Revisiting the Obama Doctrine
Source: The American Prospect, 5/6/2011
ASP Fellow Joshua Foust is a guest author.
By Joshua Foust
President Barack Obama began his term defining his foreign policy very simply: tone down the rhetoric of President George Bush, focus on humanitarian issues, and reduce American militarism. Analysts, commentators, and pundits have tried to codify this general approach into an Obama Doctrine, a set of coherent ideas that define and explain the President’s policies. After two years in office, however, it’s difficult to say what, exactly, Obama’s Doctrine actually is. It is even more difficult to see how whatever it is marks a change from President Bush’s foreign policy. None of this changes after Osama bin Laden’s rather spectacular death at his mansion in Pakistan.
Doctrines require a few basic components: a belief system that guides how circumstances will be understood, the provision of rules by which that belief system is put into practice, and a signaling event that it is being enacted — a speech, an article, or a statement of principles. James Monroe famously said in 1823 that the U.S would view further European colonization of the Western Hemisphere as acts of aggression requiring intervention. Jimmy Carter declared in 1980 his intention to use “any means necessary” to defend U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf Region. Even George W. Bush initially employed pre-emptive warfare and the principles of neoconservatism in a fairly coherent doctrine of foreign policy during his first term. In contrast, Obama’s Cairo speech from 2009, which is often invoked, was a lot about the country’s desire to do the right thing without a blueprint for action or a specific plan…
