It takes courage, in a speech from Cairo, the heart of the Arab world, to speak openly of democracy, women’s rights, religious freedom and a willingness to embrace change. Although he did not go so far as to call oil “the Arab curse,” which has enabled the perpetuation of authoritarian rule and avoidance of otherwise essential political and socioeconomic reforms, he noted that a regional economy cannot be based on one industry.

It takes courage to unequivocally declare before the Arab world that U.S.-Israeli ties are unbreakable, bound by history and recognition of Jewish national aspirations, to call upon Arab leaders to cease using the conflict with Israel as an excuse for avoiding reforms. It takes courage to state explicitly that Holocaust denial, rampant throughout the region, is factually wrong and morally reprehensible, as are threats of Israel’s annihilation. It takes courage to tell Palestinians and Arabs that violence is both wrong and will not work, that they must cease their self-defeating preoccupation with past wrongs.

The sad reality, however, is that none of the fundamental reasons for U.S.-Muslim enmity have changed. It is hard to imagine that Al Qaeda, or someone, is not busy plotting the next 9/11, only this time bigger (”been there, done that”).

Arab countries remain shrouded in suffocating socioeconomic backwardness, religious fundamentalism and authoritarianism. Can one imagine a more heinous society, a greater antithesis to American values, than Saudi Arabia, in which women need male permission to travel, cannot drive cars and in which Sharia law governs? Egypt, America’s closest Arab ally, is an ossified dictatorship. A resource-rich region, whose population is burgeoning, is falling further, explosively, behind. Reform will take decades, at best, and in the meantime the Middle East will continue to export its ills, including to the United States.

Inevitably, there were objectionable points in the speech. Obama is correct in saying that neither Israel nor the Palestinians will disappear, that a two-state solution is the only viable one and that Israel will have to cease settlements. He appears, however, to be willing to exert unprecedented pressure on Israel, the only democracy in the region, whose governing coalition may collapse as a result. Putting aside the question of whether a democracy should be pressured this way, Obama does not evince the same firmness towards the Arabs.

Moreover, even if Israel were to accede to 100 percent of Palestinian demands, there is no one on the Palestinian side today both interested and capable of delivering on an agreement. The Palestinians are hopelessly divided between the fanatic Hamas in Gaza and the feckless Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, led by Abbas.

While Hamas repeatedly declares its determination to bring about Israel’s destruction, Obama now treats it as a legitimate player, albeit only conditionally. Abbas, who professes a desire for peace, rejected Olmert’s proposal to establish a Palestinian state in all of Gaza and 93 percent of the West Bank (with a compensatory land swap). Until the Palestinians abandon their all-or-nothing approach and learn to say yes to less than 100 percent of their dreams, they will remain with nothing.

Netanyahu has gratuitously incurred American wrath by his refusal to explicitly recognize a two-state solution, despite the fact that the “Roadmap,” which he has officially endorsed, is precisely about this. His refusal, on security, ideological, and mostly political grounds, enabled the creation of a fallacious linkage between the peace process and Iran’s nukes. Both issues are important in their own right and should be pursued separately, as such.

The greatest disappointment was Obama’s grossly understated reference to Iran’s nuclear program. Granted, he wishes to begin an engagement process and, with Iran holding elections next week, this was not the time for intemperate rhetoric. Nevertheless, he should have been clearer. A hand stretched out in friendship is always more persuasive when there is a clear hint of a big stick in the other and time is short. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs recently assessed that Iran will have its first nuke within one to three years, an outcome he termed “calamitous.”

It is unlikely that any combination of positive or negative inducements will convince Iran to forgo its nukes. Good intentions aside, in a matter of months, certainly a couple of years, the United States will be faced with a narrow and unpalatable range of options: acquiesce to Iranian nuclearization and pursue containment and deterrence, a naval blockade, or direct military action. The other alternative, severe international sanctions, should be put in place today, concomitantly with the engagement process. Iran, the birthplace of chess, will understand an impending checkmate, when faced with one.

Obama has taken an important step towards a complex and troubled region. He has his work cut out for him.

Chuck Freilich is a member of MESH.

In practical terms, the speech is useful in that it may help to shift opinion among some Muslim populations. The policy consequences of this could make it easier for foreign governments to pursue policies closer to what we would like them to do. But by far the greatest long-term problem remains the disjunction between rhetoric and reality.

On Iran, it is all well and good to offer an open hand, but every U.S. president since Jimmy Carter has tried without success to find a diplomatic opening. Moreover, Obama’s overstated apologia breaks no new ground—the Clinton administration offered repeated apologies to Teheran, to no avail. The Iranian mullahs have spent twenty years on a covert nuclear weapons program. (NB: pace Mr. Obama, there is no civilian nuclear rationale for many of the facilities and technologies they have pursued.)

On Israel and the Palestinians, the core problem remains the absence of a partner for peace on the Palestinian side. Time and again, the Israeli body politic has shown itself willing to make the hard choices if and when such a partner appears. Alas, there is no reason to expect that the Palestinians have either the will or capacity to make the necessary, binding and enforceable compromises.

On the Middle East regimes themselves, most remain mukhabarat states, adroit at sustaining themselves in power and with little sign they are prepared to make necessary long-term changes or offer the kind of meaningful commitments that the Obama administration and its predecessors have sought.

Robert J. Lieber is professor of government and international affairs at Georgetown University.

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Alan Dowty :: Let’s put it in perspective. President Obama’s Cairo speech is part of an ambitious effort to totally recast the prevailing mood between the West and the Islamic world. The President evokes the glorious Islamic past, he quotes the Quran repeatedly, he condemns efforts to ban Islamic dress in (unspecified) Western nations, he promises to remove obstacles to zakat (charitable donations), and he even appeals to the vision of Moses, Jesus, and Muhammed together in prayer.

In this framework, he could not have avoided dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Doing so would have condemned the entire exercise to futility. But this issue was only one of seven issues that comprise the core of his speech, and in reconnoitering this terrain Obama added nothing to existing policy. The United States has opposed Israeli settlements in the West Bank from the beginning, it has called for easing the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and it has now for some time referred to the suffering of the Palestinians and called for a two-state solution. Nothing new in any of this; there was even a reaffirmation of Bush’s Road Map, even though elsewhere in the speech Obama offered clear repudiations of his unnamed predecessor. He also repeated the three conditions required of Hamas in order to be included: an end to violence, respect for past agreements, and recognition of Israel.

What was different was the theatrics of the occasion. By turning the spotlight on the entire spectrum of Western-Islamic relations, Obama also inevitably illuminates the Israeli-Palestinian impasse and existing gaps between the United States and Israel that were allowed, previously, to remain obscured in the shadows. The use of the descriptor “intolerable” to describe the Palestinian situation adds to this. The call for a complete end to settlement building certainly has the potential, as nervous defenders of Israel correctly surmise, to create a real crisis—although the Iranian nuclear issue has even more potential in this regard. (And the critic who said that we are already in the worst U.S.-Israel crisis since 1956 has a wildly inaccurate and sanitized vision of these relations over the last half-century.)

A careful reading shows that Obama denied the legitimacy of “continued” Israel settlement, which could even be seen as a softening of actual policy since 1967. Furthermore, the image of a U.S. president quoting from the Talmud to an Egyptian audience that included Muslim Brothers has to evoke some appreciation that this is not simple pandering.

It should also be noted that, in the end, Obama added nothing operational on the Israel-Palestinian front. Numerous new initiatives with the Muslim world were announced in economic, scientific, cultural, and commercial matters, but nothing specific was added to the general lines of ongoing policy toward Israel or the Palestinians. The major change is that, like Avis, this administration will try harder. That may not be a bad thing.

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Bruce Jentleson :: Perhaps it’s because I’m just back from Spain, but President Obama’s speech brought to mind Maria Rosa Menocal’s book, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Christians and Jews Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. This is a book about a period “when Jews, Christians and Muslims lived side by side and, despite their intractable differences and enduring hostilities, nourished a complex culture of tolerance.” It was, though, ultimately undone in large part by the pulls, pressures and violence of extremists among all three groups. Both lessons, what was possible and how it was undone, came through in Obama’s speech.

In this sense, two themes especially resonate. One was right at the top about defining our relationship less by our differences than by what we share and can come to share. This isn’t feel-good sensitivity group stuff, it is strategic in two key senses. One is in reducing our negative. Defining in terms of differences “empower[s] those who sow hatred rather than peace, those who promote conflict”—i.e., our negative that Al Qaeda, the Taliban, et al., have exploited for their own gains. The other is in increasing the positive we gain from AQ-Taliban-et al.’s negatives. Peoples who have had to live under the violent extremists tend to be first in line in wanting to get rid of them. By defining our relationships with these vast swaths of the Muslim world more in terms of this commonality, we pin the negative more on the adversary and gain more for our side from the positive. Such calculi are a big part of taking the diplomacy of engagement from a process to a strategy. Start with interests, values and traditions that are shared. Don’t deny what is not, but work from there on differences.

The other theme was the power of people. Not Leninist or Jerry Rubin-esque power to the people. But the power of people to be forces of change. That’s the link Obama meant between the American civil rights movement, Nelson Mandela’s anti-apartheid, the post-Soviet Eastern European color revolutions and his message to those in Muslim societies who would change their societies. This wasn’t intended as a one-to-one correspondence, but with the core similarity in “the simple truth, that violence is a dead end.”

Three other quick points for this post:

Israel-Palestinians: I’ve been hearing the criticisms of these sections of the speech from those who think it wasn’t sufficiently pro-Israel. “This bond is unbreakable” means what it says. So too do his statements about Holocaust denial as “baseless, ignorant, hateful,” and how “deeply wrong” anti-Semitism and calls for Israel’s destruction are. Obama’s affriming style of these core positions is more likely to be effective than Bush’s antagonistic one.

On democracy promotion: The pigeonholing into “isms”—is Obama’s foreign policy realism, Wilsonianism, some other “ism”?—is bad enough in academia, and now it’s distorting policy and political discourse. Not that policy should be ad hoc, but that the coherence is more complex than these paradigms convey. In this and other speeches as well as various early policy initiatives, one can see an emerging distinctive approach to supporting democracy and human rights. Statements about the will of the people, consent not coercion and universal yearnings for justice and rule of law are hardly Kissingerian realpolitik. But there is (a) less assumption and assertion of our model and more about the universality of the values we have built our society on rather than these being American values that we propagate universally, and (b) more of a political economy approach that includes whether political systems improve the lives of their people on crucial aspects like poverty and social justice.

On affirming America: “It is my first duty as President to protect the American people.” All the rest, as it is said, is commentary. Can’t get much clearer than that. For Obama to go from there to differentiate between the justified and effective parts of our response to 9/11 and those that were neither, and to hail certain past policies while acknowledging the legitimacy of criticisms of ones like the U.S. role in the 1953 Iranian coup, is to be no less affirming. One has more credibility in claiming credit and worthiness when one is also willing to be honest about flaws and misguided actions.

Much more of course has been said and is to be said about the speech. Ultimately it’s about follow-through and building on the declaratory for the speech to be a framework for policy.

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Michael Reynolds :: Many Americans and most of their politicians, regardless of partisan persuasion, possess a seemingly irrepressible compulsion to interpret the wider world through the prism of the American experience. President Obama and his speechwriters are no different. This tendency reflects in part the fundamental instability of American identity. Ideals have always been close to the heart of the American experience, but as America has grown more diverse, more wealthy, and globally more powerful, so too has the salience of ideals to the American project grown. The redefinition of America in terms of abstract ideals and the assertion of the universality of those ideals become more and more necessary for the affirmation of America’s viability.

What Americans want is what everyone wants, and what everyone wants is America.

In Obama’s Cairo address, America’s story is the story of progress, a story of moving up, moving forward and moving beyond. And this story, Obama asserts, is also the world’s story.

Obama lays out a vision of world history as a process of universal civilizational progress, and in it he relegates both Islam and the United States to secondary roles as engines of progress. Thus in his effort to demonstrate respect for Islam, Obama assigns to Islam an honorable place in the broader history of progress, describing how Islam “carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment.”

But if Islam moved progress in the past, Obama makes clear that no one should harbor doubts about what is today the driver of progress: the United States. Thus he defends the United States against cynical Muslims by declaring it to be “one of the greatest sources of progress the world has ever known.” He cites his personal success and the material success of America’s Muslims as evidence of America’s progressive evolution. He cleverly employs the notion of progress as process to turn defects that critics typically use to attack America into opportunities to demonstrate America’s bona fide qualifications as a force for good. By remedying its flaws, American society reveals its progressive mission. In a veiled reference to slavery and the American Civil War, Obama notes that Americans “shed blood and struggled for centuries” in order to realize the ideal of equality on which they founded their country.

Later he avers, albeit rather incongruously, that “peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding” overcame the legacies of the slavery and segregation of black Americans. “This same story,” Obama claims, “can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia.” By contrast, he deplores the actions of Al Qaeda and its ilk as “irreconcilable” with “the progress of nations.”

Towards the end of his speech, Obama fleshes out his conception of a progressive society by reciting some principles, such as religious freedom, equal rights and education for women, the right to speak one’s mind, and the right to live as one chooses. To American ears, such principles are so familiar they sound less like principles in need of explication and defense than mantras to be repeated. But none of these principles is in fact so self-evident to work as a mantra, and Muslim thinkers, among others, have mounted challenges to each of them. In essence, Obama’s message to Muslims is, “Be more like America and our conflicts will recede and you shall prosper.” But is he speaking to them, or is he another American speaking to himself?