How do we decode the “Obama doctrine”?
Jeffrey Goldberg’s 20,000-word write-up of his series of interviews with Obama in the Atlantic makes for fascinating reading. But what does it tell us about the president's strategies?
American introspection assumes many forms, from the gauche to the professorial. As
the world looks on in horrified fascination at the nativism of Donald
Trump’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, it would be
easy to miss subtler and more eloquent forms of the “America First”
sentiment that is on the rise, and has already seeped into the Oval
Office.
Aside
from being a masterpiece of journalism, Jeffrey Goldberg’s 20,000-word
write-up of his series of interviews with President Obama in the latest
issue of the Atlantic makes
hard reading for many allies of America. David Cameron, according
to Obama, was “distracted by a range of other things” after the 2011
intervention in Libya, and uses the wrong language when discussing
radical Islamism. Obama warned that the UK cannot have a “special
relationship” unless, at the very least, it maintains
its Nato commitment of spending at least 2 per cent of GDP on defence.
Some
of this griping is not unreasonable. European nations, and several of
those in the Middle East, have become complacent and flabby under the
security umbrella provided by Washington since 1945. There has indeed,
as Obama put it, been an element of “free riding”. But it is equally
true that the US has done well out of the order it established after the
Second World War, which was then revamped and much trumpeted at the end
of the Cold War. These days, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that
the United States is ever less willing to maintain what was once called
leadership of the “free world”. One result is that a number of US
allies, Britain included, have been caught in the slipstream of a grand
strategy that has – over Syria, for example – lurched between bouts of
frenzied diplomatic activity and periods of drift.
Close Obama watchers will not be surprised by the underlying sentiments in what the Atlantictentatively
calls the “Obama doctrine”. Previous iterations include “leading from
behind” and “Don’t do stupid sh*t”. Obama sees himself a being in the
tradition of the “realist” school of American foreign-policymaking. This
has three spokes. The first is a theologically conditioned
world-weariness with the limits of human action, of “doing good and
resisting evil”. The second is an admiration for the “realist”
credentials of the first President George Bush (“Bush 41”) and Brent
Scowcroft, Bush Sr’s national security adviser. The third is a desire
for retrenchment and restraint, which as much as anything was a reaction
against the legacy bequeathed to him by his immediate predecessor,
including long and costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a seemingly
interminable “war on terror”.
These
were instincts that Obama acquired long before he came to office.
While the world was fawning over his message of “change” – pre-emptively
awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 – they missed that Obama
never saw himself as a world-healer, an internationalist antidote to
Bush Jr, but first and foremost as a president who would focus his
efforts on the target he felt had been neglected: the home front.
Avoiding costly and lengthy interventions in the Middle East was the
first step towards that (though it has proved easier said than done).
That
Obama is articulate about foreign policy is without question. But the
“Obama doctrine” does not stand up to scrutiny and looks more like a
post-facto rationalisation of decisions taken on the hoof, usually under
the force of events beyond his control. Opportunities for contrition or
reflection in Goldberg’s interviews are turned into a
self-justificatory narrative. The most striking example of this is the
rationale for why he stopped short of enforcing the “red lines” over use
of chemical or biological weapons that he warned Bashar al-Assad not to
cross in the Syrian Civil War.
With
sleight of hand, Obama turned the case for the prosecution into one for
the defence. “I’m very proud of this moment,” he told Goldberg. “The
overwhelming weight of conventional wisdom and the machinery of our
national security apparatus had gone fairly far. The perception was that
my credibility was at stake, that America’s credibility was at stake.”
Obama
views it as a lasting achievement that he was able to break with the
“Washington playbook”. In truth, he went back on himself and belatedly
changed position, leaving many allies, including his secretary of state,
John Kerry, surprised, exposed and undermined. Obama may have thrown
out the Washington playbook, but he was too slow to tell those who had
grown accustomed to playing by its rules.
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