Apr. 11, 2016
Obama’s foreign policy: A house with many
(contradictory) doctrines
Riad Tabbarah
In his long and now famous article
in the Atlantic (April 2016) about “Obama’s Doctrine,” Jeffrey Goldberg, after
analyzing a large number of interviews with Obama and others, and other
sources, could not find, or claim to have found, a coherent Obama doctrine, as
the title to his piece seems to imply. Goldberg is not alone in this. Many others
who tried (for example, Colin Duek in his book “The Obama Doctrine: American
Grand Strategy Today,” and Daniel Drezner in his 2011 article in Foreign
Affairs) admitted in the end that they could not identify one. But the reason
for this may not actually be the lack of a doctrine but the existence of many,
albeit contradictory ones.
First, Obama is a realist with a bare minimum of
humanitarianism. As Goldberg wrote, “Obama generally does not believe a
president should place American soldiers at great risk in order to prevent
humanitarian disasters, unless those disasters pose a direct security threat to
the United States.” On the mayhem that Assad is perpetrating on his people in
Syria, Goldberg found that Obama considered “Assad’s continued rule for the moment
still doesn’t rise to the level of direct challenge to America’s national
security.” He decided not to intervene in Syria in spite of the suffering of
the Syrian people, because “the price of direct U.S. action in Syria would be
greater than the price of inaction.” This is reminiscent of the realpolitik of
Kissinger, but Kissinger used it both for and against intervention, while
Obama, almost always, used realpolitik against intervention.
Second, Obama is
anti-exceptionalist. America to him is not the leader of the European
countries, as it has been since the end of World War II, it is just one of the
boys; it is viewed by him, “less as an indispensable power than an
indispensable partner,” as Roger Cohen of the Times remarked recently. Obama’s
America does not necessarily lead from upfront but could lead from behind. When
Goldberg asked him about this concept he replied: “We don’t have to always be
the ones who are up front, sometimes we’re going to get what we want precisely
because we are sharing in the agenda.” This to him serves to avoid the tendency
of America’s allies, Europeans and Arabs in particular, from “holding our coats
while we did all the fighting,” and their tendency to be “free riders.”
Third, Obama is an isolationist.
Most of those who wrote about an Obama doctrine considered that its main tenant
was retrenchment. Colin Dueck argues that Obama set the main focus of his
presidency on domestic affairs and that he has tried hard to avoid having
foreign policy concerns jeopardize this focus. His grand strategy, according to
Dueck, may be described as “overarching American retrenchment and accommodation
internationally, to allow for progressive policies at home.”
Fourth, Obama is a warrior, albeit a
reluctant one. In Afghanistan, having early in his tenure promised to end
American military involvement, he authorized instead a surge of 30,000 troops.
In Iraq he did actually effect the promised withdrawal at the end of 2011, but
returned in 2014. To these two countries he added a third, Syria, where his
military commitment is presently escalating. He also added a great expansion in
drone usage in many countries stretching from East Asia to West Africa. At the
end of the day, Obama turned out to have wars, during his tenure, in more
countries than any of his recent predecessors.
Fifth, Obama is a pacifist and
accommodator. There is no doubt that Obama considers that the deal made with
Iran on its nuclear program will prove to be his most important legacy. He
claimed that sanctions didn’t stop Iran trying to acquire a nuclear bomb. At
the end of the day, it “was diplomacy, hard, painstaking diplomacy, not saber
rattling, not tough talk that ratcheted up the pressure on Iran,” he said in
his speech at American University announcing the deal. The agreement with Iran
admittedly only postponed Iran’s capability to make a nuclear bomb but this did
not matter much. Obama’s bet was that, during this period, the deal would have
strengthened the moderates among the mullahs, and the Iranian people would not
want to give up the prosperity that they would have achieved for a nuclear
device. Obama’s other star achievement was Cuba where the same logic applied.
So what is Obama’s doctrine? Is it
retrenchment while he is carrying wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya in
addition to drone attacks in countries from Pakistan to Mali? Is it ruthless
realism when he used bold and persistent effort to resolve the conflict with
Iran that had lasted more than 35 years and with Cuba more than 55 years? Or is
it refuting American exceptionalism when America, on his watch, is actually
using its clout with China in the Far East, Russia in Europe and leading, if
reluctantly, the Western fight against terrorism in the Middle East and Africa?
Or is it that Obama has many doctrines so contradictory that it is impossible
to find their unifying principle? It cannot be said that the reason that his
policies are contradictory is that they reflect the evolution of a doctrine;
they are simultaneous, overlapping and recurring. Many analysts have searched
for the unifying principle that ties them together to no avail, so they either
concluded that one of these strategies is his doctrine or that he has no
doctrine.
There is no unifying principle to
these contradictory strategies to combine them into one coherent doctrine. If
there is one it lies basically in Obama’s character and circumstances. Obama is
a theorizer who feels much more comfortable in the ivory tower of a university
than facing the ugly and complicated real world. He is “less interested in
conducting serious foreign policy than thinking about it,” wrote King’s College
London historian John Bew in Foreign Policy recently. Theoreticians make
assumptions that simplify the real world and make the questions under
investigation manageable, but this does not apply to problems the president of
the only superpower has to face on daily basis. Here there are no simplifying
assumptions. So when the world did not behave according to Obama’s theory, it
was the fault of others, or of history. The Syrian situation got out of hand
partly because Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president, “refuses to use his
enormous army to bring stability to Syria,” he told Goldberg. The apparent
mistake he made in the Libyan situation was “because I had more faith in the
Europeans” especially British Prime Minister David Cameron and President
Nicolas Sarkozy of France. He had to break his promise to withdraw from
Afghanistan because of the insistence of his generals but he at least reduced
the surge to 30,000 soldiers instead of 40,000 as demanded by the generals,
according to Bob Woodward in his book “Obama’s wars.” As for the Middle East,
the region’s problems are tribal in-fighting, rooted in history, 1,000 years
old, insoluble, so it was not his fault either that things happened to get
worse on his watch. And that damned “Washington playbook” that got him into so
much trouble; he couldn’t liberate himself from it until he decided not to
honor the red line he set for Assad’s use of chemical weapons.
So, irrespective of how many people
and circumstances Obama blames for it, the reason why his foreign policy is
replete with contradictory strategies is Obama himself: A university professor
by nature caste in the role of president of the United States. A combination of
inexperience in foreign affairs and a personal inclination to analyze rather
than to act, put his foreign policy mostly at the mercy of events making it a
series of reactions to them, devoid of a grand strategy or an overarching
vision: Indeed a house with many contradictory doctrines.
Riad Tabbarah is former Lebanese
Ambassador to the United States. He wrote this commentary for The Daily Star.
A version of this article appeared
in the print edition of The Daily Star on April 11, 2016, on page 7.
