WASHINGTON — It is fitting that the day before President Barack Obama gives his grand West Point address defending the wisdom of his foreign policy, his government should be urging Americans to evacuate Libya.
Libya, of course, was once the model Obama intervention — the exquisitely calibrated military engagement wrapped in the rhetorical extravagance of a televised address proclaiming his newest foreign policy doctrine: the responsibility to protect.
You don't hear R2P bandied about much anymore. Not with more than 50,000 civilians having been slaughtered in Syria's civil war, unprotected in any way by the United States. Nor for that matter do you hear much about Libya, now so dangerously chaotic and jihadi-infested that the State Department is telling Americans to get out.
And you didn't hear much of anything in the West Point speech. It was a somber parade of straw men, as the president applauded himself for steering the nation on a nervy middle course between extreme isolationism and madcap interventionism.
The isolationism of Obama's telling is a species not to be found anywhere. Not even Rand Paul would withdraw from everywhere. And even members of Congress' dovish left called for sending drones to Nigeria.
As for Obama's interventionists, they are grotesquely described as people "who think military intervention is the only way for America to avoid looking weak" while Obama refuses to believe "every problem has a military solution."
Name one person who does.
"Why is it that everybody is so eager to use military force?" Obama asked.
That's what the interim prime minister asked for when he visited here in March — and was denied. Two months later, military assistance was the first thing Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine's new president, said he wanted from the United States. Not boots on the ground.
Same for Syria. It was Obama, not his critics, who went to the brink of a military strike over the use of chemical weapons. From which he then flinched. Critics have been begging Obama to help train and equip the outmanned and outgunned rebels — a policy to which he now intimates he might finally be coming around.
Three years late. Qusair, Homs and major suburbs of Damascus have already been retaken by the government. The battle has by now so decisively tilted toward Assad — backed by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, while Obama dithered — that Assad is holding triumphal presidential elections next week.
Amid all this, Obama seems unaware of how far his country has fallen. He attributes claims of American decline to either misreading history or partisan politics. Most of the complaints are coming from abroad, from U.S. allies. Their concern is their own security as they see Obama undertake abdications.
What is the world to think when Obama makes the case for a residual force in Afghanistan and then announce a drawdown of American forces to 10,000, followed by total liquidation within two years on a fixed timetable regardless of circumstances?
The policy contradicts the premise. If you want not to forfeit our terribly hard-earned gains — as we forfeited all our gains in Iraq with the 2011 withdrawal — why not let conditions dictate the post-2014 drawdowns? Why go to zero — precisely by 2016?
For the same reason, perhaps, that the Afghan surge was ended precisely in 2012, in the middle of the fighting season — but before the November election. A 2016 Afghan end date might help Democrats electorally and provide a shiny new line to Obama's resume.
Is this how a great nation decides matters of war and peace — to help one party and polish the reputation of one man? As with the speech itself, as with Obama's foreign policy of retreat, one can marvel at the smallness of it all.
Reach Krauthammer at letterscharleskrauthammer.com.