obama cairo speech MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images

Should America Ever Apologize?

US President Donald Trump's administration has made a point of reversing or erasing the legacy of his predecessor, Barack Obama, including Obama's admissions of past wrongs in American foreign policymaking. But in doing so, the Trump administration is abandoning a tradition of US leadership that has long served as a source of national strength.

NEW YORK – Earlier this month, academics at the American University in Cairo declared no confidence in the institution’s president, following his decision to grant US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo an uncontested platform for a partisan foreign-policy speech last month. Pompeo used the occasion to decry former President Barack Obama’s own pronouncements from the same stage a decade earlier, and to issue an implicit endorsement of the Middle East’s reigning autocrats.

Pompeo’s primary line of attack against Obama’s famous Cairo speech, “A New Beginning,” is that it included a public admission of the United States’ past missteps in the region. Unlike the Trump administration, Obama and his advisers believed that there is much to be gained by acknowledging difficult political truths, even when doing so points to a radical change in course.

Accordingly, when Obama delivered his June 2009 speech, he took the bold step of admitting mutual misunderstandings between the West and the Arab and Muslim worlds. He acknowledged that Western colonialism “had denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims,” and that “modernity and globalization” had “led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.”

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