Rich Lowry is in a frothing rage over Obama's decision not to go over to Germany and take credit on behalf of the United States for ending the Cold War single-handedly. Daniel Larison politely corrects Lowry (who refers to Chancellor Angela Merkel as Germany's "president") and explains that the people of Eastern Europe kinda sorta had something to do with communism ending:
In the end, the communist governments of central and eastern Europe fell because their nations no longer accepted them and their Soviet masters and the men running those governments were no longer willing to perpetuate themselves in power with violence. It might very well be more appropriate that the American President not be there, lest we be treated to yet another self-congratulatory paean to how we Americans won the Cold War, which tends to obscure and marginalize the very central role that the peoples of the communist states of Europe had in toppling that oppressive and degrading system.
It would be typical of an American President to mark the twentieth anniversary of such an occasion by flying in to claim part of the credit on behalf of the U.S. While I doubt that there was actually all that much calculation involved in Obama's decision to stay away, perhaps he intended to show that he understands that the event was not principally an American triumph and was not really about us. Given his endless talk of the interdependence of all nations, I admit that this is a stretch.
As Matthew Yglesias writes, "It’s hard to think of non-cliché things to say on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall." Sadly, giving credit to the brave dissidents of the former communist bloc nations isn't actually all that cliche yet, and that's part of why Larison's post is worth noting.
At any rate, I have my own criticism to level at Lowry's absurd column, in which he states:
Wouldn't Obama at least want to take the occasion to celebrate freedom and human rights - those most cherished liberal values? Not necessarily. He has mostly jettisoned them as foreign-policy goals in favor of a misbegotten realism that soft-pedals the crimes of nasty regimes around the world.
Lowry of course, is a human rights relativist whose "celebration" of such things depends on who's holding the waterboard. As for "soft-pedalling the crimes of nasty regimes around the world," during the Cold War, that was pretty much how the U.S. rolled.
-- A. Serwer
