人们可以看到那个2007年夏天站在新罕布什尔草坪上的人宣布“我要站在联合国面前说：‘美国回来了！’”奥巴马的全球视野并不狭隘，尽管遭受了无数的挫折，他依然相信着。

但是这又有什么关系呢？军校学院和参加毕业仪式的家长们在总统的几个需要鼓掌的高音处如死水一半沉静，CNN说这场演讲是“冰冷的”。2009年以来发生的变化并不是奥巴马认为可以影响他激励面前听众能力的因素。不仅如此，奥巴马自己似乎也觉得失去了对自己演讲技能的信心。演讲是发言者与听众之间的一次交易，交易过程中，一些关键信息可能会流失。奥巴马的话不再具有充电的效果，人们很难回忆起他曾经掀起的那股狂热。

今天，我该如何看待这个几年前用他的声音、他的面孔、他的故事激励数百万美国和全世界民众的人？我也是这些人其中之一，我不能把错误归咎于奥巴马的幕僚过于相信他的人格力量，因为我也为其倾倒。我依然仰慕奥巴马，但我强烈地感觉到民众情绪的低落，不仅仅是总统身边的人。塔利尔广场、巴林珍珠广场和身处其它阿拉伯世界伟大场所的人们所迸发出的辉煌希望，已经蒸发殆尽，似乎从未出现过。与我们曾经天真的设想不同，语言是那么的脆弱，现实是那么的复杂。或许奥巴马和他的幕僚应该知道，或许他和他们应该更加谨慎。但是恰恰是因为他点燃了一些希望，美国人才把他请上总统的位置。最后，他没能成功地让这个世界按照“应该”的方式运转，不仅仅是他个人的悲剧，也是我们所有人的悲剧。



原文：

The first time President Barack Obama addressed the United Nations General Assembly, in 2009, he openly acknowledged what virtually everyone in the audience felt: that America under his predecessor, George W. Bush, had often acted “unilaterally, without regard for the interests of others.” This, he said, had proved self-defeating, for “in the year 2009 — more than at any point in human history — the interests of nations and peoples are shared.” The dominant metaphor of his address was the “bargain” that America was prepared to strike with other nations on the great global issues of nuclear nonproliferation, climate change, economic development, and the like.

Obama was interrupted by applause 12 times.

In September 2014, Obama delivered his sixth speech to the United Nations. His hair had gone gray; his long, narrow face had become a few notches more taut. He had a very different message to deliver than he had at the outset of his tenure. The presiding metaphor of this speech was the “crossroads” at which the world stood — between “war and peace” and between “fear and hope.” He had come to lay down a challenge to the world. The United States, he declared, was prepared to play its traditional role as the guardian of global order.

“We will impose a cost on Russia for aggression” in Ukraine, he said. The United States would organize a coalition to mount a military campaign against the jihadi “network of death” known as the Islamic State. Yet it would be up to others, and above all to the Muslim world, to change the conditions that had allowed terrorism to flourish. “If young people live in places where the only option is between the dictates of a state, or the lure of an extremist underground,” he said, “no counterterrorism strategy can succeed.” He did not say, and did not need to say, that this was precisely the choice all too many of them now had to make.

This time, the president was not interrupted even once for applause.

The world that Barack Obama confronts today is a barely recognizable version of the one he faced, or perhaps thought he was facing, in 2009. To go back and read the foreign-policy addresses Obama has delivered since the 2008 campaign is to witness a struggle between strong a priori convictions and a tidal wave of adversity. The president who once made an open-handed offer to the world now delivers a harsh challenge. The president who once fixed his gaze, and that of his audience, on the global problems looming on the horizon now speaks of urgent crises requiring instant action. The tribune of hope and change now speaks modestly of hitting singles and doubles. The president has been well and truly mugged by reality.

One could still hear, in the September speech, echoes from that earlier time when Obama’s hair was dark and his hopes were bright. “We reject fatalism or cynicism when it comes to human affairs,” he said, clenching his left hand as he often unconsciously does at moments of conviction; “we choose to work for the world as it should be.” And he turned, figuratively, to speak to “young people across the Muslim world,” as he had in his 2009 speech in Cairo, seeking to conjure a different kind of future by addressing those who would build that future. Obama said the words; but it feels as if Obama only wishes to believe what he once firmly believed.

Conventional wisdom has it that a figure who had seemed a classic “idealist” in foreign-policy terms has come to savor the bitter truths of realism. This is much too reductive. Obama has today — as he did at the outset of his tenure — the ingrained skepticism about the capacity of military force to produce political change that we associate with realism. At the same time, he retains the faith in the instruments of diplomacy, of personal sincerity and sweet reason, that is a hallmark of idealism. It is, however, a much-battered faith. Obama’s trajectory is that of a gifted orator who learned over time that he had put far too much store in speech itself.

Michael Waldman, a speechwriter in the Clinton White House, observes that great foreign-policy speeches almost always turn on “a universalization of American values.” In the speech in which Woodrow Wilson famously declared that “the world must be made safe for democracy” — a speech designed to persuade Americans to go to war in Europe — the 28th president went on to say lines that are far less often quoted. “Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty,” he continued. “We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion.... We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind.” FDR and Truman, Kennedy and Reagan, struck the same chords of transcendent righteousness. A supreme arrogance always lurked an inch beneath that swelling tide. It was left to George W. Bush, with his distinctive mixture of moral certainty, brusque dismissiveness, and bellicosity, to bring those harsh notes to the surface. Barack Obama thus followed the president who gave American universalism a bad name. He had been elected in part in the hope that he would tame that reckless tendency. This might be a solid basis for policy, but not for rhetoric. How was this extremely gifted orator to craft great speeches the theme of which would be the resistance of that impulse?

Obama’s foreign-policy speeches, both during the campaign and in the White House, have been written by Benjamin Rhodes, now the deputy national security advisor for strategic communications. In a recent interview, I asked Rhodes how he had dealt with that problem. The “disconnect” between George Bush’s soaring oratory and policies widely seen as reckless and aggressive, Rhodes said, had “devalued” foreign-policy rhetoric itself. Obama had to look elsewhere for the kind of language Wilson, and all those who followed him, had used to speak both to Americans and to the world. “One of his unique attributes,” Rhodes went on, “is the ability to both speak to the universalization of American values and also to meet international audiences where they are, to show a degree of empathy for their worldviews, to demonstrate that he is a person capable of standing in their shoes and looking at America through their eyes. That’s an asset that we sought to protect.”

That is a very unusual asset for an American president; yet many voters plainly found Obama’s commitment to building bridges between the United States and other nations a desperately needed antidote to Bush’s hectoring moralism, just as they had once found Jimmy Carter’s transparency the cure for Richard Nixon’s poisonous darkness. The change that Obama promised was not simply a change of policy but of tone and posture — even of consciousness. He made this explicit in one of the very first foreign-policy speeches of his first campaign, delivered at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 1, 2007.

The leitmotif of the speech was a strikingly literary one, as seemed appropriate for a politician who had come to public notice through an evocative memoir. “It is time to turn the page,” Obama said. “It is time to write a new chapter in our response to 9/11.” He was challenging not just the Bush administration’s war on terror but the narrative of America that Bush had implicitly composed. That narrative, Obama said, had increased the pool of terrorists, alienated America from its allies, and given democracy a bad name. America needed to tell a new story to the world, and to itself. He illustrated his point with a vivid image. As a senator, he said, he had seen the desperate faces of refugees and flood victims from the door of a helicopter. Here he paused and pursed his lip, either because he was thinking while he spoke or because he wished to convey the impression of active thought. “And it makes you stop and wonder,” he said. “When those faces look up at an American helicopter, do they feel hope, or do they feel hate?”

I happened to be sitting in the audience, and was struck — and impressed — by the weight Obama had given to the way America was seen. He was arguing that, in the post-9/11 era, America’s ability to advance its national interests depended not simply on fashioning strong alliances but on changing the way ordinary people thought about the United States. This was the first foreign-policy speech Ben Rhodes had written; he had channeled Obama’s rare sensitivity to what it means to be on the receiving end of American power — a product of the candidate’s years living abroad — as well as a temperament finely attuned to the thoughts and beliefs of others. Little of this made it into the reporting on the speech, which, to the immense frustration of Obama's advisors, focused almost entirely on a passage in which the candidate had sought to dispose of lingering questions about his willingness to use force by asserting that if he had “actionable intelligence about high-value targets” in Pakistan, and President Pervez Musharraf refused to act, “we will.” The press knew the public mood better than the Obamians did, for the issue has dogged his presidency ever since. To this day, his worldview is assessed on the single question of when and where he is prepared to use force.

As a campaign speaker, though, Obama took America by storm, miraculously recasting the most divisive issues, including race relations, as occasions for national reconciliation. This young and untested figure persuaded first Democrats, and then the American people, that he was the man to turn the page. His inaugural speech was dedicated to the idea of a new beginning, both at home and abroad. Speaking of earlier generations — and leaving the listener to make the contrast with George W. Bush — Obama said, “They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use. Our security emanates from the justness of our cause; the force of our example; the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.” America would put aside the bellicose self-righteousness of the last eight years.

When Obama took office in January 2009, Rhodes became his master wordsmith. Rhodes had no foreign-policy expertise, but he was an important member of an inner circle very much determined to preserve Obama’s prophetic vein from the conventionalizing forces of politics and policy — to protect that asset, as he put it. “Ben would always consult the idealists,” says Dennis Ross, who served in Obama’s State Department and White House. One of those idealists, Michael McFaul, a National Security Council director who later became ambassador to Russia, confirms that. “Ben held the pen, and we kibitzed,” McFaul says. “I kibitzed on every major speech.”

That kibitzing, however, rarely extended beyond the White House. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates had little input. As one former senior State Department official told me, “The White House folks would ask us a question or two, clearly designed to check out something. But we were not given language to consider. This was very tightly controlled by that most controlling White House.” If the speeches were to project not just Obama’s policies but also his voice and his story — if they were to carry to the world the message he had delivered to the American people — then they had to be shaped by the small group that understood him best.

In his first year in office, Obama delivered a remarkable number of foreign-policy speeches, and almost all of them abroad. The imperative that he and his advisors felt was not only to introduce a post-Bush narrative but also a post-post-9/11 understanding of what needed to be done in the world. They believed that the great issues confronting the United States were not traditional state-to-state questions, but new ones that sought to advance global goods and required global cooperation — climate change, energy supply, weak and failing states, nuclear nonproliferation. It was precisely on such issues that one needed to enlist the support of citizens as well as leaders.

Obama had shown that he had a unique capacity to reach Americans at the level of deep belief and to inspire them with hope. Could he not do the same with listeners abroad? Obama, and those closest to him, believed that his voice, his (non-white) face, his story, could help usher the people of the world to a higher plane. As he said to me in 2007, “I think that if you can tell people, 'We have a president in the White House who still has a grandmother living in a hut on Lake Victoria and has a sister who’s half-Indonesian, married to a Chinese-Canadian,' then they’re going to think that he may have a better idea of what’s going on in our lives and in our country. And they’d be right.” Experience as a candidate only reinforced this sense of destiny. Dennis Ross accompanied Obama on a trip to Berlin and other European capitals in the summer of 2008, and says that the rapturous reception Obama received everywhere — the most delirious response to an American leader, in fact, since Wilson landed in Paris in December 1918 — made the candidate feel, “There’s a hunger for this kind of leadership, and I can offer it.”

Obama thus delivered his first major foreign-policy speech in Prague in 2009, on the subject of nuclear nonproliferation. George W. Bush had barely paid lip service to the American obligation under the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to reduce its own nuclear stockpile; other states, in consequence, had offered only grudging cooperation on America’s effort to rein in nuclear rogues like Iran or North Korea, and to craft new treaties that would reduce the threat of nuclear weapons. Nonproliferation, Obama reasoned, was precisely the kind of issue where a new narrative, delivered by a new leader, could carve a path through what had been frozen seas.

The stagecraft of Prague was more rally than speech: On a brilliant spring afternoon, Obama stood on a stage in the midst of a vast crowd that seemed to fill the ancient city center. No one had embraced Obama’s promise more fervently than the young Europeans who thronged the square; when he took the microphone they cheered so wildly, waving little American flags, that the president could barely wipe the huge grin from his face. Obama began, as he often would, by introducing himself to his audience as an individual like themselves. “Few people,” he said, to another round of cheers, “would have imagined that someone like me would one day become president of the United States.” They, too, he told them, had embarked on an improbable journey — reclaiming freedom after decades of repression. “We are here today because enough people ignored the voices who told them that the world could not change,” said Obama. The Cold War had seemed implacable, just as had the limits placed on a black man in America. Obama was so energized that he was, uncharacteristically, stabbing the air with a long index finger.

Only after this lengthy exordium did Obama stake out the extraordinary goal that was his subject: “So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” Of course, the president added, that goal might be a generation or more away. But he had already established the predicate that people and nations could transform their destinies if they chose. The fatalism that supposed that things cannot change as we wish them to was “a deadly adversary.” Obama's overarching subject in Prague was not nonproliferation; it was the idea of a new beginning, of removing self-imposed limits, of daring to believe in belief. “We have to insist, 'Yes, we can,'” Obama said, to thunderous applause. We can, that is, if ordinary people allow hope and enthusiasm to triumph over fatalism and apathy.

Obama laid out the terms of a grand bargain in which the United States would reduce the role of nuclear weapons in its national security strategy, negotiate arms reductions with Russia, and ratify key treaties; meanwhile, states, acting collectively, would strengthen the NPT, crack down on violators, and establish an international fuel bank. Obama returned to the obstacles that lay in the path of his vision: That very day, North Korea had tested a rocket suitable to deliver a nuclear warhead mounted on a long-range missile. But nations and peoples, he said, must choose to define themselves not by their differences but by their collective interests. And the elimination of nuclear weapons from the Earth was a supreme global interest. By his final words — “together we can do it” — Obama’s voice was rising into the preacherly cadences he had used to such splendid effect on the campaign trail.

Two months later, in Cairo, Obama delivered the most ambitious, the most eagerly anticipated, and the most excruciatingly crafted foreign-policy address of his first term, and perhaps of his presidency to date. The June 4, 2009, speech touched on all the neuralgic issues in the region — terrorism, the war in Iraq, Israel-Palestine, Iran — but none of those could be described as its subject. Obama spoke for a full 15 minutes before even turning to those issues. He spoke, at first, of “tension between the United States and Muslims around the world” — not between states but between peoples. He made an extraordinary concession: that "tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often were treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.” With the possible exception of Jimmy Carter, none of Obama's predecessors had spoken so openly of the past failings of America and the West. Republicans accused Obama of embarking on "an apology tour." In fact, he was enlisting the sympathy of skeptical foreign audiences by demonstrating that he really did understand what it meant to be on the receiving end of American power.

The admission of tension was a stratagem to surmount tension. Obama went on to state that “violent extremists” had exploited these conflicts “in a small but potent minority of Muslims.” The attacks of 9/11 and other terrorist incidents had led some Americans to view Islam as “inevitably hostile” to the West and to human rights, said the president. “This has bred more fear and more mistrust.” Here was the true subject of the Cairo speech. He slowed his pace to impart emphasis to each ensuing word. “So long as our relationship is defined by our differences,” he said, “we will empower those who sow hatred rather than peace, and who promote conflict rather than the cooperation that can help all of our people achieve justice and prosperity. And this cycle of suspicion and discord must end.”

Obama stated his goal in Cairo as explicitly, and as unequivocally, as he had in Prague: “I have come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect.” The president was not offering a new set of policies; he backed Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak as George Bush had, and he could no more deliver peace between Israel and the Palestinians than his predecessors could. What he was offering, as he had in Prague and on the campaign trail, was a new tone of voice — his tone. That, the White House team believed, was no small thing. “Tone is not mere form,” as Antony Blinken, the deputy secretary of state and a former White House speechwriter, puts it. “Tone matters, especially in some communities where you have a sense of grievance born out of a history of humiliation.”

Obama thus took special care to correctly pronounce “assalamu alaikum.” He spoke not of “the Quran” but “the holy Quran.” The audience in Cairo was a great deal more subdued than the one in Prague had been — save when Obama championed Palestinian rights — but here, too, he offered his own story as an emblem of a different America, and thus a proof that the United States was not the “crude stereotype” so widespread in the Muslim world. In effect, he, Barack Hussein Obama, a man of their world and of his own, was proposing to bridge the vast gap he had described.

The most minutely parsed passage of the speech was, of course, Obama’s symmetrical appeals to the Israeli and Palestinian people to reach a two-state solution. In part because, as several officials told me, the speech never made the rounds at the State Department, Obama inadvertently staked out new ground by announcing that the United States did not accept the “legitimacy” of Israeli settlements, rather than regarding them as an obstacle to peace. Many Israelis and pro-Israel advocates winced at Obama’s assumption that it was the Holocaust, rather than millennial ties to the land, that vindicated the Jews’ claims on Israel. But all this was somewhat beside the point, or at least Obama’s point, which was to apply the principle of mutuality to this intractable conflict. Each side had to fully acknowledge the suffering of the other, and the valid claims of the other. Each had to see the conflict through the eyes of the other. The psychological act was the predicate for the diplomatic one. Obama was — there’s no other way of putting it — passionately balanced. When he said “two peoples,” he raised each hand, as if placing scales on a level.

Obama used his travel schedule in 2009 to offer the new American narrative to audiences around the world — not just in Prague and Cairo but also in Accra and Moscow. Vladimir Putin, then prime minister, must have laughed up his sleeve when he heard Obama say, “The pursuit of power is no longer a zero-sum game.” Obama was, in fact, deeply persuaded that the rise of truly global problems meant that cooperation among states had become a matter of national interest rather than a romantic piety. (Of course, Wilson would have said this, too.) The “bargain” at the heart of his 2009 U.N. speech was meant to give substance to this vision.

In December, Obama delivered a speech he had hardly expected to give — the one in which he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. Perhaps for that reason, he was able to give full intellectual due to his chosen subject. Former law professor that he is, Obama had typically structured his speeches according to a distinctive theory of the case, as he had in Cairo, but the rhetoric draped over the argument tended to obscure its outlines. The speech in Oslo, however, had the clarity of form one imagines Obama once brought to the classroom. Philosophers and statesmen, he said, had sought to restrain violence through the doctrine of “just war,” but the “total wars” of the 20th century had rendered these principles obsolete. Institutions like the United Nations had been established to put an end to interstate war, but this “old architecture [was now] buckling under the weight of new threats.” Sounding far less like Wilson than like the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, for whom he has often professed admiration, the president fully accepted the obligation to use violence in defense of principle. Yet, he said, “this truth must coexist with another — that no matter how justified, war promises human tragedy.” Rare, indeed, is the leader with the “negative capability,” in John Keats's term, to hold two contradictory ideas in his head at once.

Ben Rhodes notes that Obama was “adamant” about describing war as tragedy in the Nobel address. In subsequent speeches about the use of force, “where it would have been easier to fire people up by celebrating U.S. military action,” Rhodes says, Obama has “resisted glorifying the fact of being at war and he’s also made a point to highlight the tragedy of being at war.” In this, of course, his mood coincides well with the national post-Iraq hangover. Nevertheless, in the years to come, Obama would be called upon again and again to explain to the American people why he had chosen to expand or initiate hostilities. Negative capability is not a useful attribute at such moments. In these speeches, Obama has struggled to find a language as persuasive as Wilson’s — or Bush’s — without resorting to rhetorical formulations he finds repugnant.

The Nobel speech was also, in its own measured way, an expression of Obama’s visionary nature. “We do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected,” he said as he neared the end. Here Obama reached for a trope he was to employ often in the coming years — the simultaneous embrace of the world “as it is” and “as it ought to be.” Leadership, he said in Oslo, begins with hard facts but reaches toward great ideals — toward “that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls.” Obama had managed to concede his unworthiness of the honor in a way that made him seem almost to merit it.

By the end of 2009, Obama had finished introducing himself to the world, and began the task of selling a new foreign policy based on an ethos of cooperation in the name of resolving global problems, engagement with adversaries, a sensitivity to the sometimes harmful consequences of American power, and an open acknowledgment of the limits of that power. The era of the heraldic oration delivered to euphoric crowds had largely come to an end. Most of the major foreign-policy speeches he would give hereafter would be delivered at home, in order to disclose a set of policies to the American people — and to win them over.

The first of these was the address on Afghanistan that Obama delivered at West Point on Dec. 1, 2009. The previous speeches had included long and soaring introductions; this one was sober and highly specific. Obama and his team had spent months agonizing over the proper course in Afghanistan, and now he was announcing that he would send 30,000 additional troops there as part of a limited counterinsurgency surge, and start to bring them home after 18 months — a giving with the one hand and taking with the other bound to disappoint both hawks and doves. He tried to reconcile the decision with his opposition to the war in Iraq and to George Bush’s overreliance on force by saying that “our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan” — as it had not been in Iraq.

It is inherently difficult to persuade people of the merits of ramping up a war that has already ground on inconclusively for over seven years; the cadets themselves listened with solemn respect rather than boisterous enthusiasm. But Obama’s deeper problem was that his target audience — the American people, not admirers abroad — wanted to hear what he would do to revive the collapsed economy. The troop commitment to Afghanistan, he said, must be limited, “because the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own.” Obama thus appeared to accept a zero-sum relationship between his domestic and his global objectives. If so, that was new: As a candidate, Obama had advocated a doubling of foreign aid, arguing that fortifying weak states that incubated sectarian conflict, extremist ideology, and public health hazards was a matter of national interest. But that was all before the economy tanked in 2008. America could no longer afford the foreign-policy instruments Obama had hoped to use — or rather, the American people were no longer prepared to pay for them. Obama thus used the pejorative expression “nation-building” to describe something that he had once favored.

Ben Rhodes says that he told critics who said that Obama never should have placed a definite time limit on the troop commitment in Afghanistan that “absent giving Americans a sense that this was winding down, you wouldn’t have had the support necessary to carry out the policy.” In other words, Obama had to propose a policy he might not have chosen had he felt that he could rally the American people to a very difficult cause. He had already begun to encounter the limits of oratory to reshape political reality: If voters wouldn’t buy it, he couldn’t sell it. “The delicate balancing act,” says Rhodes, “was to purchase more time and resources for the policy by indicating the limits of what we would do. That was a rhetorically very difficult thing to do.”

The speech Obama gave in August 2010 announcing the end of the combat mission in Iraq marked, by contrast, a triumphal moment. The president was making good on one of his most popular campaign promises. Yet his demeanor, and delivery, could not have been more sober. He sat at the Oval Office desk — the same desk, he noted, from which President Bush had announced the beginning of hostilities. He began, his hands clasped before him, by invoking what had already become a ritual phrase — “the need to rebuild our nation here at home.” He spoke of the pain of war and recession. The Iraq mission had drained the national treasury, “strained” relations abroad, and “tested” our “unity at home.” Obama acknowledged the national sense of exhaustion: “In the midst of these storms, the future that we're trying to build for our nation ... may seem beyond our reach.” It was not, he hastened to add, because we were scaling down those ruinous commitments. Obama resorted to the metaphor he had used in the Wilson Center speech, but now in a different context: “It’s time,” he said, “to turn the page.” Turning the page now meant turning back home from abroad.

The first shadows that crept across Obama’s sunny oratory were cast from the homefront; but before long he found himself reckoning with the limits of his policies abroad. He had believed that he could help the Israelis and the Palestinians overcome their stalemate if, as he had said in Cairo, each side was prepared to acknowledge the legitimate concerns and aspirations of the other. This proved to be a vain hope. It had become clear by 2010 that George Mitchell, Obama’s special representative for the region, could not produce a breakthrough in peace negotiations. In January of that year Obama gave an interview to Time magazine in which he conceded that he had “overestimated our ability” to persuade both sides to make painful concessions, and that he “might not have raised expectations as high” had he understood the intractability of the situation.

In the year following the Prague speech, Obama enjoyed important successes on nonproliferation. He won some concessions on NPT compliance at a “nuclear summit” in 2010, reached an arms-reduction deal with Russia and, most importantly, signed up other nations, including Russia and China, on tough sanctions against Iran — sanctions that have held until now, and made possible the current talks on curbing Tehran’s nuclear enrichment program. But the grand bargain Obama had envisioned in Prague foundered. He had hoped to reshape the policy debate by speaking directly to people, who would in turn demand change from policymakers. In this case, Obama had reached the wrong people — the Europeans who already agreed with him, rather than citizens of major developing countries that had shown little interest in enforcing the NPT bargain. Leaders in much of the world remained unmoved. It turned out, says Robert Einhorn, one of Obama’s leading nuclear negotiators, that “nonaligned countries pay lip service to this notion that if the United States and others disarm they will strengthen nonproliferation.” America’s decades of unwillingness to reduce its own nuclear stockpile and change its nuclear doctrine were “a convenient excuse” for inaction on their part. Obama had finally made good on the U.S. side of the bargain, but the partners he needed had not.

Nobody who mattered seemed to share Obama’s convictions. Despite the widely touted "reset" with Russia, Vladimir Putin made it clear that he had no interest in the deeper cuts Obama sought. Republicans in Congress barely approved the New START Treaty that reduced the arsenal of deployed nuclear weapons, and outright refused to consider additional treaties. Even the president’s own senior military and national security officials so watered down the changes he promised in nuclear strategy that Obama's published nuclear strategy wound up sounding very little different from Bush's. The Prague speech remains as the bold statement of an aspiration shared by a growing number of statesman and strategic thinkers, but the words achieved less than Obama and his team had hoped.

The Cairo speech also fell short of its own goals, but in a different way. Obama’s rhetoric of a “new beginning” based on “mutual interest and mutual respect” really did resonate in the region; Obama's personal popularity, and that of the United States, rose in the ensuing months. But the hopes for change faded when it became clear that the Obama administration’s policy toward the region was not nearly as different from that of the Bush administration as the drastic change in rhetoric implied. Obama continued to support autocratic allies in the region, there were still American troops in Iraq, and his effort at forging peace between Israel and Palestine went nowhere. Within months, his approval rating had fallen. (He is still far more popular in the Islamic world than George W. Bush, which is not saying much, but far less than Bill Clinton, who was admired for his intense engagement on Israel-Palestine issues.)

The failure of the Cairo speech points to the discrepancy between Obama’s visionary rhetoric and the tools he had at his disposal. On this score, Ben Rhodes is not prepared to admit failure, but does confess to rueful regret. “We came in surfing this wave of expectations,” he says. “We also came in with enormous resource constraints staring us in the face. If we had come in a different era, you could have seen him announcing some incredibly ambitious development initiative. We tried with what we have.” In the Cairo speech Obama offered few new policy prescriptions, and few “deliverables” beyond a “Summit on Entrepreneurship.” But the lack of resources had not led Obama to scale down his expectations, or those that others entertained of him. The hope for large-scale change became attached not to acts of policy, but to the psychic transaction Obama sought, in which a new American tone would produce a new tone elsewhere. This change at the level of thought and feeling would in turn help bring about a change of policy.

But you can’t eat oratory. “You had this small group at the White House that wanted the president to create policy by giving speeches,” says Shawn Brimley, former director for strategic planning at the National Security Council. “Speeches are illustrative and paint a narrative. But what is the connection between those speeches and action?” Two years passed before the NSC had even approved the classified directive outlining the modest initiatives promised in Cairo. Brimley said that he was often baffled by the absence of follow-up inside the administration. In early 2011, he moved to the White House from the Pentagon, with its overwhelming attention to process. Brimley recalls saying to a friend, “I’d love to see the classified Asia strategy.” The colleague, he recalls, “looked at me like I was an idiot. He said, ‘You should go back and read the 2009 speech the president made in Tokyo’” — an address in which Obama had clarified that the United States did not seek to “contain” China.

In early 2011, a president who had gotten nothing but lumps of coal in his Christmas stockings finally received a lavish gift from history in the form of the Arab Spring. In the Cairo speech, Obama had spoken in general terms of the Arab world’s yearning to be free of numbing dictatorships, but had not promised to pressure the dictators themselves, as George W. Bush had. Now, however, Obama heralded the millions of young people who had taken to the streets of the Arab world. In early February 2011, trusting his instincts rather than some of his more pragmatic advisors, including Secretary Clinton, Obama called on Egypt’s autocratic ruler, Hosni Mubarak, to step down, and helped to orchestrate his dismissal. In those heady, early days, the Arab Spring looked very much like the Prague Spring of 1989. But it was not to be. In February, Libya’s strongman, Muammar al-Qaddafi, unleashed his troops on armed rebels and unarmed civilians.

Obama was confronted for the first time with the question he had dabbled with in the abstract in his Nobel speech: when to use force to prevent atrocities that do not directly threaten the United States. Libya brought out the ambivalence he had expressed then, for he was acutely aware both of the danger of standing aside while Qaddafi’s forces perpetrated atrocities and of the delusion of supposing that American bombs could cut every Gordian knot. Only after passionate advocacy from some of his closest advisors did Obama authorize airstrikes. On March 28, nine days into the hostilities, he delivered what he called an “update” to the American people — less a speech than an elaborate bulletin.

Obama spoke from the National Defense University, two American flags draped behind him. He calmly described Qaddafi’s campaign of brutality, and the allied response. He issued no Wilsonian call to arms. On the contrary, Obama made much of the limits he had placed on American action: The United States would "play a supporting role” on “the front end of the operation,” acting in concert with others and increasingly handing the burden to them. “It’s true,” Obama said, “that America cannot use our military wherever repression occurs. And given the costs and risks of intervention, we must always measure our interests against the need for action.” Here Obama did something characteristic, if probably unconscious: He dropped the volume and register of his voice from the oratorical to a pianissimo urgency, as if to italicize each word: “But that cannot be an argument for never acting on behalf of what’s right.”

That sentence was the fulcrum of the speech. On one side lay the conviction, embodied in the doctrine of “the responsibility to protect” — which Obama did not invoke — that nations have an affirmative obligation to intervene abroad to prevent mass atrocities. On the other lay national skepticism, exhaustion, and perhaps apathy. Obama promised that he would not seek regime change in Libya. “To be blunt,” Obama said, as if a reminder were necessary, “we went down that road in Iraq.” He insisted that America had “an important strategic interest” in restraining Qaddafi, though he struggled to explain what it was — a massacre, he said, would have unleashed a flood of refugees, potentially destabilizing Egypt and Tunisia. He gave the impression that he was acting out of a sense of moral conviction but felt that he had to explain his decision in carefully limited national security terms in order to make his case to the American people. “In this particular country — Libya — at this particular moment,” Obama explained, all of the elements had lined up to make an act of intervention both morally right and practically possible. The speech sounded like a Supreme Court opinion carefully crafted to produce no precedent.

In his Cairo speech, Obama had extended an offer of mutual respect both to states and to peoples. The Arab Spring, however, had turned the people of the Middle East against their leaders. Obama, who put so much store in the way the United States was seen, above all in the Islamic world, had to clarify whether the country stood with leaders or people. In May 2011, he delivered a speech on the Middle East, though this time he spoke not from the region but from the State Department, for he was addressing the American people as much as the Arab world. “For decades,” he said, “the United States has pursued a set of core interests in the region”: counterterrorism, nonproliferation, peace between Israel and Palestine. “We will continue to do these things, with the firm belief that America’s interests are not hostile to people’s hopes,” he continued. Here was the same reassurance he had offered on Libya: America pursues its interests. “Yet,” he went on, “we must acknowledge that a strategy based solely upon the narrow pursuit of these interests will not fill an empty stomach or allow someone to speak their mind.”

With this “yet,” Obama pivoted to a favorite phrase: “After decades of accepting the world as it is in the region, we have a chance to pursue the world as it should be.” The world had changed in such a way that American interests were now, as perhaps they had not been before, aligned with the aspirations of ordinary people. American support for “political and economic reform” in the region, he insisted, “is not a secondary interest” but “a top priority.” Obama then made good on that vow by grasping a nettle that he had avoided until then. He made it clear that America would not only lend its support to emerging democracies but also chastise its autocratic allies. He bluntly asserted that “mass arrests and brute force are at odds with the universal rights of Bahrain’s citizens,” and added that the government “must” begin talks with the opposition. But Obama was careful not to say what he would do if it did not. This was probably for the best, for just five days before, America’s other autocratic allies, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, had sent in troops to help Bahrain crush domestic unrest. Events had forced Obama to make the stark choice between “interests” and “values” that he had insisted was unnecessary. After sharp internal debate, the administration went with national interests, issuing a mild expression of concern for the political rights of the Bahraini people.

The State Department speech included more deliverables than Cairo had, including emergency funds plus IMF and World Bank loans to support the shaky democratic transitions in Egypt and Tunisia, as well as a trade partnership for the region. This was not trivial for a nation facing a fiscal and budget crisis. But the speech disappointed those inside and outside the White House who had been calling for a spirited response to the Arab uprising. The Cairo speech had not forced Obama to choose between the people and their regimes, and it had not required him to come up with money to give substance to his promises. Now, it turned out, he couldn’t do the first consistently and couldn’t do the second adequately.

Obama hadn’t wanted to get sucked into the vortex of the Middle East. In much of the world — as several White House aides helpfully pointed out to me — the hopeful future Obama had projected in his 2009 speeches really was arriving. The administration was eager to execute its “pivot to Asia,” and almost as eager to demonstrate to both Americans and to the people of Asia that it was doing so. In November 2011, Obama made a long-delayed trip to the region, and gave major speeches in Jakarta — where he was hailed as a returning hero — and in Canberra, where he addressed the Australian Parliament. “The tide of war is receding,” Obama declared, “and America is looking ahead to the future that we must build.” In the Middle East, where tides of war rose and fell, any act of building, and certainly nation-building, was a risky proposition. Not so in Asia. “Here, we see the future,” said Obama. He then called attention to his topic sentence: “As president, I have, therefore, made a deliberate and strategic decision — as a Pacific nation, the United States will play a larger and long-term role in shaping this region and its future, by upholding core principles and in close partnership with our allies and friends.”

The Asia speeches were intended to signal a shift not only of resources but of attention. Alas, it was not to be; just as the United States extricated itself from one set of conflicts in the Islamic world, others, hatched out of the Arab Spring, sucked American energies back in. The intervention in Libya had succeeded, and then Libya itself had failed. The murder of U.S. Amb. Chris Stevens in Benghazi, in September 2012, crystallized, at least for Americans, the fear that the whole region was descending into sectarian madness. This was Obama’s chief theme as he addressed the U.N. General Assembly two weeks later. The violence in Benghazi, he lectured his fellow world leaders, constituted "an assault on the very ideals upon which the United Nations was founded." All of them, he continued, had to "declare that this violence and intolerance has no place among our United Nations." He was still offering America’s deep engagement with the world, but, he admonished, “our citizens must be secure and our efforts must be welcomed.” Candidate Obama had convinced the American people that if they changed their tone and posture abroad, they would win the trust of the child looking up at the helicopter. Obama had made those changes — and found that people were shooting at the helicopter. Now he was turning to the world’s leaders to say that it was they who must change their tone and posture. The president seemed to be channeling his own people’s impatience and ire. Perhaps he was: The election was only six weeks away.

Obama won that election, of course. His second inaugural speech was notably more restrained than the first. The brief passage on foreign policy focused on climate change and energy security, the new issues of the day. Of the political convulsion of the Arab world he said nothing at all. And no wonder: The Arab world had continued spiraling down into violence and repression. By the late summer of 2013, only Tunisia was moving toward more pluralism and political accountability. Egypt had reverted to military control; Syria had become a killing field. Obama resisted calls from his own top officials to arm nationalist rebels there. He had, however, publicly stated, with little forethought, that he would act if Damascus used chemical weapons. And then on the morning of Aug. 21 it did so, murdering more than 1,000 civilians in the suburbs of Damascus. Now Obama had to intervene to enforce a red line that, until that moment, had seemed like a peripheral element of the conflict. On Aug. 31 and again on Sept. 10, Obama sought to explain his policy in Syria as he had on Libya; those speeches rank among the most painful and least convincing of his time in office.

In the first speech, Obama stood on the White House lawn accompanied by Vice President Joe Biden, an unusual casting decision designed to show an administration unified in horror and united in a decision to engage in hostilities. The president’s language was implacable: “In a world of many dangers, this menace must be confronted.” Actually, there was a quite placable subtext: Obama was prepared to use force against this particular menace at this particular moment, but not otherwise. He offered all the mollifying limitations that by now had become second nature: no American boots on the ground, no open-ended commitment, etc.

Then came an abrupt swerve: “I will seek authorization for the use of force from the American people’s representatives in Congress.” Obama did not believe he needed authorization, and had not intended to seek it, but polls showed that the public would only support military measures if Congress authorized them. His chief of staff, Denis McDonough, had persuaded him that he needed to ask for a vote. Of course, Obama knew that both parties were squeamish about voting to bomb Syria, and he believed that many Republicans were perfectly prepared to undermine his authority as commander in chief. He issued a remarkable admonition: “I ask you, members of Congress, to consider that some things are more important than partisan differences or the politics of the moment.”

The president made his own bad luck in Syria by declining to act when he might have been able to make a difference, and then by issuing an ultimatum that he hadn’t expected to be violated. But it was also true that he faced an opposition that saw him, and treated him, as a fundamentally illegitimate figure. It wasn't only on matters of domestic policy where Obama faced entrenched political opposition: Congressional Republicans had almost unanimously opposed his effort to rewrite the nuclear bargain, his bid for Middle East peace, his attempt to reach out to Iran, and indeed his entire rhetorical approach of offering "mutual interest and mutual respect." This had the effect of diminishing the president, just as the surly public mood did. “The absence of any traditional sense of rally round the flag has had a more corrosive effect when it comes to international relations than I think most people realize,” says Rhodes. “You don’t have the same sense that you had in the Cold War of a president speaking for the entire country. You have Barack Obama speaking for the office of the presidency.” How can a president rewrite the national narrative if he can’t speak for the country? People across the world took note of the fact that Obama could not even succeed in closing Guantánamo, as he had promised to do in his very first week in office. Obama could not, in effect, deliver America.

The Aug. 31 speech failed because Obama could no longer rally an apathetic public or arm-wrestle a hostile Congress. It became overwhelmingly clear that he would lose the proposed vote to authorize the use of force. At the same time, Russia had offered to pressure Bashar al-Assad to eliminate his stock of chemical weapons should Obama agree to withhold military action. On Sept. 10, Obama strode from the Oval Office to a lectern placed in the East Room of the White House. For all the show of resolution, his first words were not a call to action but an explanation of past inaction: “I have resisted calls for military action” in Syria, he said, “because we cannot resolve someone else’s civil war through force, particularly after a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Again he was saying: here but not there, then but not now. In this speech, unlike the previous one, he provided a strongly reasoned and morally impassioned account of why the chemical weapons attack compelled a military response. But he could not, or would not, plumb the rhetorical depths in order to issue a call for action. The chestiest moment of the speech came when he vowed that, while the campaign he planned would not be “open-ended” or “prolonged,” it would not consist of “pinpricks.” The United States, Obama declared, “doesn't do pinpricks.”

Then came another swerve: The president laid out the Russian offer. With that in mind, he said, he had asked leaders of Congress to postpone the planned vote. Here was a deus ex machina for a Congress that did not want to vote on the use of force and a president who did not want to act on his own. In this one moment was concentrated all the accumulated adversity of the previous four and a half years. A president who had begun as a tribune of change, of “Yes, we can” abroad as well as at home, was now becalmed before a listless and surly public, an openly hostile and increasingly isolationist Congress, and a disintegrating order in the Middle East. He had been forced to accept a lifeline thrown to him by a leader who would just as soon have handed him a noose.

Obama has given very few memorable foreign-policy speeches in his second term. He has found himself increasingly defending decisions to use force or coercion, a subject hardly suited to his rhetorical gifts. Still, over the last year, he has been fortunate in his choice of adversary. His decision to bomb the extremists of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria was welcomed in Congress and the public, as, in general, has been his call for tough sanctions to punish Russia for its aggression in Ukraine. At the same time, Obama has continued to try to place the use of force within the larger context of his foreign-policy goals.

In May of 2014 Obama returned to West Point, where he had delivered his 2009 speech on Afghanistan, to speak about the meaning of American leadership. His gestural vocabulary had the same measured economy as ever — the pursed lip of reflection, the lightly clenched fist of conviction, the hands crossed over one another in repose. He was, and remains, undemonstrative.

Obama sought to locate his own conception of American leadership between ideologies too rigid to accommodate a messy world. “Self-described realists,” he said, insist that conflicts abroad “are not ours to solve.” That view, he added, “is shared by many Americans.” On the other hand, “interventionists from the left and right” argue that “America’s failure to act in the face of Syrian brutality or Russian provocations not only violates our conscience, but invites escalating aggression in the future.” Obama often defined such antinomies in cartoonish terms, but this was the kind of fair-minded summation one would expect of a scholar rather than a politician. It was a reminder of the intellectual dispassion so fundamental to his nature.

Obama then mapped out the space he wished to occupy, one in which the United States has “an abiding self-interest” in “a world of greater freedom and tolerance,” yet had too often resorted to force in order to achieve those goods. “Since World War II,” he said, “some of our most costly mistakes came not from our restraint, but from our willingness to rush into military adventures.” Obama’s skepticism about the effectiveness of force had helped carry him to the White House; he had been probing the issue in public since the Nobel speech. When America’s “core interests” were threatened, he explained, it must be prepared to respond with military force, “unilaterally if necessary.” But in the face of “issues of global concern,” such as mass atrocities or crises that “push the world in a more dangerous direction,” the United States should “mobilize allies and partners to take collective action,” and deploy the tools of diplomacy and development, as well as force. Presumably, then, Obama would not have intervened in Rwanda had he been president in 1994, unless he had forged the kind of alliance he had in Libya. Here, then, was a blunt statement of the hierarchy of interests and values, at least regarding the use of force.

As Obama reached the conclusion of his speech, he used the balanced formulation that had become almost his watchword, observing that the mantle of global leadership required America to see the world as it is but also as it should be, “where hopes and not just fears govern.” He spoke of “international norms” and “multilateral channels” and U.N. peacekeeping missions and “a global framework to preserve our planet.” One could see the man who declared on a New Hampshire lawn in the summer of 2007, “I want to go before the United Nations and say, ‘America’s back!’” Obama’s worldview is not parsimonious; he is still, for all his setbacks, a believer.

But does it matter? The cadets and the parents gathered for the graduation ceremony sat silently through several of the president’s applause lines. CNN described the reception as “icy.” What had changed since 2009 was not so much the substance of Obama’s views as his capacity to inspire the audience before him. And not only that; Obama himself seemed to have lost faith in the efficacy of oratory. A speech is a transaction between orator and listener; some crucial energy had dissipated from both sides of that transaction. Obama’s words no longer carry a charge. It is hard to recapture, even to remember, the sense of excitement he once generated.

What are we to think today of this man whose voice, whose face, whose story inspired millions of Americans and people all over the world only a few years ago? I was one of those people. I can’t quite fault the excessive faith that Obama’s inner circle placed in his empathic powers because I felt it too. I still admire Obama — even the Obama of singles and doubles. But I feel deeply the sense of collective deflation, and not only the one surrounding the president. The splendid hopes of people in Tahrir Square and Bahrain's Pearl Roundabout and the other great spaces of the Arab world have evaporated as if they never were. Words have proved so much weaker, and facts so much more intractable, than we once thought. Perhaps Obama and his circle should have known that; perhaps he, and they, should have been more circumspect. But Americans made Obama president precisely because he lifted their sights to something finer. In the end, his failure to move the world as he hoped to is our tragedy, far more than it is his.

每天的晨吟

罕见的演讲天赋，离远见卓识差着不只是几条街，而是不可同日而语。

master123

灌水来了。。。。。。