Universal Nation: Barack Obama Sees a World without Borders-A Vision Islam Shares

IF CONFIRMATION were needed that Barack Obama's foreign policy will retain the same philosophical assumptions that underpinned George W. Bush's, it came quickly enough in the new presidency. Speaking to an economics college in Moscow on July 7, the new president said that the U.S. was distinguished by "a commitment to certain universal values." He repeated the phrase twice more in the speech, then used it a day later with respect to the crisis in Honduras.

Obama had told the Russians that he wanted to press the "reset" button on the American relationship with Moscow. Perhaps his listeners did not expect him to use the term so literally: when you reboot a computer, it starts over exactly as before.

He did indeed sound like Bush who, on numerous occasions--perhaps most forcefully in the notorious National Security Strategy of September 2002--also avowed that the U.S. stood for universal, not American, values: "The United States must defend liberty and justice, because these principles are right and true for all people everywhere."

Obama said almost identical things in his address to the Muslim world in Cairo the previous month. Indeed the two speeches, Moscow and Cairo, both given to students, followed the same template: first deferential praise for the great history and culture of the nation or religion being addressed (medieval Muslim learning, Russian novels); then references to the past and present divisions between them and America (Islamic terrorism, the Cold War and its legacy); and finally a conclusion about shared challenges, hopes for peace and …