Touring the Pyramids that day, though, I knew that it wasn’t the kind of speech that could be measured against the state of the world at any one particular moment. It expressed what Obama believed and where he wanted to go, the world that should be. In writing the speech, and over the course of the trip, we’d seen the forces aligned against that outcome: the contradictions of American foreign policy; the corruption of Saudi Arabia; the repression in Egypt; the extremist forces lurking just out of sight; the intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
