Professor of English David Bromwich contrasts the arguments in Leslie Gelb’s new book Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy with Obama’s speech at Cairo University in this week’s New York Review of Books. (One has to appreciate the unorthodoxy of this assembly: a doctor of literature reviews a speech and a book, both dealing with foreign policy. An argument for the liberal arts). Bromwich shows his loyalty (and his training) by making several digs at Gelb’s writing style concurrent with his comments on the book’s content:

Gelb marvels at the “streams of diplomacy” that amounted to “a cascading display of America’s unique role.” And again:

The genius of President Richard M. Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger [in their withdrawal from Vietnam]… was to let the victim drown slowly while they steered the world’s attention in another direction—to the most dazzling and theatrical display of American power ever.

Machiavelli would have appreciated the sentiment if not the economy of that sentence.

The two pieces of writing are reviewed together because, in Bromwich’s reading, Gelb’s book calls for speech like the one Obama gave in Cairo. The speech that was actually delivered, though, has a message that Bromwich sees as directly in conflict with the one Gelb had in mind. Obama’s choice to address the speech not to an American audience but to an Muslim one, buttressed by comments like his candid acknowledgement that colonialism was, um, bad for Muslim-Christian cooperation and his reference to the links between the Arab world and Muslim communities in America, expanded its utility beyond national security.

In my opinion, though, Bromwich seems to gloss the difference in Gelb’s and Obama’s thinking on this issue. Obama’s speech is clearly addressed to a religious group. It is meant to reach Muslims, and their other identity affiliations - Arab, Indonesian, educated, female - are secondary. The only nation he is concerned with is America. Gelb, on the other hand, takes up the issue of foreign relations from a nation-centric perspective. His book actually sorts nations by their positions on the hierarchy of power (with the United States, of course, at the apex). Bromwich faults Gelb for caring too much about winning and not enough about justice; Obama’s speech, in his reading, resituates the debate in terms of relations between civilizations rather than contests between states. I think this might be a little rosy. Rather, Obama seems to have observed that the security threat that 9/11 made apparent is not a security threat from other nation states, so he’s crafted an address designed to woo a religious community rather than a national one. Smart, but not a total reinvention.

And who said that a speech like this can’t also be read as a dazzling display of American power? It certainly isn’t the formerly colonized states that should be held responsible for building bridges between East and West, developed and developing, Global North and Global South. Perhaps Obama is channelling Thomas Jefferson, and using American power less so that it might be greater.