New York Times reports “In Obama’s Speeches, a Shifting Tone on Terror”:
“[Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser] said Mr. Obama’s diagnosis of the threat as an arc of militancy stretching from the Middle East to Africa was nearly identical last week and a year ago. His criteria for the use of force — unilaterally, when the nation’s interests are directly at risk; multilaterally, in the case of humanitarian crises — were unchanged from 2009…
“In his second term, a time that presidents typically set about cementing their legacies as statesmen, Mr. Obama has instead settled on a minimalist foreign policy — one that he laid out at West Point and sums up with a saltier version of the phrase, “don’t do stupid stuff.”
“While many foreign policy experts dismissed the speech, a few defended Mr. Obama’s restraint. The journalist Fareed Zakaria, in a recent column in The Washington Post, wrote that Mr. Obama was right to reject a “knee-jerk sentiment in Washington in which the only kind of international leadership that means anything is the use of military force… ”
We do take issue with a choice of “ambivalence” in the following paragraph: “Taken together, the speeches offer a portrait of a president whose ambivalence about the wisdom of military action has only deepened since he took office, even as his view of the world’s dangers has darkened.” ‘Cautious’ might be more accurate.
