Slavery, Obama and Turkey

No country on Earth is more responsible for the abolition of slavery than the United States of America. Barack Obama's blackening of America's past -- he repeatedly referred in his European trip this week to America's 'darker periods' of slavery without acknowledging Americas redemption through its abolition -- did America an injustice and cost him a precious opportunity to promote security in vulnerable regions. Ironically, Obama repeated his references to slavery in Turkey, the very nation more responsible than any on Earth for the institutionalization of slavery.

The American democracy's swift consignation of slavery to the dustbin of history, and the American role in ending a universal scourge that, until recent times, was unrecognized as an evil, is a story Barack Obama could have told with conviction, reigniting the American ideal in Europe and reassuring Turks of their wisdom a century ago in choosing Western values.

Instead, in his description of slavery and of other wrongs, President Obama has become the face of a kinder, gentler, apologetic America. Whether this new America can help a Turkey torn between its Western and Islamic factions, a Central Asia unable to export energy and a Europe without an alternative energy supplier to Russia, will be seen soon enough.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute. energyprobe.org