Streetwise Professor

Reading about Obama’s commencement speech at West Point took me back years, to 1978 when Jimmy Carter spoke at the USNA graduation.

Not that I remember anything that Carter droned on about. Not a word. And that’s part of the reason Obama’s speech brought me back to Annapolis, 36 years ago: I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the case of those in attendance at USMA yesterday.

Some things have stuck in my mind. Like my classmates getting booted from their room at 0600 by a man wearing sunglasses and carrying a long black case who proceeded to lock himself in: their room overlooked the field where Marine 1 was going to land. I remember the march over to Memorial Stadium. I remember my classmates and I heckling Sam Donaldson before he did a standup in advance of Carter’s speech.

But as for what Carter said, in one ear and out the other, if it made it in the one ear at all. And the assembled WooPoos (sorry-as an ex-Squid I couldn’t resist) will probably have similar non-memories of Obama’s banal, vacuous, and totally predictable foreign policy speech.

I knew what he was going to say and how he was going to say it before he said it because the man is utterly incapable of originality, and stubbornly clings to both his rigid and narrow perspective on policy (a view apparently invulnerable to the reality of repeated failures) and his mental and rhetorical tics. I knew that he would justify his own positions by reference to those of his opponents, and do so by outrageously mischaracterizing them. For the most notable of his tics are the false choice and the mass murder of straw men. And I was not disappointed. In these expectations, anyways.

Obama portrayed himself as the realist and the peacemaker, and his opponents as troglodyte warmongers who advocate a military solution to every foreign policy challenge. He said that because the US has the world’s premier military hammer, his political foes see every problem as a nail to be driven by it. Yes. He said every.

He was at his most outrageous in his discussion of Syria, where he peevishly and pridefully congratulated himself for his calm wisdom in not committing US ground troops to the country. Which absolutely no one was calling for in the first place, or ever. Well, maybe the chief oped writer and head of classified advertising for the Back of Buggery Bugle was shouting Geronimo and calling for the deployment of the 82d Airborne, but no major politician or policy figure, or A, B, C, or even D-list conservative opinion leader was advocating any such thing.

In point of fact, in Syria Republicans and even people in his own administration presented a variety of different policy alternatives, including arming the rebels to airstrikes. None advocated insertion of ground forces, and indeed almost all who even mentioned it did so only to disclaim that intent. Pretty much the entire security establishment in his own administration pressed for arming the rebels, but Obama demurred. Obama and Kerry themselves threatened air strikes before backing down.

And here we are, years after the war began, and the carnage and misery drags on day after day. But Obama is giving himself bursitis patting himself on the back for a job well done in fending off those baying for battle in Damascus.

200,000 dead Syrians could not be reached for comment.

Insofar as Ukraine is concerned, Obama said it brought back memories of Soviet tanks rolling into eastern Europe after WWII. I said to myself: yeah, we didn’t do anything about it then, and we sure ain’t going to do anything about it now. Obama has gone full auto-Yalta.

And again, no one except the chemtrail set and Russian propaganda shills (there is a large overlap between the two) even suggest the possibility of US military action. Many advocate far more robust financial measures against Russia, but (a) Obama has shied away from those despite Russia’s attempt to disrupt the election (which Obama said was a trigger for more sanctions, but what’s another red line anyways?), and (b) Obama pretends as if his critics never mention measures short of war to confront Putin.

There was stiff competition, but these were the dumbest bits:

“We can’t call on others to make commitments to combat climate change if so many of our political leaders deny that it is taking place,” Obama said. “It’s a lot harder to call on China to resolve its maritime disputes under the Law of the Sea Convention when the United States Senate has refused to ratify it. – despite the repeated insistence of our top military leaders that the treaty advances our national security. That’s not leadership; that’s retreat.”

Translation: How can I ram idiotic policies down your throats if some uppity people insist on pointing out that they’re idiotic? The LOST part is particularly outrageous. What China is doing violates maritime rights and laws and obligations that far pre-date LOST. Moreover, even putting the legalisms aside, China is engaged in aggressive acts that greatly raise the risk of serious confrontation or even conflict.

Obama did throw in a few stock lines. If the US doesn’t lead, who will. I believe in American exceptionalism to the last fiber of my being. Cheerleader media outlets, notably Bloomberg, dutifully led with this boob bait in their headlines. But every substantive part of the speech contradicted those assertions.

This was billed as a major foreign policy speech and a ringing defense of his policies. The scary thing is that Obama and his minions probably believe that. But given the tiresome predictability of the speech, you have to wonder what they are thinking. Any slightly self-aware speechwriters, not to mention a slightly self-aware president reading what’s going on the teleprompter, should have realized that critics would be ready to pounce on the resort to Obama’s standard rhetorical tricks, and that this would greatly diminish the impact of the speech. And diminish it has. The impact is pretty much zero, from what I can tell from reading a rather wide range of sources.

Reading through the transcript, it struck me that Talleyrand’s characterization of the Bourbons fits Obama well too. He has learned nothing, and he has forgotten nothing. In his mind, despite the wreckage of policies in the Middle East, Asia, and Russia/FSU strewn all around him, it’s still Berlin 2008 or Cairo 2009. He rationalizes the criticism by mischaracterizing the critics and their arguments, in a profoundly unfair way.

With a never forgetting, never learning Bourbon in charge, we are condemned to 2.5 more years of foreign policy fiascos. Get used to it, if you haven’t already.