If Obama’s speech signals a genuine shift, we will see the administration insist on election monitors in Egypt or withhold aid if Mubarak says no. It will wield real tools — visa bans, bank account seizures — to sanction human-rights abusers in Russia and China. It will not only claim to support a U.N. inquiry into Burma’s crimes against humanity but will call in chits from friends in Thailand, Singapore or India to make such an inquiry happen.
And maybe the administration will stop sabotaging Obama’s message on his most active foreign policy front: the war in Afghanistan. There, in its almost aggressive insistence that the war is about protecting the U.S. homeland — and only about protecting the U.S. homeland — the administration undercuts its claim to be a champion of “universal values.”…
[W]hen the White House derisively proclaims that Afghanistan will never be a true democracy, when it almost proudly insists that the war has nothing to do with Afghanistan’s freedom and everything to do with destroying al-Qaeda and protecting New York — it powerfully, and needlessly, wounds Obama’s message.
