At the Wall Street Journal, "Obama at West Point":
The speech President Obama delivered Wednesday at West Point was intended to be a robust defense of his foreign policy, about which even our liberal friends are starting to entertain doubts. But as we listened to the President chart his course between the false-choice alternatives of "American isolationism" and "invading every country that harbors terrorist networks," we got to thinking of everything that wasn't in his speech.
No mention of the Reset. "The reset button has worked," Mr. Obama avowed in a 2009 meeting with Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's figurehead president. That was the same year Mr. Obama announced in Moscow that, "The days when empires could treat sovereign states as pieces on a chessboard are over."
No mention of the Pivot or "rebalance" to Asia. This was billed by Hillary Clinton in 2011 as "among the most important diplomatic efforts of our time" and meant as proof that America's withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan wasn't simply a retreat from the world. But as assistant secretary of defense Katrina McFarland admitted in March, following the latest round of Pentagon cuts, "Right now, the pivot is being looked at again, because candidly it can't happen."
No mention of Mr. Obama's Red Line in Syria against the use of chemical weapons. No mention, either, of the ostensible success of using diplomacy to disarm Bashar Assad. The President was fond of boasting of this achievement until recently, when it emerged that Assad continues to use chlorine bombs to kill his enemies. Somehow that also didn't make it into the speech....
We know that no foreign policy speech can cover the entire world. But listening to Mr. Obama trying to assemble a coherent foreign policy agenda from the record of the past five years was like watching Tom Hanks trying to survive in "Cast Away": Whatever's left from the wreckage will have to do.
0 comments:
Post a Comment