Since I gave him so much grief for accepting the prize in the first place, I have to give the president credit for the speech itself. He faced the impossible task of having to give multiple addresses at once: A speech his European hosts expected to hear from a Nobel Prize winner; a speech that would work as a statement of foreign policy principle from an American president abroad; and the speech that would play well with a skeptical public back home. It could have easily collapsed into incoherence. Instead, it mostly cohered, and often impressed.

via Commentary on Politics and Culture – Ross Douthat Blog – NYTimes.com.