Nobody seems to have liked the speech.

A glance shows that the New York Times and Washington Times, the Financial Times and Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal were all disappointed with it.

As was said of one of Harding's addresses, it was "an army of pompous phrases marching across the landscape in search of an idea."

What Obama has is less a foreign policy doctrine than a foreign policy disposition. He is a reluctant interventionist.

He got us out of Iraq and is taking us out of Afghanistan. Yet he was pushed into a war on Libya that turned out disastrously and is now dipping his toe into what he has called "somebody else's civil war" in Syria.