I watched the broadcast of the Cairo speech on a rooftop terrace in Istanbul’s historic district. I remember the excitement in the air. Something big was happening. The United States’ first Black president, deeply familiar with Islam, was attempting to reset U.S. relations with the "Muslim world" after the tensions and wars of the Bush era. I wasn’t a Times reporter. I was just a State Department bureaucrat on my honeymoon. Fifteen years later I still celebrate my wedding anniversary, but the anniversary of the Cairo speech has become a moment not so much for celebration but for more modest commemoration or just sober reflection—if it’s remembered at all.
This disappointing outcome would have surprised many of us who worked on the drafting or implementation of Obama’s speech. His highly anticipated remarks were widely acclaimed. They generated a surge of diplomatic activity and a wave of global goodwill. Four months after Cairo, the Nobel Committee announced its decision to award the Peace Prize to Obama “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”
Hillary Clinton, at the launch event for the Cairo-inspired initiative called Partners for a New Beginning, expressed her hope that “this is one of those occasions in the diplomatic history of our country that we will look back on and say that that made a difference.”
Did it? One of my former Obama administration colleagues told me she cried tears of joy when watching Obama’s speech in 2009. But this year when I shared my plans to arrange this series of articles on the fifteenth anniversary of the Cairo speech with another former colleague, he responded differently. He chuckled. His response audibly illustrated the dominant contemporary perception of the speech: it did not make a difference.
My assessment is slightly more positive. The speech made a massive difference in global, and especially Muslim, perceptions of the United States. But that was short-lived. The United States’ image in Muslim-majority countries soon tumbled back down to near George W. Bush-era levels. And then Donald Trump and his “Muslim ban” certainly didn’t help matters. The speech also had a significant and longer-lasting impact on how the United States government engages with international religious communities. Admittedly, that’s a modest—and largely unintended—success, but it adds a bit of nuance to the overall dour assessment of the New Beginning.
The seeds of both the short-lived and longer-lasting successes were sown in the text of the speech itself. The speech addressed specific issues that proved to be intensely complex, resistant to quick solutions, and largely outside Obama’s control. But Obama also articulated—and embodied—a humble, holistic, de-securitized approach to diplomatic engagement with Muslims that had enduring, positive influence.
To his credit, Obama recognized that the flashpoints in U.S. relations with the Muslim world were not about messaging but about divergences on certain policies and values. So, in Cairo the president said he would attempt to “speak as clearly and as plainly as I can about some specific issues that I believe we must finally confront together”: violent extremism, Israel/Palestine, nuclear weapons, democracy, religious freedom, women’s rights, and economic development.
Obama received enthusiastic applause for his careful, hopeful treatment of every issue. But the perceived success or failure of the speech would be henceforth directly connected to how U.S. foreign policy would shift on these issues. For instance, Obama’s reference to the “daily humiliations” of Palestinians under Israeli “occupation” raised hopes among many Arabs and Muslims that Obama would usher in a new U.S. policy toward Israel/Palestine. But then he didn’t. The Obama administration increased military aid to Israel, largely acquiesced on Jewish settlement activity, and blocked the Palestinian bid for statehood at the United Nations. As Muslim audiences, particularly in the Middle East, saw the same old U.S. policies rather than a new beginning, impressions of Obama and his Cairo speech quickly soured.
Aware of this dynamic, the White House shifted the emphasis in its post-Cairo communications from geopolitical issues to the socioeconomic issues Obama had mentioned in the speech. By June 2010, a White House fact sheet on the first anniversary of the speech led with the soft power issues and then devoted only 28% of the document to hard power issues of violent extremism, Iraq, and nuclear proliferation. It was an almost complete inverse of the structure of the Cairo speech. The White House webpage devoted to the New Beginning eventually focused exclusively on the soft power issues, detailing Cairo implementation under four headings: Expanding Opportunity, Science and Technology, Democracy and Human Rights, and Interfaith Engagement. This only fed the growing perception that the Cairo speech was “just a speech.”
But even as critics were vocally questioning Cairo’s impact on U.S. foreign policy, the overall framing and tone of the speech were quietly shaping U.S. diplomacy. Obama had saturated his speech with religious references and spoken knowledgably and respectfully of Muslims. He addressed them not as threats or as mere targets of U.S. strategic communications campaigns. He addressed them as partners. The New Beginning was not so much about “winning hearts and minds” but about joining hands to achieve shared goals.
For those of us working to make U.S. diplomacy more attentive to religion, the Cairo speech was a godsend. We leveraged the New Beginning to build greater momentum for existing and emerging efforts to equip America’s diplomatic, development, and defense officials to incorporate analysis of religion and partnership with religious groups into their tradecraft. In 2010, Clinton observed that “President Obama’s speech in Cairo in June of last year signaled a significant increase in our engagement with Muslim-majority countries and with religious communities around the world.”
She was right. In 2010, the new interagency working group on religion and global affairs produced a massive internal report on how several foreign affairs agencies and some 166 U.S. overseas posts were engaging with religious communities. Much of the activity was related to the Cairo speech. The insight and energy from the working group and report fed into the creation of an external advisory council on religion and foreign policy that in turn fed into the creation of a new State Department office focused on religious engagement, as well as the adoption of a 2013 National Strategy on Religious Leader and Faith Community Engagement. A decade later, this 2013 document was referenced in USAID’s 2023 Strategic Religious Engagement Policy to underscore that partnership with religious and faith-based groups at home and abroad, within the guardrails of the First Amendment, has become established U.S. government practice.
Today we are 15 years and two presidential administrations removed from the day Obama commanded the world’s attention from a podium at Cairo University. His soaring speech had some success, but it’s no longer the lodestar it once was, and its legacy has lost much of its luster.
My commemoration of this anniversary is thus a mix of nostalgia, regret, and gratitude. Nostalgia for the exhilaration of 2009 in U.S. diplomacy. Regret for the naïve and unrealistic aspects of the New Beginning that hampered our ability to more fully and sustainably actualize Obama’s vision. But gratitude nonetheless for all the ways that vision has enriched the United States' religious engagement.
Note: Portions of this article are adapted from a chapter in the author’s doctoral dissertation.
