One of the running gags in the US Foreign Policy class I took last semester was our inability to figure out what the deal was with our current president.
Our textbooks could speak at length about the history of the country's foreign policy, from its early isolationism to the Cold War presidents to Bush II. We could break down policymakers based on liberalism and realism, and even had fun with David D. Barber's active-passive, positive-negative matrix of presidential character. And then the professor would ask if we could apply the current topic to President Obama, and the class would fall into an awkward silence nearly as profound as those that occurred when it turned out the undergrads hadn't done the assigned readings.
I'd put the issue out of mind until an unrelated article on Al Jazeera's website had this opinion piece in the sidebar. It's a good critique of Obama's policy for the Middle East and so on, but the interesting thing is that the word "doctrine" doesn't appear anywhere but the title - Bishara speaks of Obama's pragmatism and realism, but can't go further than that. So I did a quick Google search to see what others had to say, and the results were sometimes similar but never quite consistent.
David Rohde of Foreign Policy discusses Obama's unilateral use of drone strikes in his article on the Obama Doctrine, while Noam Chomsky wrote a piece for Truthout that focuses mainly on the isolationism vs interventionism and the awful things America has done since abandoning the former. Bob Burnett of the Huffington Post thinks the Obama Doctrine is limited to preventing WMD proliferation and use as part of America's role as the "anchor of global security," while David Corbin and Matt Parks of The Federalist consider the Obama Policy not "so much a policy as a posture" and then poke at the Obama Administration's penchant for style and perception over substance and performance. They also note that their commentators can identify at least 10 Obama Doctrines, so I'm hardly treading new ground here.
This confusion isn't a recent development, and if you check Wikipedia or trawl through editorials and reports from ever since Obama took office, you can see pundits and analysts struggling to put what they're seeing in words. An obvious conclusion is that there is no coherent Obama Doctrine, which is what my Foreign Policy class could've told you. But something I haven't seen in this quick literature review was an issue raised in that class: is the lack of such a doctrine necessarily a bad thing? Why are we so uncomfortable that there's no codified behavior for our current president?
As described by my class' text and lectures, the early, isolationist period of American foreign policy was characterized by pragmatism and sober realism. The country was a lightweight compared to the great continental powers like England and France, so we didn't want to stir up any trouble. Similarly, we knew Europe's history, and so our interactions with the countries on it were limited to consular duties and other basic diplomatic relations, to avoid getting entangled in the next big continental conflict. We did eventually come up with the Monroe Doctrine, a big "keep out" sign on the Western Hemisphere. If you ask the guys at The Federalist it was a realist desire to avoid the security risk posed by another country's colony or client state sitting on our border, while a more cynical observer might theorize that we wanted all those bananas in Central and South America for ourselves.
It's after we abandoned isolationism and fought in two world wars and came up with a new doctrine that things got difficult and messy. Suddenly we were committed to fighting communism anywhere it reared its head, regardless of whether the regime we were defending was worse than the leftist rebels trying to overthrow it, and regardless of what we had to do to preserve it. Presidents added wrinkles and conditions to this, but that was pretty much the tone of the Cold War, so when it finally ended there were questions of what to do next. Bush I suggested we uphold the New World Order, which didn't quite work out, Clinton thought we could do humanitarian interventions, and ended up ignoring a genocide or two, and then Bush II decided that America could unilaterally, preemptively declare war on a tactic, which has worked about as well as one might expect.
So if the Cold War is over, the New World Order is no longer in fashion, and the War on Terror is being quietly deescalated, why do we need an Obama Doctrine?
We don't have any global dragon to slay anymore, and we've admitted that our hearts may bleed for certain political disasters, but we're not prepared to go to war over them. If we follow doctrines blindly, they can lead us into terrible places that we really ought to know better than to go into; if we declare a doctrine and then make a practical decision to break it, like when Eisenhower decided not to get involved in the '56 Hungarian Revolution despite talk about "rollback," we look bad. So perhaps it's best to not even bother? My professor characterized Obama's terms as a return to America's pre-World War years, when our foreign policy was based on the pragmatic pursuit of our national interests and a desire to avoid foreign entanglements, which sounds a lot like what the Al Jazeera article was talking about.
The problem is that America isn't a second-rate, distant power anymore. The Cold War left us with a network of alliances and entanglements spanning the globe, a military infrastructure capable of projecting power anywhere we needed it. We can argue about whether America's a superpower anymore, and how far other countries are from catching up, but it should be safe to say that we're at least the world's premier power, the force best-situated to maintain the status quo.
In this sort of scenario, a return to the good old days might not be practical. A doctrine at least lets the rest of the world know how you'd think you'll respond if the Reds invade a country. You might of course break it if you decide it's not worth starting World War III over a bunch of dead Hungarians, but it's easier for other countries to work with than having them guesstimate how Obama will react to the latest fiasco in the Middle East. I'm sure the Syrian rebels are curious as to what about Libya made the US willing to intervene militarily to overthrow its dictator, and what they're doing wrong.
On the other hand, if we no longer have any global dragon to slay, do we need a global dragonslaying apparatus? In this case, a return to America's early foreign policy may signal a shift towards if not full isolationism, than perhaps a reduced global presence. It sure would be nice not to have to prop up any non-democratic regimes just to protect a military outpost we're not doing anything with.
Of course there's still a problem with that. If you buy into the theory that wars are started by uncertainty -
whether in terms of capability or how a country would react in a
situation - then a doctrine would decrease uncertainty and therefore
reduce conflict. Combine that with the power vacuum resulting from America moving away from its superpower positioning and things could get turbulent.
Relative certainty that may drag us into unwanted conflicts, or increased uncertainty that could start conflicts we'd have to deal with anyway, take your pick.
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