President Obama: “For Want of a Nail”

This week President Obama signaled a foreign policy shift in the best way he knows how: he gave a speech.  Whatever else may be said about this President, he’s been no slacker in the speech-giving department.

Nor was his foreign policy speech at West Point earlier this week short on stale rhetorical fare.  Indeed at times it sounded not just like an attack on a series of straw men, but an attack on a series of straw men from about ten years ago.  For instance we had, ‘Just because we have the best hammer doesn’t mean every problem is a nail.’  It’s hard to find anybody, outside the nightmares of the radical left, who does think that every problem is a nail in need of a hammer. But it is an interesting analogy for the President to use.  It echoes Robert Kagan’s comment in his seminal ‘Paradise and Power‘, where he pointed out that one of the inverses of the hammer analogy is that if you don’t have a hammer, you don’t even want to see a nail.

The problem for Obama’s America is not its ownership of hammers, and it certainly isn’t about a paucity of nails.  The problem is that the best hammer in the world is being wielded by a man who would rather get out of doing any DIY.  We noted in recent weeks the absurdity of the world’s most powerful people joining a Twitter campaign rather than doing anything about the missing Nigerian schoolgirls.  But in recent days this absurdity has magnified.

In Sudan, a woman called Merriam Ibrahim is sitting in a prison in Khartoum.  She has been sentenced to death for converting to Christianity.  She is married to an American man and has just given birth – in prison – to a child who will be an American citizen.  Her ‘apostasy’ from Islam to Christianity means she will be lashed one hundred times before being executed.

The American government does not appear to regard the execution of the wife of an American citizen (herself a citizen-in-waiting) as a serious matter.  The Sudanese authorities certainly don’t seem to think it any great matter and are treating Merriam Ibrahim in the way they treat any other person who they find guilty of having exercised their conscience.

So here, Mr President, is a real nail.  And you are the one with the hammer.  You could talk the nail away.  Or you could talk about how understanding we must be towards those who have nail problems in general.  Or you could show some political leadership and give that nail the biggest and hardest hammer-blow of all time.  And that is what a leader would do.  He would wield that hammer and threaten to strike – and strike if necessary – the biggest blow possible in defence of human freedom, human conscience and basic human rights.  So what’s it going to be?  As Merriam Ibrahim is finding out, the Sudanese authorities seem to think talk is cheap.