If you have not already done so, I recommend that you take a minute to read and reflect on the speech President Obama gave in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. This is a serious speech, and in parts as moving as William Faulkner’s famous speech for literature in 1950.

Unfortunately, one of the emerging memes on the Left is the supposed irony of using the platform of the Nobel Peace Prize to sing the praises of war—a fatuous point Glenn Greenwald didn’t hesitate to trot out mere hours after the event. The European Left is even less likely to be conflicted in their disappointment at the speech—or at least so I have predicted.

An equally unfortunate meme emerging about the speech is that “this is what Bush has been saying all these years”—see especially Sarah Palin and Bill Kristol. They must feel delighted not just that Obama has confessed that war, while always tragic and evidence of human folly at one level, is sometimes just, but also that Obama has repudiated his left-wing base, as well as his erstwhile admirers in Europe. But Palin and Kristol shouldn’t feel too pleased with themselves; for Barack Obama has just managed to sell some of the same arguments that they, along with George W. Bush and John McCain, have failed to sell convincingly for more than a decade.

On his blog at The American Interest online Walter Russell Mead has said that Obama’s salesmanship has gone beyond “putting lipstick on a pig”—that is, beyond the conventional meaning of dressing up some absurdity or untruth with clever speech. In fact, as Mead says,

The pig has been bathed and scrubbed and is taking a steady diet of prescription-strength breath mints.  The new administration quickly and correctly identified certain features of American policy that had become so offensive that change was urgently needed.  Guantanamo is being closed.  The rhetoric has changed.  But these represent more nips and tucks than radical surgery — botox for the pig, not a face transplant. …

[This] is a real accomplishment and one that Americans should both be grateful for and take pride in.

Quite right. I think Obama has presented here a much more convincing presentation of Niebuhrian Christian realism than Bush ever managed to do, despite the fact that Bush and his advisors were the ones name-dropping Niebuhr every chance they got.

That said, there was one part of the speech that I had difficulty with:

…no Holy War can ever be a just war.  For if you truly believe that you are carrying out divine will, then there is no need for restraint — no need to spare the pregnant mother, or the medic, or the Red Cross worker, or even a person of one’s own faith.

I think this was a poor formulation that concedes far too much to the jihadist way of looking at things. How so?

Well, recall Pope Benedict’s Regensburg speech (as I’m evidently fond of doing). The point Benedict was trying to make was that there are two distinct ideas about the divine will: One says that God is himself bound by reason, and thus spreading the faith by the sword is an irrational act abhorrent to God. The other says that God is bound by nothing; reason and morality are concepts entirely subordinate to God’s will and can change according to his whim.

With the former understanding of God, “if you truly believe that you are carrying out divine will”, just war doctrine still applies to you. With the latter understanding of God, “there is no need for restraint.” Needless to say, the President should be seen to encourage the former understanding of the divine and to reject the latter. If he needs a model of how to do this, he can do no better than Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural.