ONE of the great tropes of Republican criticism of Barack Obama is that the president goes around the world apologizing for America’s past misdeeds. “Have we ever had a president,” Mitt Romney asked in a foreign policy speech this summer, “who was so eager to address the world with an apology on his lips and doubt in his heart?” Mr. Romney repeated the allegation at last month’s national security debate. He even embedded his claim in the title of his campaign book: “No Apology: Believe in America.”

The implicit allegation is that Mr. Obama does not, at bottom, believe in America, and so can’t be trusted to stand up for American values or interests. Absurd as this sounds, the charge seems to have put the White House on the defensive: according to news reports, one reason Mr. Obama decided not to apologize to Pakistan for the deaths of 24 soldiers in a NATO airstrike along Pakistan’s border last month is that doing so would give the president’s political opponents further ammunition against him.

Let’s start with the question of whether Mr. Obama has, in fact, apologized. In a series of speeches at the start of his tenure, the president acknowledged mistakes made by his predecessor, George W. Bush — which of course counts not as apology but as standard political critique — but also some that lay deeper in the past and were more systematic. In Cairo, for example, he admitted that “the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government” — that of Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953. At the United Nations he acknowledged that the United States had “dragged its feet” on climate change.

Do these and similar statements constitute “apologies”? More important, would it be bad if they did? Presidential apologies, or those delivered by senior government officials, are not unprecedented. In a major speech in Cairo in 2005, Condoleezza Rice, then Mr. Bush’s secretary of state, said that “for 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East — and we achieved neither.” What was she doing if not apologizing on behalf of the United States — and vowing to put an end to a pattern of misguided policy?