PRESIDENT OBAMA’S Oslo speech could have been titled “the ambiguities of history.’’ That the president spoke with self-awareness from within those ambiguities made the speech important. Two notes of ambiguity stood out. First, that his “labors on the world stage’’ have not merited the Nobel Peace Prize. His “accomplishments are slight,’’ yet there he was in receipt of the highest honor. Second, that he was “responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle’’ where they “will kill, and. . .be killed.’’ Since when is the peace prize awarded for war?
Those ambiguities were enough to prompt skepticism and even anger, especially from many who opposed the escalation of the war in Afghanistan. I count myself among those so opposed, yet oddly the president’s stance in the thicket of such contradiction gave his remarks resonance. He spoke, for example, of the just war tradition, and like many war-leaders before him, he drew it around himself as a defensive cloak. Usually, that’s the end of it. Just war rhetoric produces a complacent resignation. Violence is a given in the human condition. “Evil does exist in the world.’’ The solution to violence is yet more violence. Too bad, but that’s the way it is.
Yet President Obama struck a different note. Having invoked just war, he observed how, precisely from within its tradition, “the capacity of human beings to think up new ways to kill one another proved inexhaustible.’’ After the total wars of the 20th century, “it became clear to victor and vanquished alike that the world needed institutions to prevent another world war.’’ Either humans will put an end to war, in John Kennedy’s formulation, or war will put an end to human beings. Following World War II, institutions of a new order were constructed, yet “a decade into a new century, this old architecture is buckling under the weight of new threats.’’ What is required now, Obama said, is thinking “in new ways about the notions of just war.’’
That means that, while affirming the necessity of war, war must also be reckoned with as promising “human tragedy’’ and as “an expression of human folly.’’ Therefore, the task of nurturing an ongoing “evolution of human institutions’’ toward peace and away from war must not be abandoned. That this injunction comes from a current sponsor of war makes it all the more potent. In effect, the speech was an idealist critique of realist politics - but offered from within hard realism. We have already seen how this works in Obama’s geopolitics, from Cairo where he firmly rejected the necessity of war between Islam and the West, to Prague, where his appeal for a nuclear-free world was made on the basis of pragmatism, not dreaminess.
Yet Obama’s tough assessment is clear - that the world has not yet advanced to the place where non-violence is a solution to problems of aggression and injustice. “We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes.’’ Yet equally clear is his insistence that we “must develop alternatives to violence that are tough enough to change behavior.’’ The old dichotomy between realism and idealism no longer applies - exactly because, like the just war theory itself, it reinforces the deadly status quo. More than that, the so-called realist must submit to the judgment of those whom hard men have always dismissed as soft. Obama cited Martin Luther King Jr. to declare that violence never brings permanent peace, and always creates “new and more complicated’’ problems that lead to new rounds of violence. Rulers in the throes of exercising power are traditionally criticized by prophets who stand apart from power. At Oslo last week, a war-making ruler dared to offer his own prophetic self-criticism.
In his short presidency, Obama has become a connoisseur of the “ambiguities of history,’’ and his Nobel speech is their catalogue. Ambiguities can seem like contradictions, which destroy coherence and meaning. But ambiguities can also point to paradox, how the expansive truth can contain its own opposite. With King, President Obama concluded that the ambiguities of history are a source not of despair, but of the “continued expansion of our moral imagination; an insistence that there’s something irreducible that we all share.’’ In that “something’’ lies our hope.
James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe. 
