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| Image: Flickr User Barack Obama |
By Alex Ward
As his West Point speech reaffirmed, President Obama doesn’t have his own brand of foreign policy.
President Barack Obama’s speech at West Point was many things to many people. Indeed, realists reveled in Obama’s preference to act only when core interests are threatened, and liberals enjoyed the willingness to work multilaterally and, on occasion, via institutions. Naturally, his political allies and foes praised and eschewed his speech, respectively, without giving it much serious thought.
In the end, these short-lived comments won’t mean much. What does matter is where this speech places Obama’s foreign policy in relation to other American presidents. Sadly, his place in the pantheon will not be reserved, simply because Obama failed to detail his own personal “brand” of foreign policy. Instead, he will be remembered for being the president who defined his foreign policy by wholeheartedly opposing or supporting his predecessors’ policies instead of charting his own unique course.
Obama was careful to toe the line drawn by past presidents, never swaying toward one side or the other, positing that the U.S. role in the world should be some place in the middle. The problem was he did not articulate what he wanted the United States to do in that middle space, which Fred Kaplan notes is “so broad almost anyone could walk [in] it.” Ultimately, Obama’s proposed operating manual will take a little bit from realism and a little bit from liberalism — in essence, the neo-liberal model most associated with Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye. But what will this new American operating manual allow the United States to achieve? This remains unclear.
Read the full story at The Diplomat