Turns out not all of the Republican Party has lost direction entirely. Where former Vice President Dick Cheney is willing to embrace any excuse to attack Obama, party elder Newt Gingrich and, surprisingly, Sarah Palin too are more sincere in their judgement of the president’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

“He clearly understood that he had been given the prize prematurely,” said Gingrich, “but he used it as an occasion to remind people, first of all, as he said that there is evil in the world.” The former Speaker of the House of Representatives described the speech as “historic” in ways and praised the president for reminding the world that there can be no just and lasting peace when countries are unwilling to use force to defend it.

Sarah Palin was enthusiastic too, noting that Obama’s defense of war as a means to combat evil could have been taken from the pages of her recently published memoirs. “I talked, too, in my book about [...] why war is necessary at times,” she said.

Amid all the niceties from both sides of the political spectrum, there is already talk of an “Obama doctrine”—an approach to foreign policy that regards international relations as a struggle between good and evil.

The notion that American force can be used to promote peace and serve humanitarian purposes is valid, although, in fairness, Obama isn’t exactly the first one to point this out. Indeed, as Erick Erickson, founder of RedState writes: “Parts [of the speech] sounded like full throated support for the Bush doctrine.” Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, adds though that, “If Bush had said these things the world would be filled with violent denunciations. When Obama says them, people purr.”

That is not entirely true. Obama isn’t saying the same things as President Bush was. The comments he made after accepting the Nobel Peace Prize should be understood within the broader framework of his foreign policy which is a multilateral one—far different from the “either you are with us, or you are against us” rhetoric that so upset many traditional allies of the United States during the Bush Administration. Obama is reminding them that conflict is sometimes inevitable and that free nations have the duty to protect themselves against violence; a message that apparently goes well with both the left and the right.