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Politico...
In search of the
‘Obama doctrine’
By Glenn Thrush
At a briefing for reporters last Saturday as U.S. Tomahawks missiles
slammed into the Libyan coast, a top aide to President Barack Obama was
asked to define the “Obama doctrine” to explain why the United States
was suddenly pursuing a third conflict in a Muslim nation.
Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser and one of Obama’s most
highly regarded speechwriters, ticked off the factors that led his
reluctant commander-in-chief to act: Muammar Qadhafi’s threat of a
massacre against his own people, support from an international
coalition and “the provision of humanitarian assistance” to rebels.
Yet after 800 words, the eloquent Rhodes offered nothing as compact or
pithy as the “Bush doctrine” Obama ran against in 2008, a
black-and-white commitment to supporting democratic movements and using
unilateral American firepower to back them when necessary.
That difficulty in succinctly describing the intellectual framework for
Obama’s approach to U.S. foreign policy and national security issues
has long bedeviled anyone trying to impute a concrete agenda from
Obama’s soaring pronouncements about supporting democracy and fostering
international human rights.
Republicans, especially the neo-conservatives who gave enthusiastic
support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, have sought to paint Obama’s
nuanced approach as fundamentally weak. “We used to relish leading the
free world. Now, it’s almost like leading the free world is an
inconvenience,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said on Fox News Sunday.
Obama’s reluctance to embrace an easily definable approach to the world
stands in stark contrast to many of his predecessors, such as Richard
Nixon, who relied on regional surrogates, like the Shah-run Iran, and
Ronald Reagan who was committed to anti-communist “freedom fighters” on
several continents.
In a debate against Graham’s good friend Sen. John McCain in the 2008
presidential campaign, candidate Obama declared he was “not going to be
as doctrinaire as the Bush doctrine, because the world is complicated,”
and he’s often railed against the oversimplified world view he believes
led to the war in Iraq.
But on Libya, Obama’s opacity is coming back to haunt him, as critics
from both parties press him on his rationale for taking action and for
a more specific articulation of his vision for American goals and
aspirations in the Mideast and elsewhere.
“There’s just no quick way to define it,” said Steve Clemons of the New
America Foundation, who is generally supportive of the president’s
foreign policy. “He’s genuinely committed to human rights but in
actualizing those principles he’s fundamentally a pragmatist. He runs
against cookie-cutter approaches. So he knows what you do in Egypt
isn’t the same as what you do in Libya and that isn’t the same as what
you do in Bahrain.”
The problem, added Clemons, is “so far he hasn’t come out with a new
strategy for all of what this means for America… But every president
eventually has a ‘doctrine’ because every president has a track record.
And Obama’s defining his now.”
In an interview with CNN Tuesday, Obama suggested that many Americans
have trouble reconciling his sharp opposition to the Iraq War – and his
acceptance of a Nobel Peace prize — with his recent embrace of force.
“I’m accustomed to this contradiction of being both a
commander-in-chief but also somebody who aspires to peace,” Obama told
CNN late Tuesday.
Read the rest of the story at Politico
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