President Barack Obama said Wednesday
that America must “always lead on the
world stage” but signaled a less direct
role for the U.S. military overseas, instead
stressing the imperative for consensus-
building and providing tools for others to
tackle the increasingly diffuse threat
posed by terrorism worldwide.
Unilateral military force could be used
“when our core interests demand it,”
Obama said. “But 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.
“Just because we have the best hammer
does not mean that every problem is a
nail,” he said.
Obama chose to deliver the most in-depth
articulation of his foreign policy
doctrine to date at commencement
exercises for the U.S. Military Academy in
West Point, which has historically been an
occasion for foreign policy declarations.
At the 2002 ceremony, then-President
George W. Bush introduced his doctrine of
preventive war as part of his post-9/11
war on terror. Within a year, he had
invaded Iraq.
For Obama, Wednesday's speech was
similarly timely. The president has come
under growing pressure to defend what
critics have called his “timid” or even
isolationist approach to the world’s
pressing conflicts, after being accused of
waffling on threats of military intervention
in Syria and having been outmaneuvered
by Russia over the crisis in Ukraine.
In his speech, Obama instead sought to
frame the new chapter in U.S. foreign
policy as an evolution of the U.S. war on
terror, a product both of U.S. success in
dissolving much of Al-Qaeda’s central
leadership structure and of the lessons
learned in Iraq and Afghanistan. The
president said the U.S. now faces a global
threat that demands a more nuanced
regimen of coalition building and aid to
regional partners as they tackle Al-Qaeda
offshoots, such as the Boko Haram
insurgency in Nigeria.
“A strategy that involves invading every
country that harbors terrorist networks is
naive and unsustainable,” Obama said, in
an apparent jab at his predecessor’s
embrace of preventive military action,
which many believe has only served to
embolden anti-American sentiment and
further destabilize the Middle East. “We
need a strategy that matches this diffuse
threat; one that expands our reach
without sending forces that stretch our
military thin, or stir up local resentments.”
As part of that effort, he announced a $5
billion Counter-Terrorism Partnerships
Fund for training and other assistance to
partners in the Middle East and Africa as
they deal with armed groups, such as Al-
Qaeda-linked forces in Yemen.
Obama also confirmed previous reports
that the U.S. would ramp up its training
and support for moderate factions among
Syria’s beleaguered rebels. He framed that
decision, too, as a Goldilocks option
between what he called a “brutal dictator”
in Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and
“terrorists,” or the Al-Qaeda-inspired
extremist factions that have flooded the
country to fight him. The U.S. will be
partnered with regional allies — namely,
Jordan, Turkey and the Gulf countries — in
that endeavor.
Since he took office in 2009, Obama has
ended the war in Iraq and withdrawn the
majority of troops from Afghanistan. “You
are the first class to graduate since 9/11
who may not be sent into combat in Iraq
or Afghanistan,” Obama told the class of
1,000 graduating cadets to a murmur of
applause.
The last time Obama spoke at West Point,
in 2009, he announced a 30,000-strong
troop surge to Afghanistan. On Tuesday,
he said no American boots would remain
on the ground there past 2016, in a
speech that served to formally wind down
that 13-year war ahead of Wednesday’s
much-anticipated speech.
But while recent polling has indicated
rising support among the war-weary
American public for the U.S. being “less
active on the global stage,” Obama has
nonetheless come under fire from both
sides of the aisle for failing to articulate
the middle-ground approach that
continues controversial elements of the
war on terror, like the use of drones, as it
simultaneously scales back the U.S.
military footprint.
Gary Sick, a senior research scholar at
Columbia University’s Middle East
Institute, said the Obama doctrine was, in
part, a natural response to more than a
decade of unpopular wars that many feel
have backfired by sharpening anti-U.S.
sentiment. Sick likened the principles
Obama laid out on Wednesday to “a
rebirth of the Nixon doctrine,” which
emphasized acting through proxies and
regional allies to defend U.S. interests.
The Nixon doctrine, which was formulated
amid another unpopular war, in Vietnam,
sought to combat the expansion of the
Soviet Union and the spread of
communism in the 1960s without risking
American lives. The modern-day fight
against global terrorism “isn’t the same
thing at all,” Sick said, “but it does
involve the same principle, which is that
we have willing partners on the other end
and that we don’t have to do everything
ourselves.”
That “leading from behind” approach — so
coined by an Obama official in the context
of the U.S.-supported NATO attack on
Libya, in which French planes struck first
— remains controversial . Since Libyan
dictator Muammar Gaddafi fell from
power, the country has in effect been run
by militias and infiltrated by extremist
groups. Meanwhile, a rogue
general appears poised to stage a
coup against the anemic central
government, and the country looks to be
heading toward civil war.
In Syria, many say the minimal assistance
Obama has provided for moderate rebel
groups, who are outnumbered by Islamist
factions and Al-Qaeda-inspired radicals,
has been inadequate to tip the balance of
the three-year-old war and merely served
to perpetuate the violence, which has
killed more than 160,000 and displaced
nearly 10 million.
It is unclear whether the additional aid
announced Wednesday will do much more,
and it certainly will not satisfy hawkish
members of Congress who have called for
a surgical strike on the regime.
The U.S. would strike only “when we face
a continuing, imminent threat, and only
where there is near certainty of no civilian
casualties,” Obama said. “For our actions
should meet a simple test: We must not
create more enemies than we take off the
battlefield.”
Obama’s speech was notable for what it
did not say, too. The president made just
one reference to cyberwarfare, which
military analysts in a recent poll said was
the foremost threat facing the U.S. And he
made scant mention of Israel, a major
U.S. partner in the Middle East but one
that has proved obstinate in Secretary of
State John Kerry’s fruitless efforts to
broker a peace agreement with the
Palestinians. Those talks broke down last
month amid criticism that the U.S. was
not willing to pressure its ally Israel to
make the painful concessions required for
progress.
Some might have expected the showdown
with Russian President Vladimir Putin to
get the same treatment, since the U.S.
was widely perceived to have suffered an
embarrassment when Russia turned a
cheek to "red line" rhetoric from Obama
and annexed Crimea by way of a Moscow-
backed public referendum.
Instead, the president cited last weekend’s
Ukrainian elections as a signal that U.S.-
led “mobilization of world opinion and
institutions” had given the Ukrainian
people the opportunity to “choose their
future.”
“Russia’s recent actions recall the days
when Soviet tanks rolled into Eastern
Europe,” Obama said. “But this isn’t the
Cold War. Our ability to shape world
opinion helped isolate Russia right away.”
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