When President Obama speaks to the world's Muslims from Cairo this week, he'll touch, again, on the themes of respect and engagement. But he's delivered that message at least three times already, and this time his audience will expect more. They'll want to know whether Obama has a "big idea" about U.S policy toward Arabs and Muslims.
For all his faults, President George W. Bush did have a big idea -- that a witch's brew of radical Islamist extremism and repressive autocracy was destroying Muslim societies, and that the antidote was democracy. Bush not only believed it, he translated this idea into real policies, such as promoting a democratic, Shiite-led government in Iraq and endorsing flawed elections in Egypt, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority. Some of his initiatives worked well and some were disastrous, but they all flowed from Bush's grand view of the situation.
So far, Obama has defined his approach to Arab and Muslim societies as, essentially, anti-Bushism. It has included four key elements:
First, in place of the polarizing posture of "either you're with us or you're against us," Obama has offered the more salutary concept of "mutual respect and mutual interests." This phraseology leaves room for nuance, debate and a pragmatic recognition that politics is a two-way street.
Second, instead of seeing the world through the lens of the 9/11 attacks, Obama specifically told the Turkish parliament that "America's relationship with the Muslim world cannot and will not be based on opposition to Al Qaeda."
Third, instead of characterizing problematic countries as "evil" and working for their political, diplomatic and economic isolation, Obama has offered a willingness to talk, without preconditions, with radical governments (though not yet non-state actors) that had previously been off-limits.
Fourth, instead of making U.S. support for Palestinian statehood contingent on democracy and reform, as Bush did in his landmark June 2002 Rose Garden address, Obama has returned to the more conventional notion of promoting diplomatic solutions -- i.e., the "peace process" -- without saying much about the internal dynamics of Palestinian politics.
