President Obama may not have come out and said the word ‘sorry’ during his visit to Hiroshima last week, but that doesn’t mean his presence there coupled with his speech calling for a world without nuclear weapons wasn’t an implicit apology, according to syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer.
After being inaugurated, Krauthammer said Obama started “confessing to a long history of American sins,” from the mistreatment of Indians to the coups in Iran and Guatemala.
“He closed the circle of that apology tour … in Hiroshima,” Krauthammer said on Fox News.
“To say it wasn’t a formal apology, of course he wasn’t going use the word and yes, he did speak of war in the abstract, but he did it in Hiroshima,” he continued. “If you want to do a speech about war in the abstract you do it in Prague, which is what he did in 2009.” When you do it in Hiroshima of course you’re talking about World War II, of course you’re talking about America dropping [the bombs] and of course the implication is that we have a sense of guilt about it.”
What President Obama should have done is visit next year when he is a private citizen, he added. Even former President Jimmy Carter, who also visited Hiroshima, had the sense to at least wait until after he’d left he White House.
Krauthammer also went on to argue that eliminating nuclear weapons will never happen and since that’s the case, does the U.S. really want to be without them when there are ‘nut cases’ like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un who are trying to acquire them? Of course not, he said.
“The president speaking as president was representing the United States,” Krauthammer said. “I thought it was embarrassing in utopianism and the implicit apology dishonored our nation. This is not something he should have done."
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