American exceptionalism – terms and conditions apply on foreign use

President Barack Obama’s speech at the class of 2014 graduation ceremony in West Point military academy offered further justification for his foreign policy decisions rather than change his view of America’s leadership role in the world. His approach will inevitably be defined as the Obama Doctrine.

Coming in the sixth year of the presidency, Obama took up where he left off in his address to the United Nations last September and outlined, in a 5,000-word speech to the graduating cadets in New York on Wednesday, how the US should take unilateral military action when its "core interests demand it".

But when issues of global concern do not pose a direct threat to the US – “when crises arise that stir our conscience or push the world in a more dangerous direction but do not directly threaten us” – America should “not go it alone” but act collectively with the support of allies.

After more than a decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, Obama told the graduates to cheers and applause that they may be the first graduates since the September 11th, 2001, attacks "who may not be sent into combat in Iraq or Afghanistan".

The day before the White House announced that the US would leave 9,800 troops in Afghanistan after this year but that that number would be reduce roughly by half by the end of 2015.

At a time when Obama is at loggerheads with Afghan president Hamid Karzai, the announcement about troop levels seemed more directed at his audience back home than on security considerations in Afghanistan.

Karzai refused to meet the US president at Bagram military base on Obama’s unexpected Memorial Day visit with his troops last weekend amid the Afghan president’s ongoing refusal to sign a security agreement to allow American troops to stay on after the US military campaign officially ends this year.

Answering critics, not just within the ranks of Republicans but among his own Democratic party, who believe that Obama has not gone far enough to act on his "red line" threat in Syria or stood up to Russia's expansionist ambitions for former Soviet states, Obama told the West Point graduates said that just because the US has an interest in peace beyond our borders, that is "not to say that every problem has a military solution".

Telling them that the military they had joined was the “backbone” of American leadership in the world, he offered stipulations on its use: “US military action cannot be the only, or even primary, component of our leadership in every instance. Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.”

The response to the speech was largely negative. Some commentators pointed to the absence of references to the "Reset" with Russia or the "Pivot" to the Asia-Pacific region that formed central planks in Obama's foreign policy in the early years of his presidency.

Others criticised his picking of arbitrary timetables to withdraw from Afghanistan, engaging too late by assisting moderate rebels in Syria and not doing enough to stop the expansion of Islamic extremism and al-Qaeda offshoots.

"It was more clear what it was against than what it was actually for," said Richard Haass, the former US diplomat tapped last year to find solutions to remaining issues in Northern Ireland.

The Washington Post castigated the president for binding the hands of US power abroad, which placed him "at odds with every US president since World War II," noting that he was in effect ruling out interventions to stop genocide and missions along the lines of those carried out in the past in places such as Somalia and Haiti.

"Listening to Mr Obama trying assemble a coherent foreign-policy agenda from the record of the past five years was like watching Tom Hanks trying to survive in Cast Away: whatever's left from the wreckage will have to do," wrote the Wall Street Journal in an editorial.

Aaron David Miller, an analyst at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars think-tank in Washington, said that the policy followed by Obama, describing him as the “Extricator-in-Chief,” may be right.

"We refuse to accept the possibility that Obama's view of the world – visionless, minimalist and focused far more on the middle class than the Middle East – is well-suited to the times and, in certain respects, quite productive," he wrote in Foreign Policy magazine.

Obama told the cadets that he believed in “American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being”. But laying out the terms and conditions on US foreign action, he set out clear exceptions on when it would be displayed.