President Obama's address to West Point.

• Author: Clare, Gwen

Where's the Strategy?

For a speech supposedly weeks in the making, President Obama's address to West Point's graduating class on May 28 found few, if any, admirers across the political spectrum. Rather, it unleashed a torrent of criticism. At a time when Americans are increasingly worried about our place in the world and the prospects for successive generations, there was little to reassure us that these worries are baseless. Nor was there any call to unite our fractious body politic to work together for a brighter future.

We, of course, are part of the problem, since as a nation we respond best to great challenge as when we geared up to win World War II, to send a man to the moon, and to recover from the horror of 9/11. We also perform well when we have a clear understanding of the enemy and the strategy for defeating it. No one can seriously look back fondly on the Cold War, a time of great peril for our country and the world at large. While the average American might not have been able to explain all the nuances of containment, she did know who the enemy was and understood that we were in an existential battle with Soviet Communism, one we finally won.

The period of the War on Terror following September 11, 2001, once again gave us an identifiable enemy--Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda--and united us again with a strategy. But, even by the time Osama was finally found and eliminated, Al Qaeda had already morphed from a single threat to a diffuse group of loosely linked terrorists spread around the Middle East and Africa. And the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, supposedly undertaken to defeat this terrorist...