Obama's West Point speech reeked

Obama’s third big foreign policy theme is that for America to be strong abroad, it must be strong at home. On the surface, who could disagree? But what Obama is really suggesting is that for America to be strong at home, it will have to pull back from wars it can’t pay for. That’s what he means when he says that “our adversaries would like to see America sap its strength by overextending our power.”

Obama is clearly trying to ensure that the Afghan war no longer be run on a blank check. That’s why he famously brought OMB Director Peter Orszag to be photographed at an Afghanistan strategy session, and why, according to Jonathan Alter’s new book, The Promise, he demanded that the U.S. begin drawing down troops next summer, over the objections of top military brass. As I suggest in my own forthcoming book, The Icarus Syndrome, I think Obama’s effort to restore humility to American foreign policy will be his defining intellectual and political struggle. But it’s a struggle. And the West Point speech shows why. Because Obama believes that America must limit the amount of money and time it devotes to Afghanistan, he has limited America’s goals. Rather than defeating the Taliban we’re going to “break” their “momentum.” Rather than birthing a stable Afghan democracy, we’re going to “train Afghan security forces.” That’s a limited mission, all right. The problem is that at West Point, Obama was addressing cadets who are being called to make an unlimited sacrifice. Telling them they and their buddies are going to risk their lives to break the Taliban’s momentum is not exactly the stuff of Churchill.