INTELLIGENCE/ROGER COHEN

In his victory speech to a joyous Chicago crowd, Barack Obama employed a little word not much heard from the White House these past eight years: “peace.”
This is our moment, he declared, “to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace.”
Nobody can know what lies ahead for the young African-American senator now thrust, on a wave of rekindled democratic fervor, to the highest office. But we have learned this much about him already: dialogue is an instinct and peace from his lips no empty phrase. Where revenge seemed to animate George W. Bush, reconciliation is the foundation on which Obama has built his very identity.
The world was waiting to hear that word. It has grown used to a drumbeat of American bellicosity. It has ached for the reappearance of American hope because dread is a harsh daily diet. For all the power shifts under way across the globe, United States leadership remains essential.
Four years ago, at the Democratic convention, in the speech that lifted him from obscurity, Obama spoke of “ a belief that we are connected as one people.”
He never wavered from that theme, his central and ultimately triumphant idea. “In this country, we rise or fall as one nation, as one people,” he declared as his defeat of John McCain took on the dimensions of a near-landslide.
Obama extended his barrier-breaking message beyond American shores to an expectant world. “Our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared,” he said in his victory speech, promising that “a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.” The promise went out not only to leaders but also to “those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world.”
That last phrase was another unimaginable from the current White House occupant. It spoke of Obama’s experience, in his father’s Kenya, in his stepfather’s Indonesia, of the enduring hold of poverty on billions of human beings. This is no abstraction to him, and so it will inform his policy.
There will be new tensions, there will be disappointments, and recession and war will test Obama from day one. But some principles will be immediately restored: that words must have meaning, that listening is important, and that an open mind is the only mind worth having.
You can’t proclaim freedom as you torture. You can’t promote democracy as you disappear people. You can’t dispense with the transparency and regulation essential to modern capital markets and hope still to be the beacon of free enterprise.
Or rather, you can do all these things, but then you find yourself alone.
Americans found it in themselves to embrace the genius for change that is woven into the Constitution. But they also challenged the world.
That challenge is this: Look afresh at your own societies, your own barriers, your own power structures, and ask yourselves to what degree the unfamiliar name, the unfamiliar face, the unfamiliar culture or religion is treated as alien, rather than part of the “one nation” Obama evoked.
America was always a revolutionary idea. It has just thrown down the gauntlet to the world of the 21st century.