President Barack Obama delivers the commencement address at the United States Military Academy at West Point in West Point, N.Y., May 28, 2014. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
President Obama’s commencement address at West Point on Wednesday was clearly aimed at deflecting rising criticism of his administration’s foreign policy. In particular, the speech was designed to address complaints that U.S. foreign policy under Obama has lacked strategic coherence and signaled a U.S. retreat from the international arena. The administration promoted the address as a platform for the president to describe his “vision” for U.S. foreign policy during the remainder of his term. To the extent that the speech did present a vision, it was not a particularly new one.
The president spoke a day after the administration announced its “end game” for U.S. military engagement in Afghanistan. The plan would keep 9,800 troops past the formal year-end deadline but still set us on a track to remove almost all military personnel by the end of 2016. The announcement reinforces Obama’s argument that he is both tough and realistic: tough, insofar as he recognizes the continuing need for U.S. military force in Afghanistan, at least in the short term; realistic, to the extent the plan will still terminate our country’s troubled 12-year-old intervention. More importantly, perhaps, the announcement allows Obama to claim — with some justification — that he will have ended U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by the time he leaves office in early 2017. In its details, the plan very much embodies the president’s customary “split the difference” approach — in this case between a) pulling the plug on our involvement by the end of this year and b) extending it indefinitely until the Taliban are decisively defeated. It is yet another example of the president’s penchant for middle-of-the-road policies that infuriate many of his critics on the left and right. And it is this approach, at a fundamental level, that the West Point speech was designed to defend in broad terms.
The address itself was well-written and superbly delivered boilerplate. Indeed, much of it could have been given by any post-Cold War U.S. president. President Obama praised our armed forces. He stressed our country’s unique role in world affairs and then offered an unimpeachably internationalist view of that role. He invoked the high ideals — democracy, human rights — that U.S. foreign policy can and should serve. And, like Goldilocks tasting the bears’ porridge, he rejected both military adventurism on the one hand and isolationism on the other, preferring a policy that is “just right.” To say this is not meant to be dismissive. Obama’s careful, risk-averse approach to foreign policy has much to commend it. At the very least, it has yielded nothing like the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003.
We should not have expected anything particularly new in the speech. The Obama administration is now, after all, over five years old. The idea that the president would announce a major change in strategic course at this point would be to acknowledge past failure, something leaders are unsurprisingly hesitant to do.
There is no doubt, however, that the president has been stung by criticism of his foreign policy in recent months. His frustration showed in his sometimes testy, sometimes plaintive comments at the end of his Asia trip in April.
At one level, I sympathize with the president. Much of the criticism leveled at his foreign policy is frankly partisan in nature. This state of affairs is not unique. Republicans pilloried President Truman for “losing China.” Democrats attacked Ronald Reagan over his Central American policy. The list of partisan point-scoring is a long one. The idea of some earlier era where foreign policy, sustained by seamless bipartisan support, was exempt from politics is a comforting myth — but a myth all the same. Even when such a consensus existed — the strong bipartisan support for containing Communist expansion during the Cold War, for instance — it could lead to catastrophic results, like the escalation in Vietnam.
A great deal of the criticism levied against President Obama is couched in terms of “leadership,” and, specifically, Obama’s purported lack of it. This critique tends to fetishize leadership by confusing a means — executive leadership — with an end — effective foreign policy, however defined. Presidential leadership in both the foreign and domestic arenas is an instrument that can be used to advance bad policies or good ones. It is substantively and morally neutral. For a president, exercise of that instrument in foreign policy involves — at great simplification — identifying a problem, formulating a solution, and rallying domestic and international support. But leadership presupposes a world view – derived from theory, experience and intuition – that shapes what the president perceives as problems demanding action and what he considers appropriate responses. The folly of our invasion of Iraq was only in part the result of poor leadership in the instrumental sense of the word; indeed, the Bush II administration demonstrated great skill in marshalling domestic support for the invasion of Iraq. Fundamentally, however, the Iraq fiasco resulted from a world view in the Bush II White House dominated by an exaggerated assessment of the specific threat posed by Iraq, an inflated faith in U.S. military might, and an endemic under-appreciation of the risks involved.
President Obama has surely shown lapses in leadership in the narrow sense. His fumbling approach to the Syrian weapons of mass destruction crisis last year is a clear example. Only Russia’s last-minute offer of a possible deal with Damascus permitted the president to escape the corner into which he had painted himself. (Rest assured: the president is now more careful about drawing “red lines.”) But most of the criticism levied against the president actually masks something else: a disagreement with the policies that his administration has pursued. When his critics say that he has shown too little leadership on Syria they do not mean, by and large, that his execution has been inept (though it has been at times). It is, rather, that his policy has been wrong — so the standard critique goes — because he should have intervened in the Syrian civil war earlier and with more vigor. Similarly, when critics assail his lack of leadership on Ukraine, they don’t mean, for instance, that he has been incompetent in crafting a common US-EU front on limited sanctions against Russia. They mean that he should have taken more dramatic steps — with the EU or unilaterally — to punish Russia, reassure NATO allies, and bolster the current Ukrainian government. Needless to say, critics do not agree, when it comes to either Syria or Ukraine, on the particular policies they would prefer. They merely believe that Obama should have done — and should do — more.
Combine this “do more” critique of the president with constant calls to “do something” about the various foreign policy issues confronting him — from kidnapped girls in Nigeria to heighted tensions between China and its neighbors — and I can understand the president’s exasperation. Everywhere he turns there are calls that the United States must “do something.” And when the president does, in fact, do something, he can expect criticism for not doing more.
Will the speech at West Point calm the critics of Obama’s foreign policy? No. But it will give his supporters ammunition to support the administration against accusations that its policies are feckless. It will send a message of seriousness to the general public, though whether this impression will last much beyond a single news cycle is doubtful. And the address might, at the margin, assuage some wavering centrist members of the foreign policy elite uneasy with his policies. But its general impact is likely to be modest. Again, this is not necessarily a criticism of the president or his speech. We have merely heard what he said before. And we will no doubt hear it again, from the president himself and from other senior figures from his administration.
Joe Barnes is the Baker Institute’s Bonner Means Baker Fellow. From 1979 to 1993, he was a career diplomat with the U.S. Department of State, serving in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.