The two Obamas

„In his Libya speech, Obama was clear, forceful and principled. Yes, there were some ambiguities but these were dictated by a genuinely uncertain situation on the ground, not by muddled thinking. The president made the case for a foreign policy rooted in morality yet also alive to the difficulties of acting wisely in an imperfect world that does not bend easily to one man’s or one country’s will.

On the budget, by contrast, it’s hard to know what the president’s bottom line is, what deals he would regard as reasonable or when he will even join the fray. The White House is so determined to keep the president antiseptically distant from the untidy wrangling on the budget that it will not even allow its allies in Congress to cite the administration’s own analyses of how harmful some of the Republican cuts would be. They can use the facts but not let on that the administration put them together. What’s up with this?

Obama was not afraid to take risks on Libya, including the hazard of criticism from all sides for his resolute refusal to lay out an all-encompassing policy toward the various uprisings in the Middle East. It’s amusing to watch us journalists assume the mantle of medieval scholastics as we parse his every word in search of an Obama Doctrine. But the last thing the United States needs is a doctrinaire approach to a series of conflicts that affect our interests in different ways and in which we have very different capacities to influence the outcomes. When history is on the move, as Obama put it nicely, rigid policy frameworks can be dangerous. What Obama did offer was an exceptionally honest and rigorous defense of humanitarian intervention.”