Mighty Achievements

The new political sphere of world politics is a somewhat unfamiliar one. The on-again-off-again conscience of the international community appears to have gone into deliberate seclusion. Perhaps to ponder the complexities and the downfalls of intervention and responsibility and the morals involved in doing the former and owning the latter, and conversely the morals involved in failing to respond to the former, effectively disowning the latter.

This is the era of a president of the United States of America having collected a rather amazing recognition in the form of the Nobel Peace Prize on the basis of a world awaiting premise becoming reality. He did, after all, offer hope, reconciliation, a new tomorrow. All achievable, he asserted, by people of goodwill. And he was recognized as having ample goodwill.

Where his predecessors presumed to enter conflicts for the purpose of resolving them or even initiating them to resolve an issue, he promised to avoid the need for such actions.

He would do the right thing. And he did just that. He offered the hand of the man who had entered the office of the most powerful position on the globe, to any who would grasp it in reciprocal goodwill. President Barack Obama was left posturing, his open hand grasping air and nothing more. While those to whom he extended his anticipation for reasonable debate in place of heated rhetoric debased the motion, and scorned the man.

The famous "reset" button with Russia, the peaceful dialogue option with Iran, the statesmanlike diplomacy to take the place of urgent military action stuttered the new world order to an awkward halt in mid-stride. Vladimir Putin, as it happened, preferred his own trajectory, another stab at contesting that world-power status so unfortunately abandoned. China, for the time being, steeped in its resolve to capture world production - of just about anything - cheaply.

And the little irritations like nuclear-owning Pakistan taking huge umbrage at the humiliation imposed by the entrance to its sovereign space for the inconvenient removal of a mass-killer-of-Americans that simply could not be assigned to another time another place another day. A Muslim country busily building as many nuclear warheads as funding from that same U.S. source might allow, generously offering technical assistance to Iran, Libya, North Korea.

In Afghanistan, President Karzai dictates to the U.S. Congress his expectations for financial and military support, on his stringent, non-interfering terms, and finds meek assent. The U.S. administration also sets aside its financial and military injuries to find common cause with a Taliban urged to form part of a new government in Kabul, the while dispatching its members to slaughter more American and NATO soldiers.

Time Photogallery  -- Obama walks a runway to the podium where he delivered his speech, at the base of the Victory Column, Berlin

In Berlin, where once "instability and intolerance" reached its apogee with Hitler's Nazis, the new placidly peaceful Germany that is the economic engine of the continent hears from President Obama that "instability and tolerance" are the engine of Islamist terrorism; perhaps he meant to say 'dissatisfaction' instead of 'terrorism'. He is, after all, a mean of peaceful determination.

He was named a Nobel Laureate, doesn't that prove something?