Category Archives: U.S. Foreign Policy

President Obama has a strategy for American counterterror policy and he is sticking to it; that was the core message of the speech the President gave Thursday at the National Defense University.

Confronted by a troubling strategic and political situation in the world at large as well as in the complex conflict that he does not want to call a ‘global war on terror,’ the President offered a careful, thoughtful speech that doubled down on the core foreign policy themes he has sought to promote since accepting the Democratic presidential nomination in the summer of 2008.

The President is a man who believes that speeches matter; his critics sometimes accuse him of believing that making speeches and making policy are the same thing. He has no doubt learned in the White House that this is not always true; nevertheless, President Obama does not take major foreign policy addresses lightly. Like his speech in Cairo and his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 2009, yesterday’s speech was intended as a comprehensive and definitive statement of the ideas by which he intends to be guided in the remaining years of his second term. Both supporters and critics of the President should study it carefully; it is the best available window into the mind of the man onto whose shoulders the responsibility for American security rests. Continue reading →