In today’s globalized world, the security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people. When narco-trafficking and corruption threaten democracy in Latin America, it’s America’s problem too. When poor villagers in Indonesia have no choice but to send chickens to market infected with avian flu, it cannot be seen as a distant concern. When religious schools in Pakistan teach hatred to young children, our children are threatened as well. ~Barack Obama

Actually, our security is not “inextricably linked” to that of “all people.”  Really, it isn’t.  Our security is not “inextricably linked” to that of people in Zimbabwe or Darfur or Nepal or Colombia.  He might argue that it is important to help resolve the smouldering civil war in Nepal or support the MDC opposition, but he would have to acknowledge that these things are only distantly and tangentially related, if at all, to U.S. security.  In some cases, our security is scarcely linked at all. 

Are Americans endangered by rebel Naxalites in east-central India?  Is American security at risk because of Sri Lanka’s civil war?  If this were true, every crisis and conflict on earth would be a threat to national security and would merit American involvement and intervention.  This is crazy.  This is not a responsible retreat from delusions of grandeur, but simply more of the same in a slightly less menacing form.  Obama’s foreign policy is a more charming hegemonism, but hegemonism it remains.  He would rather have the hegemon be liked and have many willing servants, rather than recognising that the work of a hegemon is itself detrimental to America and the world (but especially to America).  This is, in its way, far worse than a blundering interventionism that reveals its wrongs for all to see, because a more subtle hegemonism has a much better chance of enduring (at least for a little bit longer). 

It might be the case that the United States should act in certain circumstances abroad even when our security is not directly concerned, but Obama does not make that appeal, because I think he knows that people have had enough of this sort of excessive idealism.  But then he makes the far less credible appeal that national security is bound up with the fate of democracy in Latin America.  Quite the contrary.  The regular workings of democracy in Latin America have produced one of the more virulently anti-American, albeit pitifully weak, rulers of the last decade.  What does Obama make of the opposition of Bolivian President Morales to the drug war if narcotrafficking is the bane of Bolivian democracy?  At least he didn’t refer to the “quiet violence” of flu-infected Indonesian chickens. 

Obama believes that by stressing interdependence and globalisation that he has seriously addressed complexity in foreign affairs, but he has simply replaced one rigid scheme with another, and in that scheme every problem on earth is potentially our problem.  If every problem is our problem, and everyone’s security is “inextricably linked” to our own, how can any President set priorities or address one crisis rather than another when all are potentially just as relevant and connected to American security?           

It cannot now be said that Obama does not make policy speeches.  But he does make bad policy speeches.