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COMMENTARY BY
James Jay Carafano, a leading expert
in national security and foreign policy challenges, is The Heritage
Foundation’s Vice President, Foreign and Defense Policy Studies, E. W.
Richardson Fellow, and Director of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis
Institute for International Studies.
President Obama’s West Point speech proved
telling in ways he probably didn’t plan. The commander-in-chief tried to use
the commencement address to quell concerns over a foreign policy that has
produced nothing but controversy and setbacks since the debacle in Benghazi.
But the president scored more misses
than hits with the audience, pundits and the press. Even The Washington Post
acknowledged
that the speech did little more than mow down a field of “straw men.”
As far as policy goes, the speech may
have been a clarion call for little more than muddling through.
But for prospectors of presidential rhetoric, it is a gold mine. And the
biggest nugget is the paradox of an administration mimicking the caricature of
the foreign policy it created to discredit the previous administration.
Every administration must define the
enemy from which they are protecting us. During the Cold War, that was easy.
But since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it’s often been less self-evident.
That can be problematic. Strategy,
after all, is a competitive practice: the art of besting somebody—the Trojans,
the Red Coats, the Nazis, whoever’s on the other end of the spear, the sword or
the gun. “It is about getting more out of a situation than the starting balance
of power would suggest,” Lawrence Freedman declares in his new book, Strategy: A
History. “It is the art of creating power.”
And then, slapping the other side
over the head with it.
During the Cold War, the enemy was in
Moscow. The big challenge was to make neither too much, nor too little of the
threat. George Kennan always argued for a tempered, measured threat assessment.
On the other hand, the drafters of NSC 68, led by Paul Nitze, and Senator
Arthur Vandenberg wanted to “scare the hell out of the American people.”
Getting the threat right was
critical. It was the main selling point to the public about how much was enough
to defend us.
But America’s long-time selling point
for strategy crumbled with the Wall. No self-evident replacement arose until
9/11. From the rubble of the World Trade Center, a strategy for fighting a
“global war on terrorism” (GWOT)—the “Long War”—emerged.
Then came Obama. He not only
shortened the long war and banned GWOT from the rhetorical locker room, he
actively participated in a campaign to delegitimize the whole endeavor. That
crusade continued into the West Point speech. “[A] strategy that involves
invading every country that harbors terrorist networks is naive and
unsustainable,” the president told
the Corps of Cadets and their assembled loved ones.
Of course, the Bush administration
had made exactly the same point again and again, post 9/11. Bush, for example,
passed on taking on a number of transnational terrorist groups including Hamas,
Hezbollah, all sorts of Pakistani groups with lots of initials and most of the
nascent groups in North Africa.
Bush invaded exactly two places—Iraq
and Afghanistan. Obama invaded one—Libya, and he tried to bomb his way into
another war—Syria. So, at least numerically speaking, the score on invasions is
pretty even. Obama’s critique of GWOT is an embarrassment of
oversimplification.
But while treating the terrorist
threat dismissively, Mr. Obama went on to identify an alternative “enemy” on
which to pin a grand strategy. Unfortunately, his chosen enemy is just as far
removed from a pressing threat to national security as his caricature of the
Bush Doctrine was divorced from the real Bush Doctrine.
The “enemy” chosen by Obama to
animate America’s grand strategy is climate change. The nation’s existential
goal, therefor, is “to energize the global effort to combat climate change, a
creeping national security crisis that will help shape your time in uniform,”
the commander-in-chief told his new troops at West Point. Apparently, the new
second lieutenants will spend their careers fighting the weather.
Weather may seem an odd foe for the
military. But for a progressive president, it’s the perfect choice.
Obama can’t be accused as a warmonger
because he doesn’t want the military to fight anyone—he wants the military to
help people.
Weather isn’t a person or a country.
He risks offending almost no one.
Making climate change a national
security matter also helps a president to press for other statist agenda
items—from pet green energy projects to adopting the right-to-protect doctrine.
Unfortunately, as an organizing
principle for national security, climate makes a terrible “enemy.” It is
enormously complex and unpredictable. The unpredictability of how climate
change will play out on the global stage ought to dissuade any strategist from
regarding it as an organizing principle around which one can practice what
Freedman calls “the art of creating power.” Basing strategy on climate would be
the ultimate march of folly.
Mr. Obama may well know that. The
reference to climate may be just like the rest of the address: knowingly empty
rhetoric. But it does lead to a conclusion devoid of complexity and
unpredictability—this speech and the vapid ideas in it will soon be forgotten.
Originally appeared in The National
Interest.
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