RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s never entirely easy to distinguish between retrenchment and retreat.For three years, the Obama administration has followed what it believes is a strategy of retrenchment—withdrawing from Iraq, setting a deadline for Afghanistan, calling off further expansion of NATO, signing arms-control treaties, asking the Europeans to take the lead in Libya, preferring sanctions to military strikes, and now slicing into the Pentagon’s budget—all on the commendable theory that America must learn once again to pick its spots, match its ambitions to its means, and pursue a “sustainable” foreign policy.

The only problem is, the theory is wrong. What the administration would like to have you believe is a matter of vision is seen by others as a function of weakness.

Consider the Strait of Hormuz, 2012 edition. The administration kicks the year off by imposing sanctions on Iran’s oil trade and persuading the Europeans to follow suit. The Iranians conduct military drills and warn the U.S. not to send an aircraft carrier back to the Persian Gulf. Then a potential diplomatic deus ex machina appears in the form of the USS Kidd’s high-profile rescue of some Iranian sailors from their pirate captors. Iran repays the gesture by sentencing to death 28-year-old Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, an American citizen of Iranian descent.

The lesson of this parable is that you don’t get more by doing less. The administration’s policy toward Iran amounts to avoiding direct confrontation at all costs on the view that the last thing the U.S. needs is another war in the Middle East. But the result is that Iran is more truculent than ever (and much closer to a bomb), while our allies are more skittish than ever about the strength of U.S. commitments.

Sooner or later, the U.S. will have to prove the worth of those commitments in the face of an adversary that’s more likely to test them. How sustainable is that?

This scenario has been playing itself out with depressing regularity since Mr. Obama came to office. About Iraq, Hillary Clinton said in October that the U.S. would not tolerate Iranian meddling. Yet the likelihood that the promise will be tested is far greater now than when we had a residual force in the country, even as the prospective cost of honoring the promise has become almost unaffordable. About Afghanistan, we surged our forces but attached a deadline. The upshot is the U.S. expending itself on temporary triumphs over the Taliban as Pakistan waits and plans a pro-Taliban end game.

Or consider Mr. Obama’s favorite subject, nuclear proliferation. In April 2009, he gave a speech in Prague dreaming of a nuclear-free world. Almost immediately, North Korea tested a weapon, Pakistan expanded its arsenal, Iran moved ahead with its illicit programs, and China and Russia undertook extensive nuclear modernization schemes.

Now the president wants a retrenched military, on the three-part theory that “the tide of war is receding,” that America needs to get its financial house in order, and that the risk is minimal because the U.S. will continue to spend more on its military than the rest of the world combined.

Unfortunately for the president, the tide of war does not ebb or flow according to his wishes—unless he refuses to meet any provocation with force as a matter of principle. Our financial disorders are not the result of excess military spending but of entitlement programs Mr. Obama refuses to touch and has done much to expand.

And because we spend so much on personnel and weapons-development costs, our military budgets are heavier on tail than on tooth. Today’s military has half as many ships and nearly 600,000 fewer active duty troops than it did at the end of the Cold War. Whatever else he’s doing, Mr. Obama is not taking his budget knife to a bloated force.

In the history of any great power, there is always a point when the downward trend becomes unmistakable and irreversible. For France it was 1940; for Britain 1947; for the Soviet Union 1989. A case may soon be made that for the European Union the year was 2011.

It would be silly to suggest that the U.S. is anywhere near that type of inflection point. It has suffered no comparable military or economic disaster; the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were a sneeze compared to World War II. The current vogue in declinism confuses the failures of (and disappointments in) an administration with the health of the country as a whole.

But like yesteryear hypochondriacs who convinced themselves they had tuberculosis—then took themselves to sanitoriums where they got it—acting on a belief in decline ultimately produces decline. We will not husband our resources by spending less on defense: We’ll just squander the money elsewhere, probably less productively. We will not lessen tensions overseas by diminishing our military footprint: We’ll just create vacuums into which others rush and to which we’ll eventually return, at a cost.

That’s the Obama administration’s foreign policy legacy in a nutshell. Perhaps its failures don’t seem clear enough for the Republicans to run right against them. But they are becoming clearer by the day to U.S. allies and adversaries alike. Eventually Americans will get the picture, too.