(Vox) President Obama made a commencement speech at West Point on Wednesday that the White House had aggressively billed as a grand articulation of Obama's foreign policy vision. This was not the first time he had attempted to lay out a foreign policy doctrine, and few expected much more than the usual vague policy mish-mash — when it's year six of your presidency and you still need to explain your doctrine, it's not a great sign that you really have one.
So it was a legitimate surprise when Obama articulated a unified, tightly focused vision of America's role in the world. And while it's not a vision that will thrill many foreign policy hands, including perhaps some of those in his administration, it is the clearest Obama foreign policy doctrine he's made in years: no war, no militarism, no adventurism. With the possible exception of Jimmy Carter's 1977 Notre Dame speech, it may well have been one of the most dovish foreign policy speeches by a sitting US president since Eisenhower.