A Reluctant Realist at West Point

A day after announcing that he will withdraw virtually all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2016, President Obama went to West Point and tried, for the umpteenth time, to lay out an “Obama doctrine” for American foreign policy.

Arguably, this was largely unnecessary. Most Americans already know about and support Obama’s approach, which involves repudiating the Bush Administration’s military adventurism, but, nonetheless, remaining committed to prosecuting the war on terror by more covert methods; paying lip service, but not much more than that, to humanitarian interventionism; and, above all else, avoiding getting entangled in another Iraq or Afghanistan.

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