Muammar Gaddafi often comes across as a nutjob, travelling around with his amazon bodyguard and having himself crowned “king of kings”. And his long, rambling, intemperate speech at the UN Security Council yesterday certainly contained its fair share of crazy. However, I’ve suggested before that Gaddafi has more tactical acumen than the media gives him credit for, and this thought occurred to me once again while reading Foreign Policy’s live blogging of the speech. After bashing the United States and calling the Security Council the “terror council”, Gaddafi takes his speech in a new direction:

Now heaping praise on the “black, African, Kenyan” president of the United States

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“We would be happy if Obama would stay forever as president.”

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He keeps calling Obama “our son.”

Perhaps this praise was sincere. But I have a feeling that Gaddafi’s comments were aimed at American domestic audiences; in particular, Obama’s right-wing critics. Gaddafi uses the internet, and he surely understands that Obama’s political position has been complicated by the fact that he is seen as less than fully American: either, by the mainstream right, as a globalised “Davos man” with an insufficient appreciation for the importance of American exceptionalism, or, by the birther fringe, as literally a citizen of Kenya rather than the United States. If Gaddafi wanted to deliberately exacerbate these fears, the easiest way to do so would be to effusively praise Obama for the same cosmopolitanism that makes the right uneasy; and that’s exactly what he did.

On the other hand, I don’t see any long-term gain for Gaddafi in annoying Obama, which suggests that whatever tactical acumen he possesses does not necessarily translate into strategic good sense.