In his Cairo speech, Obama assured his global audience that they could remake the world, "if we have the courage to make a new beginning". What he offers, however, is well-worn territory: the dissolute daydream of the utopian. It is a vision of a world that does not require moral courage. It represents, rather, a moral evasion that refuses to face the world as we find it. "For it is one thing to see the Land of Peace from a wooded ridge," wrote St Augustine, "and another to tread the road that leads to it."