The Defense Secretary rebuts claims by critics that U.S. influence is declining under President Obama.

If you happened to run into a rank-and-file Republican, a hawkish Democrat, or a member of the Washington foreign-policy community, chances are that you would run into an argument that has circulated around town ever since President Barack Obama decided to abort a planned missile strike in Syria. That argument goes something like this: the power and respect of the United States is declining around the world, America’s allies do not believe that we will come to their defense in a time of crisis, and U.S. global leadership is embarrassingly inept. President Barack Obama and his administration, Republicans argue, are simply not demonstrating the type of leadership required of an “indispensable nation.” President Obama is “weak,” he’s not passionate about U.S. foreign policy, he doesn’t care about the strength of the U.S. military, and he’s “gun-shy.” Or, as New York Times columnist David Brooks commented on Meet the Press last month, Obama has a manhood problem.

There is no question that many of these critiques come from predictable corners: people like John McCain or Lindsey Graham, the leading voices in the Republican Party for the hawkish, interventionist camp. The Obama administration has tended to laugh them off as partisan attacks from people who have not learned the lessons of U.S. overreach during the past ten years. But while that rebuttal resonates with a majority of the American people, it becomes increasingly difficult for Obama and his foreign-policy advisers to recycle the same defense when popular magazines and respected columnists start to pick up on the “America-in-decline” theme.

In the May 3, 2014 edition of The Economist, the magazine’s cover story had a byline that Republicans in Washington and some of America’s closest allies all take to heart: “America is no longer as alarming to its foes or reassuring to its friends.” This would seem to be a striking indictment of U.S. foreign policy under President Obama on its own, but it only becomes magnified when people who have historically been supportive of Obama’s restrained worldview run with this assumption. In The Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria attempts to defend Obama’s foreign policy, but he concludes at the end that Obama pursues international relations “as if his heart is not in it, seemingly pulled along by events rather than shaping them.” Even David Ignatius, a respected journalist on national-security matters and a reliable Obama foreign-policy supporter, had to admit that at times, the Obama White House is more concerned with what it says to foreign audiences that what it does. “Under Obama,” Ignatius writes, “the United States has suffered some real reputational damage.”

Given the drumbeat of criticism that never seems to go away and the politically effective argument that President Obama is just a younger iteration of Jimmy Carter, it must have come as a welcome opportunity for the administration when Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was scheduled to give a major policy speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Hagel’s appearance on May 6, 2014 was just the kind of opening that the administration needed to defend its record: a well-thought out and prepared speech to a friendly audience that would allow the country’s top defense official to challenge the persistent and often shallow claims of U.S. weakness and retrenchment. And what a better official to give that speech than Chuck Hagel, a man who, over two-terms as a senator and over a year as Defense Secretary, has been at the forefront of advocating for a smart, pragmatic, and sometimes reserved foreign policy.

Secretary Hagel’s speech encompassed many topics, from the budget woes that are forcing the Defense Department to cut back on troop strength to a description of what contingencies the U.S. military must prepare for in the future. But there are several themes in Hagel’s address that are worth exploring.

The United States Must Continue to Play a Global Leadership Role

Sure, the American people may be tired of overseas engagement and more concerned with the decaying infrastructure and slow economic recovery at home (a well-cited Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds that a plurality of 47 percent of Americans want the United States to be less active in international affairs). But Secretary Hagel wants those same Americans to know that the peace and tranquility that they are now feeling is directly correlated to the type of global leadership that the United States has practiced since World War II.

“Let us remember that the biggest beneficiaries of American leadership and engagement in the world are the American people. Turning inward, history teaches us, does not insulate us from the world’s troubles. It only forces us to be more engaged later…at a higher cost in blood and treasure and often on the terms of others.”

This is the same type of message that Republican lawmakers (and most of the prospective 2016 GOP presidential candidates) have been saying since President Obama assumed office over six years ago. Yet if Hagel’s speech is anything to go by, President Obama and his administration have the same exact view; the United States simply cannot afford to pull back from the world stage and allow powers like China or Russia to fill the void America leaves behind. American leadership, in other words, is “indispensable” to the health, welfare, security, and prosperity of the American people and the international community. Former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Senator John McCain, and Senator Lindsey Graham would all be proud of this statement.

The United States Is Not in Decline

Those who say that the United States is losing influence under President Obama are either disingenuous self-promoters or ill informed. After reading his remarks, this is the bold conclusion that I believe Hagel is trying to get across. Why else would he list everything that the U.S. military is doing in every critically strategic region around the world?

“Today,” Hagel said, “the U.S. military is engaged in nearly 100 countries with nearly 400,000 personnel stationed or deployed around the world.” The United States has 35,000 men and women in uniform stationed in the Persian Gulf, ready to provide its Arab allies with the military capabilities it needs to project strength and deterrence against Iran. America is shifting 60 percent of its Navy fleet to the Asia-Pacific to provide the same measure of reassurance to its East Asian allies. And in Europe, the U.S. military is single-handedly holding the NATO alliance together. Hagel mentions all of these deployments as if he is trying to prove something: that is, the United States is more engaged internationally than it has ever been, and its doing it in a wiser way through multilateral organizations, regional partners, and trusted allies.

Great Power Politics Are Alive and Well

President Obama and Secretary Kerry may be befuddled as to why Russian President Vladimir Putin is using nineteenth century tactics in a twenty-first century world, but Secretary Hagel doesn’t seem to find Putin’s behavior at all surprising.

Tee up Hagel: “[T]he character of international relations has not changed. Conflicts between states…and rivalries between regional powers all remain defining features” of the twenty-first century global environment. Global competition is not a thing of the past, but instead something that will remain with us long into the future. The United States needs to get used to it and plan its foreign and national-security policies accordingly.

The U.S. Military Needs To Be Fully-Funded

Secretary Hagel saved his most vehement criticism towards the end of the speech and directed it at members of Congress. Channeling his inner Bob Gates, Hagel unleashed a heap of advice to the American people’s representatives that amounted to a simple bumper-sticker talking point: take the country’s national security seriously.

Republicans and Democrats talk a good game on national security, but when it comes time to vote, they are more interested in keeping their constituencies happy—saving weapons platforms and defense infrastructure that are not needed and preventing the Pentagon from using the savings that would be generated from base closings towards enhanced readiness of the nation’s armed forces. The Defense Secretary doesn’t explain why Congress would act any differently (closing bases and throwing thousands of people out of work is not necessarily the best thing for their reelection campaigns), but he outlines why they should. And according to Hagel, it’s a pretty simple concept: the U.S. military cannot afford to keep every single platform, weapon, plane, amphibious ship, aircraft carrier, or soldier. Congress, therefore, needs to get on board and prioritize responsibly.

The best thing Congress can do, however, is repeal sequestration. Hagel is obviously not the only defense official that has warned about the dangerous effects of artificial budget cuts, nor will he be the last. The push to get rid of sequestration will continue up until the very day that Congress finds a way to do it.

Takeaway: The World Is Scary, but the U.S. Will Be There

If there is any major theme that Hagel’s address conveyed, it was that the U.S. military will continue to be the greatest, most efficient, technologically dynamic and innovative military in the world. Automatic cuts to the defense budget certainly do not help, but even this challenge can be met over the short term through wise investments within the force and pragmatic realism in the nation’s foreign policy. The United States may not be able to solve every international problem or come to the rescue in every theater, but as the “indispensable nation” that it is, the country has a responsibility and inherent duty to ensure that the global system is as secure for Americans as possible.

What more can Republicans ask?

Daniel R. DePetris is a Middle East analyst at Wikistrat, Inc., a geostrategic consulting firm, and an independent consultant. He can be followed on Twitter: @DanDePetris.

Image: Flickr/U.S. Department of Defense/CC by-nc-nd 2.0