The Cory Remsburg metaphor

The President’s State of the Union speech last night broke little new ground on foreign policy.  He is pleased to be finishing two wars and will resist getting the United States involved in other open-ended conflicts.  He may leave a few troops in Afghanistan to train Afghans and attack terrorists.  Al Qaeda central is largely defeated but its franchises are spreading in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq and Mali.  He will limit the use of drones, reform surveillance policies and get us off a permanent war footing.  He wants to close Guantanamo, as always, and fix immigration, as always.

He will use diplomacy, especially in trying to block Iran verifiably from obtaining a nuclear weapons and in resolving the Israel/Palestine conflict, but also in destroying Syria’s chemical weapons capability.  He will support the moderate Syrian opposition.  He will veto new Iran sanctions in order to give diplomacy a chance to work, maintain the alliance with Europe, support democracy in Ukraine, development in Africa, and trade and investment across the Pacific.  America is exceptional both because of what it does and because of its ideals.

The President didn’t mention Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, Russia or Japan.  He skipped North Korea too.  His mother must have taught him that when you don’t have anything nice to say you shouldn’t say anything at all.  Those countries might merit mention, but all have in one way or another been doing things that we prefer they not do.  He mentioned China, but only as an economic rival, not a military one.  He skipped the pivot to Asia as well as Latin America.  For my Balkans readers:  you are not even on his screen.

The main focus of the speech was on restoring the American economy.  Reducing foreign commitments, not increasing them, is the main contribution foreign policy can make, apart from the Atlantic and Pacific trade and investment agreements now under negotiation.  The president would like a kinder, gentler and more orderly world, but he is not committing himself to making one in the couple of years he has left in office.  His ambitions are much reduced, his goals circumscribed, his means limited.

This is what retrenchment looks like.  Its consequences aren’t pretty.  It may mean letting Egypt restore autocracy with financial support from the Gulf, letting Turkey drift in an illiberal direction, letting Russia continue to infringe its citizens’ rights, letting Pakistan suborn President Karzai, and letting Japan return to its nationalistic past.  It may even mean letting North Korea continue as a nuclear weapons state.  The tacit message is this:  we can’t prevent these things with the means at our disposal, so we’d better not mention them and learn to accept them.

I’d have preferred the president be explicit about this.  Instead, he concluded with a crescendo keyed to Sergeant First Class Cory Remsburg, who

never gives up, and he does not quit.

He was supposed to be a metaphor for an America that “has never come easy.”  It pursues lofty goals at home and abroad despite the difficulties, including freeing other nations from tyranny and fear.  It never gives up.

I can’t help but think that Cory Remsburg was a metaphor in a different sense:  battered and broken, America needs time to heal and recover from grievous wounds inflicted for no good reason.  We need to conserve our resources, recuperate our strength, restore our capacities, and focus on top priorities.  Some things are not going to get done, because we can no longer do them.  This is a foreign policy of triage and retrenchment, limited goals and modest means.