The Seven Faces of Barack Obama

The Seven Faces of Barack Obama

05/29/14

Daniel R. DePetris

Grand Strategy, United States

In a speech that was designed to clarify his foreign policy, Obama may have done the opposite.

The last time President Barack Obama gave a speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, it was December 1, 2009.  At that time, the war in Afghanistan was the only foreign policy issue that Americans across the country could talk about.  The war by most indications was going badly, or at least not well enough, fast enough, and President Obama had to make a monumental decision at a pivotal moment in his young presidency: whether to send tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops to the war zone.  In front of a national audience and thousands of West Point cadets—some of whom would be deployed to Afghanistan in the future (and four of whom would be killed serving the country)—Obama doubled down on a counterinsurgency-counterterrorism hybrid strategy that he labeled at the time as the best option the United States could take to beat back a resurgent Taliban insurgency.

Over four years later, President Obama returned to West Point with Afghanistan looking a whole lot different (just a day earlier, Obama announced in the Rose Garden that practically all U.S. troops would be withdrawn from Afghanistan by 2016) and with a different goal in mind: defending his foreign policy record.

To the president’s supporters, Obama said what he needed to say to fight back against Republican critics in the U.S. Congress and some within the Washington foreign policy establishment who have been complaining about his administration’s lack of focus in world affairs.  To some, like frequent critics John McCain and Ed Royce, Obama’s address was more of the same: long on rhetoric, short on action.

But neither side has it quite right. The real problem with president Obama’s commencement address to West Point’s latest graduating class is that it was a perfect microcosm of his many personalities and traits as Commander-in-Chief.  Obama may have hoped to lay out a broad vision of the world for the rest of his term, but in doing so, he exhibited the multiple faces, attitudes, and approaches to the world that has defined his presidency for the past five and a half years. The result has been confusion.

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