Five years later, Obama returned to Berlin last June to commemorate Kennedy's speech, greeted this time by a much smaller and less enthusiastic audience. For Obama, though, nothing had changed: "We are not only citizens of America or Germany — we are also citizens of the world. And our fates and fortunes are linked like never before." But in recalling Kennedy's famous line "Ich bin ein Berliner", Obama added a new gloss. Invidiously, he singled out Afghans, Burmese and "those who work for an Israeli-Palestinian peace" as "the citizens who long to join the free world. They are who you were. They deserve our support, for they too, in their own way, are citizens of Berlin." 

Quite apart from the implication that Israel is not yet part of the free world, this is the politics of buck-passing. President Obama has a global responsibility to protect the victims of war and genocide, but so does everybody else. While no longer acknowledging any special responsibility, he compensates by pretending that we are all citizens together. Citizens of the world, unite: you have nothing to lose but US protection. This watered-down world citizenship is quite different to Kennedy's gesture of solidarity to Berlin at a moment of real peril. 

What, in such a world, do the "burdens of global citizenship" really amount to? Are the "fates and fortunes" of Syrian refugees actually linked to our own, except in the sense that we may watch them on YouTube? In its practice, if not in its rhetoric, the Obama administration takes the view that "fate" and "fortune" must be allowed to take their course, and are certainly no business of the US government. Like Hamlet, the President soliloquises; he does not act.

Abrams fears that if Obama's policies are not reversed, "they will produce an America that is a ‘citizen of the world' like all the others, shorn of the ability to lead and believing that leadership means little more than hubris and risk." The "post-American presidency", the term coined three years ago by the former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton, writing in Standpoint, has morphed into the "citizen of the world presidency". Abrams recalls the incumbency of Jimmy Carter. His presidency was cut short by Ronald Reagan, who capitalised on the sense of impotence that gripped America. Obama won a second term, but he too seems impotent. 

Whereas Wilson saw it as his duty, both as a patriot and as a global citizen, to "walk with the light all about us if we be but true to ourselves", Obama "leads from behind". The once-noble title "citizen of the world" has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning. This is a president who just wants to be loved. As Machiavelli says, "Of course, one would prefer to be both loved and feared, but since this is unlikely it is much safer to be feared." Who's afraid of Barack Obama?