America wakes up to the shift in global power

Andrew Sullivan

Last Tuesday night was a sobering affair if you are a supporter of America’s engagement with the world. In his defining speech on Afghanistan at the West Point military academy, Barack Obama’s own tone was extremely sober, and at times he seemed close to choking up as he weighed sending more young men and women into the wastes of Helmand. His audience of West Point cadets sat silently for the most part, some even fighting off sleep.

The pundits regretted that Obama had not pulled off a Henry V peroration, as if announcing a ninth year of counterinsurgency in a country thousands of miles away could be compared to Agincourt. And the polling found a public deeply ambivalent about extending the war further, while also afraid of the consequences of too rapid a departure.

This was a chastened rather than confident America. And it isn’t hard to see why. Obama emerged as a candidate, and then as a president, precisely because Americans saw that their country was so far off track. But the reason change was vital then is why the atmosphere is now so dire, and Obama’s inability to overcome it all (what human could?) has brought Americans back to the sobriety of their current predicament.

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