Tone is key to Obama message and impact

By Edward Luce and Delphine Strauss

It is not so much what Barack Obama says, as how he says it. The US president on Monday gave his last set-piece address of a frenetic and momentous inaugural overseas tour at the Turkish parliament in Ankara.

The event was loaded with opportunities to trip up – not least over the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman soldiers. Mr Obama has repeatedly backed a US congressional resolution des-cribing the killings as genocide. Without using the word “genocide” Mr Obama gently pressed for progress in talks with neighbouring Armenia, with which Ankara has yet to establish relations.

In spite of his speech’s acute sensitivity to his Turkish hosts, Mr Obama was given a standing ovation. By choosing Turkey to deliver messages on his policies for the region, and linking Turkey’s secular and democratic evolution to that of the United States, he flattered to cajole – in stark contrast to the tone and language of George W. Bush.

President Obama said “the United States is still working through some of our own darker periods” – slavery, its treatment of Native Americans and human rights abuses during the “war on terror”. “I say this as the president of a country that not too long ago made it hard for someone who looks like me to vote,” he said. “But it is precisely that capacity to change that enriches our countries ... Every challenge that we face is more easily met if we tend to our own democratic foundation. This work is never over. That is why, in the United States, we recently ordered the prison at Guantánamo Bay closed, and prohibited, without exception or equivocation, any use of torture.”

Nowhere did Mr Obama unveil a radically new policy. Yet the unorthodox manner in which he framed his words and the fact that he was introduced by the Turkish speaker as Barack Hussein Obama, made it all sound radically fresh.

“Each country must work through its past,” he said. “I know there are strong views in this chamber about the terrible events of 1915 ...The best way forward for the Turkish and Armenian people is a process that works through the past in a way that is honest, open and constructive.” There was substance as well – Mr Obama offered his help to resolve the continuing division of Cyprus and gave strong backing to Turkey’s aspirations to join the European Union – urging his hosts to continue reforms that had “created ... a momentum that must be sustained”.

If only for a day, there was more unity, even in the fractured world of Turkish politics. Military commanders came to listen for the first time since shunning parliament after elections in 2007 brought Kurdish party politicians into the chamber. They applauded as Mr Obama promised US support in fighting Kurdish separatist rebels and as he paid tribute to Ataturk’s legacy of “strong and secular democracy”. The speech came towards the end of a trip in which Mr Obama repeatedly promised to “listen, not to lecture” and in which the US appeared, once again, to be an enthusiastic participant in multilateral institutions, such as the G20 meeting in London or the Nato summit in Strasbourg. Mr Obama’s impact has been in how he has delivered his message.

“I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism,” the president said when asked by the Financial Times whether he subscribed to the view that the US was uniquely moral among nations. “The fact that I am very proud of my country, and I think that we’ve got a whole lot to offer the world, does not lessen my interest in recognizing that we’re not always going to be right, or that other people may have good ideas, or that in order for us to work collectively, all parties have to compromise.”

Mr Obama applied that approach to Turkey, a country that could prove pivotal to his plans for remaking America’s relations with the Muslim world. “The trust that binds us has been strained, and I know that strain is shared in many places where the Muslim faith is practised,” he said.

The president distanced himself from the Bush administration’s habit of praising Turkey as an example of moderate Islam. Mr Obama instead took the United States as his starting point, saying, “We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation.”