Obama's Foreign Non-Policy

Commentators on the right have been eager to reinforce President Obama’s better foreign-policy moves. Despite their best intentions, however, conservative praise for Obama repeatedly fails to gain purchase. It’s not that enthusiasm for this or that Obama decision is misplaced; it’s that there’s no reason to take any single administration accomplishment as representative of a larger strategy, and those apportioning the compliments know it. Laudatory editorials and blog posts by strong-military advocates or pro-democracy pundits are wishful, caveat-rich, and willfully imperceptive. These folks are typing with their fingers crossed.

The praise is, by necessity, narrowly focused, giving Mr. Obama singly earned points for discrete acts. After the U.S. Navy rescued Captain Phillips off the coast of Somalia, Wall Street Journal editors wrote, “White House and Navy officials say President Obama had issued a general authorization to use force in these circumstances, and that is to his credit.” Point. When at long last Barack Obama made a full-throated denunciation of the Iranian regime’s post-election brutality, the Weekly Standard’s Stephen F. Hayes noted, “There are some things to quibble with, but this is much, much better.” Point. And after the president gave his pro-democracy, anti-corruption speech in Ghana, Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal called it “by far the best of his presidency.” Point.

But this hat trick is not all it’s cracked up to be. Since the rescue of Captain Phillips, the Islamist al-Shabab group has enlisted pirates to smuggle as many as a thousand al-Qaeda fighters into Somalia in an effort to overthrow the American-backed government. Mr. Obama has responded by sending aid money. Point retracted. Apparently satisfied with the state of affairs in Iran a month after the regime slaughtered protesters in the streets, the Obama administration has gone silent on electoral justice for Iranians and is back on track in its effort to engage (and thus legitimize) the thugs of Tehran. Point retracted. Regarding the president’s call for good governance and personal responsibility in Ghana, the point was earned under protest to begin with. As Stephens went on to write, “[I]f the U.S. owes Africa no apologies for its recent disasters, why has Mr. Obama gone to such lengths to apologize to Iran for the 1953 Mossadegh coup, and, in his Cairo speech, to the entire Muslim world for the politics of the Cold War? Or if Mr. Obama wants to ‘isolate’ irresponsible actors, why does he continue to promise engagement with Iran, Syria, Russia, and perhaps North Korea, no matter how they behave?”

It is those very questions that make praising President Obama’s foreign-policy decisions such a trying exercise. The individual moments conservatives attempt to praise are quantum phenomena with no traceable link to other administration events or to any organizing principles. More often than not, the admirable instances are most notable for contradicting positions Mr. Obama has previously held. His condemnation of Tehran’s barbarism is one such instance; his commitment to a longer Iraq engagement is another; and his decision to prevent the release of photographs showing Americans allegedly abusing detainees abroad is yet another. When the good comes so frequently after a commitment to the bad, its virtue is at least suspect.

The suspicion? That Barack Obama has no operable foreign policy. He does not stay the liberal course he so often talks up, nor does he effectively plan for the conservative solution he eventually adopts. Shifting gears and looking flat-footed while doing so is not the president’s intention.