It’s nice to see that even CNN recognizes the president’s deal with Iran for what it is: “another legacy-making item on his checklist.” Indeed, only the president’s determination to round out his tenure with his own Nixon-in-China moment could explain the administration’s countless concessions to Iran — on sanctions, on centrifuges, on inspections, on American hostages — and its enthusiasm for a deal that effectively concedes to the regime a nuclear weapon, to the mullahs in Tehran international legitimacy, and to Islamic terrorist outfits in the region a funding windfall.
What could account for such astonishing indifference to American security? In his 1838 address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Ill., Abraham Lincoln suggested ambition, and that seems to me as good an explanation as any.
It is “not much to be wondered at,” Lincoln said, that America had survived to its fiftieth birthday. The American “experiment” was the perfect instrument for the ambition of the men of the late 18th and early 19th centuries:
Then, all that sought celebrity and fame and distinction expected to find them in the success of that experiment. Their all was staked upon it; their destiny was inseparably linked with it. Their ambition aspired to display before an admiring world a practical demonstration of the truth of a proposition which had hitherto been considered at best no better than problematical — namely, the capability of a people to govern themselves. If they succeeded they were to be immortalized; their names were to be transferred to counties, and cities, and rivers, and mountains; and to be revered and sung, toasted through all time. If they failed, they were to be called knaves, and fools, and fanatics for a fleeting hour; then to sink and be forgotten.
They succeeded, says Lincoln. But what would that mean for new generations of ambitious men? This “field of glory” harvested, to what would the next Alexander or Napoleon turn? He warned:
Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored. It sees no distinction in adding story to story upon the monuments of fame erected to the memory of others. It denies that it is glory enough to serve under any chief. It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction. . . .
Distinction will be his paramount object, and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm, yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.
Barack Obama’s ambition, his hunger for his own aggrandizement, has long been obvious. No humility afflicts a one-term senator who promises to “fundamentally transform” the United States of America, or who proclaims his mere nomination for the presidency “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”
He is an ideologue, yes, a Chicago leftist, community organizer-in-chief, unreconstructed Columbia poli-sci grad student. I’ve no doubt he thinks a diminished America a better America — for us, and for the world. But “building up” or “pulling down” is secondary. America is merely the instrument with which Barack Obama would carve his name into history.
Of course, the rest of us must live in that America — one soon to be more endangered than ever, should the president’s deal go through. To “frustrate his designs,” Lincoln said of the overambitious man, “it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent.”
It is not at all clear that we are, any longer, such a people.