DULCE ET decorum est pro patria mori?No, President Obama insisted yesterday in Oslo. War may be inevitable, part of the human condition, sometimes justifiable, but it "promises human tragedy". "War itself is never glorious," Mr Obama told the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in a fine speech which sought to reconcile those "two seemingly irreconcilable truths", that war is both "sometimes necessary and ... at some level an expression of human folly".
The apparent contradiction was at the heart of the controversy over his nomination – what some claim to see as the Orwellian notion of a peace prize awarded to a commander in chief engaged in two major wars. But Mr Obama’s direct and clearly conflicted engagement with that issue combined with his usual understated rhetorical power to give his speech its appealing force.
He spoke as an admirer of Gandhi and King, but of the responsibility of a head of state. “Sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is.” In articulating a philosophy of the “just war” he also acknowledged the challenge that “in many countries there is a deep ambivalence about military action today, no matter the cause” and a “reflexive suspicion” of America.
The speech was interrupted only twice, receiving strong applause particularly for his insistence on the rationale for ending the US use of torture, the closing of Guantanamo, and its recommitment to the Geneva Conventions: “We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honour those ideals by upholding them not just when it is easy, but when it is hard”.
In classic Obama triangulation he described and rejected what he said was a false dichotomy in the US between a foreign policy based exclusively on either idealism or realism, “a tension that suggests a stark choice between the narrow pursuit of interests or an endless campaign to impose our values”. Realists had to understand that there was an intimate link between human rights and hunger on the one hand and security and the danger of war on the other.
It was a seductive and compelling argument that chimed well with his European audience, both acknowledging difficult realities and reaffirming the core values on which he has reshaped US foreign policy: “Agreements among nations. Strong institutions. Support for human rights. Investments in development”. Alfred Nobel would have approved.