THE KING'S SPEECH – AT 8:48 A.M. ET:  They are noticing.  Some pundits are waking up to the reality that the president of the United States had so little to say about foreign policy in his speech last night.  It is shocking.  Foreign policy is the province of the president, and he is commander-in-chief of a military at war.  Yet foreign policy seemed like a footnote at the end of the State of the Union.  If we are attacked again in this country, it won't be because we don't have high-speed rail, but you'd never know it.

Jackson Diehl, at the Washington Post:

The focus of this State of the Union address was domestic rather than foreign -- and perhaps properly so, given Americans' continuing preoccupation with the economy. Even in that context, though, President Obama's portrait of U.S. engagement in the world was thin -- and weak.

By Obama's account, the most important American foreign initiatives in 2011 will be retreats -- the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. The president portrayed the two wars not as vital missions but as loose ends to be wrapped up. In Iraq, he said, "we finish the job of bringing our troops out" -- even though Iraq's pro-Western parties, such as the Kurds, would like at least some American soldiers to stay. In Afghanistan, "we will begin to bring our troops home." Never mind defeating the Taliban -- Obama didn't set that goal.

What of Middle East peace, a great focus of Obama's first two years? The president didn't mention it. Nor did he discuss the spreading popular unrest in the Arab Middle East, other than to say that the United States "stands with the people of Tunisia," whatever that might mean. The efforts to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, and North Korea from expanding its arsenal, were covered with perfunctory phrases.

And British observer Nile Gardiner, whom we've often quoted:

For the second year running, President Obama has demonstrated that he is no world leader, and frankly has little interest at all in foreign policy.

The war in Afghanistan was barely a blip on the president’s teleprompter. With over 100,000 American troops on the ground fighting the Taliban in defence of the United States and the free world, one would have expected the president to have dedicated more than a miserly 132 words to the war effort and the stakes involved. There was no sense from the president of a plan for victory in Afghanistan, or the wider importance of the conflict within the context of a global war against Islamist terrorism, which he resolutely refuses to even identify.

Similarly, the Iranian nuclear crisis, arguably the biggest foreign policy challenge facing the Obama administration in 2011, was barely mentioned, meriting a single, rather pathetic line in the speech. Nor was there any declaration of support for dissidents in Iran, or a clear signal that the United States stands with those who are being brutally suppressed by the Islamist dictatorship.

Again in a major speech, Barack Obama has shied away from taking a clear stand on human rights issues, in marked contrast to predecessors including George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. The plight of hundreds of millions living under tyranny, from Burma to Zimbabwe to North Korea, was ignored altogether. No US administration in living memory has paid less attention to the spread of liberty and freedom across the world than the Obama presidency, and this was glaringly apparent in Obama’s State of the Union address.

COMMENT:  Accurate comments, but will the president's foreign-policy debacle have much effect at the polls in 2012?  Absent an attack on our soil, I would tend to doubt it.  Americans are focused on the economy.

Historians have pointed out that the Great Depression of the 1930s was one of the causes of World War II, because citizens of the democracies were so focused on their economic plight, and had little patience for discussion of the military buildup in fascist countries.  History doesn't repeat itself, but the psychology of history repeats itself, and that is what we might be seeing.  The attacks of 9-11 have faded into memory, and Americans are being lulled into complacency once again.

January 26, 2011