We can all rest easy, because yesterday, the president of the United States assured the graduating cadets at West Point and the rest of America that, despite enormous pressure, he is not going to intervene militarily everywhere at all times.
He’s just not. So stop asking!
“To say that we have an interest in pursuing peace and freedom beyond our borders is not to say that every problem has a military solution,” the president said.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: Whew! That was a close one! Because before he spoke, the consensus opinion was that every problem has a military solution. Now we know better! Thanks, President Obama!
His speech at West Point was billed as one of the most significant of his presidency — an address in which Obama would lay out a philosophical case for his administration’s conduct and choices.
He found it necessary to deliver such a speech because of the worldwide distress his disastrous off-the-cuff remarks in Asia caused a few weeks ago.
Then, he summed up his foreign policy this way: “You hit singles; you hit doubles; every once in a while we may be able to hit a home run.”
With these words, the president seemed to be suggesting the United States ought to be evaluated much as a baseball sabermetrician would evaluate a quality utility player — one of those guys who bounces around the major leagues and adds some small but meaningful value to a team’s production.
The United-States-as-utility-player may be the country he’d prefer to lead, given his lifelong skepticism about America’s ability to bring about change for the better beyond our borders.
But it doesn’t do the slightest justice to the power, influence or responsibilities of the country he was twice elected to lead.
His words alarmed even his friends. Thus, it was time, he clearly felt, to put flesh on the bones of his foreign policy, to give us the Obama Doctrine.
But, as usual with Obama, he mostly talked about what he is not, and what the United States should not be — rather than what he is and what the United States ought to be.
For example, our president opposes both “so-called realists,” as he referred to them yesterday, and “interventionists.”
Both have a point, he said, but “neither view fully speaks to the demands of this moment.”
The demands of the moment are, it would appear, for some singles and doubles.
One example he gave of a single we should be hitting is the passage of the Law of the Sea Treaty. He contended, with a straight face, that our failure to pass this treaty — which has been before the Senate for, no joke, 29 years — undermines our effort to oppose Chinese aggression in the South China Sea.
That is patently absurd.
The United States has managed to do a great deal of good in keeping the world’s sea lanes open for trade and peaceable travel while the treaty has languished.
(Indeed, Obama himself did some of that good in 2009 by making it clear to Somali pirates he wouldn’t stand for their aggression against commercial ships.)
An example of a single he claims we have hit was some positive change in Burma. True: What’s happened in Burma is a heartening development. Also true: Burma matters far less than, say, Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
Not to worry, though. In an astonishingly bizarre passage yesterday, the president seemed to suggest the United States could take a measure of pride in its response to Russia’s aggression on the European mainland — because the world has come together to get really mad at Russia under our leadership.
Then there’s Syria — another case in which Vladimir Putin has played Obama for a fool. Not in the president’s view. Yes, the civil war there has killed as many as 200,000 people and caused an unprecedented refugee crisis.
The regime has used chemical weapons. It’s bad. But “as president,” he said, “I made a decision that we should not put American troops into the middle of this increasingly sectarian civil war, and I believe that is the right decision.”
Only, the thing is . . . nobody was advocating the use of American troops in Syria. Nobody. Not even evil neocons like me.
But what’s the point in objecting? As Boon from “Animal House” put it when someone objected to Bluto saying the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor, “Forget it, he’s rolling.”
Rolling where, exactly, we can’t say.
But it’s probably nowhere good.