Obama Ambassador To Russia: We Support "Universal Values" Not "American Values"

"And we, as President Obama has said many, many times, we're not going to get into the business of dictating that path, we're just going to support what we like to call universal values. Not American values, not Western values, universal values." - U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, January 25, 2012

What's disturbing about this quote is not so much the usage of the phrase "universal values," but the outright negation of, and unwillingness to support, "American values." How can an official American Ambassador actually state that he is not going to support "American values" abroad but only "universal values"? In that context, it is meaningless culturally relativist gibberish, the sort of multicultural nonsense you might come to expect from a college professor, but not something that should be imbued in American foreign policy. But I guess this sort of statement you get while Barack Obama is President of... the universe. Tweet