Foreign policy in the United States is an elite sport. Unless there is a big Iraq- or 9/11-style disaster, the public mostly ignores foreign policy, because it can. The United States is extremely safe, but it runs an expansive, ambitious grand strategy that keeps elites busy and the public largely uninvolved. President Obama will give a speech tomorrow at West Point defending his foreign policy and answering elites who have begun to grow bored with it.

The president seems to view foreign policy mostly through a domestic political lens. While he opposed an Afghanistan surge, he ordered one anyway, likely for fear of the domestic political implications of defying the generals’ request for more time and more troops. Ideologically, Obama fancies himself a realist in the mold of Reinhold Niebuhr, although no actually-existing realists think his policies resemble realism. During the 2012 presidential campaign, Obama found himself particularly captivated by an essay from Robert Kagan—a neoconservative Romney adviser—that urged Americans to wade ever more deeply into world politics. If there were any doubt that the two political parties agree on U.S. foreign policy, Obama’s accord with Kagan should have demolished it.

But the president has begun to irritate both the right and left halves of the foreign policy establishment by declining to intervene more forcefully in Syria and in Eastern Europe. Obama will likely play to nationalist themes in his speech tomorrow, reassuring the foreign policy elite that he endorses their project and explaining to Americans that their special place and special responsibilities in the world necessitate a costly, globe-girdling grand strategy. News reports indicate the administration is contemplating sending anti-aircraft weapons to the Syrian opposition, and that the president will criticize Russian behavior in Ukraine during an upcoming trip to Europe. In addition, the foreign policy establishment has breathed a collective sigh of relief with the announcement that the president will keep nearly 10,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan beyond his previously-announced 2014 withdrawal date.

Regular Americans should view the speech for what it is: a cynical sop to the insular clique of Beltway elites who view themselves as the vicars of liberalism on earth, and the rightful possessors of hundreds of billions of American tax dollars to do with what they will.