Sky Views: Obama speaks up for liberals around the world

John Sparks, Africa correspondent

In what was his first major speech since leaving the office of the US presidency, Barack Obama made a startling admission in front of 15,000 people in Johannesburg on Tuesday. He said he could not really believe what he was going to have to say.

"I still have to stand here at a lecture and devote some time to saying that black people and white people and Asian people and Latin American people and women and men and gays and straights… are all human, that our differences are superficial, and that we should treat each other with care and respect. I would have thought we would have figured that out by now."

His impassioned 90-minute address was, at its heart, a forceful endorsement of universal liberal values and the rules-based international order. The problem is, the established rules-based order is currently getting a battering from Donald Trump-style hyper-nationalism, xenophobia and bigotry.

Maybe that is why the multi-racial crowd at the Wanderers Cricket ground looked so patently grateful as Obama spoke.

It was as if the captain of the reserves had been called up to play in the big match because there was nobody left on 'Team Open & International'.

It is not like Theresa May can speak out for the global system. Given a mandate to enact Brexit by people who, for the most part, do not like immigrants, Ms May is currently trying to find a way limit the damage leaving the EU will do to the UK economy.

Obama may have been thinking of the Brexiteers when he said this: "Should we understand the last 25 years of global integration as nothing more than a detour from the previous inevitable cycle of history - where might makes right, and politics is a hostile competition between tribes and races and religions?"

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau cannot do the job either. The refugee-hugging yogi has proven himself a disappointment with progressives by seeking to nationalise a lengthy oil pipeline, maintaining tax-loop holes for the super-rich and arguing against a raise in the minimum wage.

The EU's liberal-in-chief, Angela Merkel is trying to cling on to power as anti-immigration factions in her own coalition threaten to bring her down, while in the United States, the Democratic Party has struggled to counter the frenzy which is the Trump administration with a message - or a messenger - that can dominate the public space.

You have to believe in facts. Without facts, there is no basis for cooperation

Instead, liberals are counting on Donald Trump's predecessor to say the things he never thought he was going to have to say in these "strange and uncertain times".

"Unfortunately, too much of politics today seems to reject the very concept of objective truth. People just make stuff up. They just make stuff up," said an incredulous-looking Obama.

"This is another one of these things that I didn't have to lecture about. You have to believe in facts. Without facts, there is no basis for cooperation. If I say this is a podium and you say this is an elephant, it's going to be hard for us to cooperate."

In truth, Obama is not the only one left on 'Team Open & International'.

This week the European Union inked the biggest trade deal in history with the Japanese and signed an unusual joint-declaration with the Chinese committing both parties to an international rules-based system.

Still, no one knows how much damage President Trump and friends will do by the time they are finished with what we used to call, the post-Berlin Wall 'international consensus'.

Sky Views is a series of comment pieces by Paste BN editors and correspondents, published every morning.

Previously on Sky Views: Paul Kelso - What's really frightening about Salisbury is how little we know