Obama's many contradictory doctrines

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.