America should provide global leadership with less recourse to military might in future, Barack Obama announced on Wednesday, proposing a new foreign policy doctrine focused on soft power diplomacy and launching financial grants to fight terrorism through international partnerships instead.
In a graduation speech to cadets at the US military academy in West Point, New York, the president sought to carve a middle way between the relentless US interventionism of recent decades and a growing isolationist tendency that some fear will leave the world less stable and without a dominant superpower.
The much-anticipated foreign policy address came after Obama presented a delayed timetable for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan but amid growing criticism from Republicans of foreign policy “weakness” after setbacks in Syria and Ukraine.
Yet the president rejected the choice between fighting wars or withdrawing from foreign challenges, arguing it was possible for the US to lead through example and by creating international alliances.
“We have been through a long season of war,” he told the first West Point class to graduate since 9/11 who are unlikely to be sent immediately into combat.
In future, he said: “US military action cannot be the only – or even primary – component of our leadership in every instance. Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.”
The promise of a less aggressive American foreign policy comes despite Obama's increased use of drone assassinations and continued failure to shut the Guantánamo Bay detention facility.
Between the end of the cold war and 9/11, US presidents intervened militarily every 17 months on average, including Panama, Kuwait, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo, but Obama said the end of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq offered the chance of a new approach.
“Here’s my bottom line: America must always lead on the world stage. If we don’t, no one else will,” he said.
“The question we face ... is not whether America will lead, but how we will lead,” he said.
In one of the few concrete policy proposals of the speech, Obama gave an example of alternative ways to protect US national security from threats such as terrorism by calling on Congress to support a new $5bn Counterterrorism Partnerships Fund to train and support partner countries in areas such as the Sahel.
“We must shift our counter-terrorism strategy – drawing on the successes and shortcomings of our experience in Iraq and Afghanistan – to more effectively partner with countries where terrorist networks seek a foothold,” said Obama.
He also announced limited new steps in response to the Syrian civil war, promising greater assistance to neighbouring Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq to “host refugees, and confront terrorists”.
But much of the speech dealt with the need to use international institutions to tackle broader global problems such as climate change and border disputes.
“American influence is always stronger when we lead by example. We cannot exempt ourselves from the rules that apply to everyone else,” said the president.
“What makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it’s our willingness to affirm them through our actions.”
And, in a nod to liberal interventionists in his team, Obama reaffirmed his belief that there were moral and national security motives for intervening in extreme circumstances.
“We have a real stake – an abiding self-interest – in making sure our children grow up in a world where schoolgirls are not kidnapped; where individuals aren’t slaughtered because of tribe or faith or political beliefs,” he said.
“When a typhoon hits the Philippines, or girls are kidnapped in Nigeria, or masked men occupy a building in Ukraine – it is America that the world looks to for help. The United States is the one indispensable nation.”
Yet the overall tone of the speech was of a president promising less armed conflict than in recent years to a military and a nation he believes are weary of war.
“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,” he said.
Referring to previous West Point graduates who died in Afghanistan, he said: “I am haunted by those deaths. I am haunted by those wounds. And I would betray my duty to you, and to the country we love, if I sent you into harm’s way simply because I saw a problem somewhere in the world that needed fixing, or because I was worried about critics who think military intervention is the only way for America to avoid looking weak.”
Opinion polls suggest Obama's campaign promise to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan remains popular among the US public, but his last-minute decision to eschew military intervention in Syria and apparent impotence in the face of Russian aggression in Crimea are giving growing ammunition to conservative critics who say US deterrence has lost credibility and will herald a new era of instability in the world.
“What we are facing is not war weariness, but world weariness,” historian Robert Kagan told a Brookings Institution policy debate held on the eve of Obama's speech. “I have begun to wonder whether we may be heading into a period that is not just a shallow and temporary retrenchment that we saw during the cold war [immediately after Vietnam and Korea] but is actually a much deeper and much longer retrenchment of the kind we saw after the first world war.”
Some prominent Republicans, such as libertarian senator Rand Paul, have welcomed such developments, but recently more moderate party leaders, including Bob Corker, ranking member of the Senate foreign affairs committee, have begun to advance a critique of US “weakness” that Democrats fear could be used against them in the midterm elections.
Corker issued a cautious statement in response to the Afghan troop announcement on Tuesday, urging a rethink before full US departure.
“It is my strong desire that the administration revisit conditions on the ground in 2015 and 2016 to determine if a full withdrawal is warranted,” he said.
Others, such as senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, are more hawkish still, but largely at odds with the party in their desire to see robust intervention in Syria and an aggressive response to Russian president Vladimir Putin.
“President Obama is not ending wars, he’s losing them,” Graham said on Tuesday.
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