LONDON (AP) — President Barack Obama’s speech emphasizing soft power and alliances over military might crystallized into a single speech what many experts said Wednesday was an inevitable — and welcome — evolution of U.S. foreign policy.

The president who pulled U.S. troops from Iraq, avoided direct confrontation in Syria and has tapered off the American military presence in Afghanistan seemed to be saying that the U.S. had learned that it cannot impose its will on the rest of the world, said David Livingstone, an expert in international security at London’s Chatham House. He said Obama’s words went against the “American instinct to go in hard with the military first” when crisis erupts.

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