President Obama began his presidency with what is often called his "apology tour," and apparently he's not a bit sorry about it seven years later. Politico reports:
Seven years after kicking off his presidency with a famous speech in Cairo reaching out to the Arab world, but that skipped Israel, Barack Obama is about to bookend it with one of his last big trips on Air Force One, landing first here in Vietnam before going on to Hiroshima, Japan.
Obama’s critics call stops like this an apology tour. He and his White House aides call it “reckoning with history.” Some prefer “coming to grips with history.”
These trips are deliberate, ordered up by a president whose foreign policy has been shaped by a sense of himself as a catalyst forcing the world to deal with the past in order to deal with the future, according to current and former officials close to the president. He’s going to Vietnam to deal with China, and he’s going to Hiroshima to deal with North Korea.
Politico's Isaac-Edward Dovere writes that Obama aides say that the president knows that the "usual suspects" will be critical of the trip and portray it as another apology tour.
This is a dismissive way to think of those who regard the president as a vain man, untutored in history, even after nearly two terms as a history-making president.
How presumptuous if he dares to take it upon himself to re-evaluate for the world difficult decisions made by former American presidents. We are told that he will not use the word "sorry" but this does not allay concerns.
President Harry Truman made a decision to end World War II and spare American and Japanese lives by dropping the atomic bomb.
Before this president is slyly critical or condescending towards that decision, I urge him to look around and see the danger his vanity has created in the world.
Specifically, he might take a look at what has happened in the Middle East in the wake of Apology Tour I. .
President Obama, who is always more critical of this nation than he is of dictatorships, is not the president I would pick to reckon with our history.
Most men would be humbled when confronted with the magnitude of the decision Truman made–but nothing humbles the perpetual adolescent who is this president.