Obama Foreign Policy: Less Deserving of 'We Hold These Truths To Be Self-Evident'

From Kori Schake, at Foreign Policy: "Missing the "freedom agenda" on the Fourth of July":

This weekend we celebrate our country's independence and the courage of those brave men who met in congress in Philadelphia to chart a path to greater liberty. Despite the considerable effort Jefferson goes to in the Declaration to enumerate the crown's depredations, and the very real grievances Americans had against the British government, we stand now far enough from the colonial experience to acknowledge we rebelled against perhaps the most humane and legally responsible government of its time.

And yet we rebelled. We are a country founded on the belief that people have rights, and they loan them in limited ways for limited purposes to their government. We were made great by distrust of a largely beneficial British government, and we remain great by distrust of our own.

Which is what makes our president's response to Iran's elections so discouraging. America's reflex -- our natural position as a country -- is to stand with a people against their government when that government is infringing upon their natural rights. But our president chose the course of deference to an authoritarian government as it repressed its own people...

Our president expressed "deep concern" and urged the Iranian government to respect its people. He had to be pulled by public reaction into condemning the Iranian government as it threatened executions of protestors. This from a president who repeatedly lectures us that there is no conflict between our values and our interests.

His "realism" and caution now are of a kind with his initial reaction to Russia's invasion of Georgia last summer, when he urged both the invader and the invaded to exercise restraint. President Obama is a "realist," unwilling to impinge on our national interests or the established international rules of state sovereignty, even when those interests and rules crush the hopes of others striving to gain by peaceful means what we have long enjoyed.

This all makes me a little homesick for what came to be called "the freedom agenda" in the Bush administration - now that we are hearing what the alternative sounds like, now that we are taking the measure of ourselves as a nation, and now that we are willing to consign other people's freedom to our interests. It makes us a little less a force for good in the world, a little less deserving to say we hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.