Dangerous Doctrine

How Obama's Grand Strategy Weakened America

Robert G. Kaufman

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780813167220
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Much like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, President Barack Obama came to office as a politician who emphasized conviction rather than consensus. During his 2008 presidential campaign, he pledged to transform the role of the United States abroad. His ambitious foreign policy goals included a global climate treaty, the peaceful withdrawal of American military forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, and a new relationship with Iran. Throughout Obama's tenure, pundits and scholars have offered competing interpretations of his "grand strategy, " while others have maintained that his policies were incoherent or, at best, ad hoc.

In Dangerous Doctrine, political scientist Robert G. Kaufman argues that the forty-fourth president has indeed articulated a clear, consistent national security policy and has pursued it with remarkable fidelity. Yet Kaufman contends that President Obama has imprudently abandoned the muscular internationalism that has marked US foreign policy since the end of World War II. Drawing on international relations theory and American diplomatic history, Kaufman presents a robust critique of the Obama doctrine as he situates the president's use of power within the traditions of American strategic practice.

Focusing on the pivotal regions of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, this provocative study demonstrates how current executive branch leadership threatens America's role as a superpower, weakening its ability to spread democracy and counter threats to geopolitical order in increasingly unstable times. Kaufman proposes a return to the grand strategy of moral democratic realism, as practiced by presidents such as Harry S. Truman, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush, with the hope of reestablishing the United States as the world's dominant power.

1

The Main Tenets of the Obama Doctrine

Barack Obama’s meteoric rise owes more to the appeal of his personal narrative and his protean theme of change than to a long, well-defined, controversial record such as the one that constituted Ronald Reagan’s path to the presidency. Yet the Harvard historian James T. Kloppenberg, author of an admiring intellectual biography of Obama, correctly locates the president on the American political spectrum as a man of the left. He sees this reflected in Obama’s formative experiences, two major books, prepresidential speeches, and progressive voting record in the Senate.¹ By his own account in The Audacity of Hope, Obama “personally came of age” during the Reagan presidency, defining himself politically as Reagan’s antithesis.² His decision to become a community organizer arose from his conviction that “change was imperative,” foremost “in the White House where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds.”³ Later President Obama came to respect Reagan’s tactical acumen and steadfastness—but never his politics. On the contrary, Nancy Reagan and Obama engaged in this exchange at the White House in early 2011, which highlights the profound political differences dividing her husband and the president: “You are a lefty,” Nancy Reagan remarked as President Obama signed the Reagan Commission into law. Yes, “I am a lefty,” Obama replied.⁴

The designation anti-Reaganite “man of the left” also applies to Barack Obama in his early and evolving views on America’s role in the world, which the progressive outlook of his mother, his mentors, and his elite education reinforced. The young Obama “bemoaned” the “effects of Reagan’s policies toward the Third World,” particularly with what he perceived to be the administration’s support for the apartheid regime in South Africa. He also opposed the rhetoric and reality of Reagan’s policy of unremitting vigilance toward the Soviet Union, particularly in the realm of national defense. The more Obama studied arms control policy, the more he “found Star Wars to be ill conceived.”⁵ In 1983 Obama published his first article in Columbia University’s college newspaper, Sundial, supporting the nuclear freeze but criticizing the movement’s narrow focus. He called for the United States to initiate a nuclear test ban as the first step to achieving a nuclear-free world. He blamed “the Reagan Administration’s stalling at the Geneva talks on nuclear weapons” for causing “severe tension” that “could ultimately bring about a severe rift between the United States and Western Europe. By being intransigent, Reagan is playing right into Russian hands.” Obama praised student activism as a valuable way to “lay the foundation for future mobilization against the relentless, often silent spread of militarism in the country.”⁶

Senator Obama’s 2002 speech in Chicago categorically opposing the impending war in Iraq also helped vault him to national prominence, distinguishing him from other liberal Democrats such as Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, who voted in 2002 to authorize the Bush administration’s use of force to depose Saddam Hussein. In his speech Obama declared his opposition not to “all wars,” but to a “dumb” and rash war in Iraq, the country’s embarking on which he attributed to Karl Rove and the “cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors … to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats.” Obama affirmed that Saddam Hussein was a “brutal” and “ruthless” man “who butchers his own people,” who serially defied UN resolutions and used chemical and biological weapons, and who coveted a nuclear capability. Even so, Obama admonished that Saddam posed “no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors,” and he thus warranted no war to depose him. Obama predicted that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support would only fan the flames of Middle East tension and encourage the worst, rather than the best, impulses of the Arab world.⁷ Senator Obama voted twice against President Bush’s strategy in Iraq, predicting it would fail. He pushed for a phased but unconditional withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, to be completed by 2010—also a major theme of Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign against Republican Senator John McCain.⁸

Obama’s impassioned critique of the Iraq war galvanized the Democratic Party’s preponderantly liberal base, which was unreconciled to President Bill Clinton’s triangulation to the center of American politics during the 1990s. His unbridled antiwar stand may have tipped the balance in his razor-thin victory over Hillary Clinton in the primary contest for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.⁹ Running for president in 2008, Obama offered a “sweeping liberal foreign policy critique,” repudiating President Bush’s doctrine of preemption and his reliance on narrow coalitions of the willing in favor of multilateralism, engagement, and negotiation.¹⁰

Obama heavily touted his “unique” credentials to improve America’s image in and relationship with the Islamic world. “The day I’m inaugurated, not only the country looks at itself differently, but the world looks at America differently,” Obama told New Hampshire Public Radio in November 2007.

If I’m reaching out to the Muslim world they understand that I’ve lived in a Muslim country and I may be Christian, but I also understand their point of view. My sister is half Indonesian. I traveled there all the way through my college years. And so I’m intimately concerned with what happens in these countries and the cultures and perspectives these folks have. And those are powerful tools for us to be able to reach out to the world … then I think the world will have confidence that I am listening to them and that our future and our security is tied up with our ability to work with other countries in the world—that will ultimately make us safer.¹¹

As a candidate, Obama also assigned high priority to halting the spread of nuclear weapons and achieving disarmament, which he deemed required “the active cooperation of Russia.” Although not shying “away from pushing for more democracy and accountability in Russia,” Obama urged the United States to “work with [Russia] in areas of common interest.”¹² He promised to listen to rather than dictate to our international partners. In a constant refrain, Obama blasted President George W. Bush above all for tragically causing “people around the world” to associate freedom with “war, torture, and forcibly imposed regime change.” Alternatively, he envisioned building “a better, freer world” by acting “in ways that reflect the decency and aspirations of the American people.”¹³

The Obama Doctrine therefore has deep roots in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which has dominated the party’s foreign policy since supplanting Cold War liberalism in the 1960s.¹⁴ Despite mounting criticism from many quarters, President Obama’s foreign policy has remained largely faithful to major themes he articulated during his inaugural presidential campaign.

The Tenets of the Obama Doctrine

Tenet I: Protect the world and the United States from the arrogance of American power too often justified by extravagant claims of American exceptionalism.

President Obama has radiated a significantly more ambivalent view about the merits of American global leadership since World War II than any of his predecessors. Like the antiwar left during the Cold War, President Obama frequently conveys the notion that he often considers American enemies abroad less menacing than what Senator J. William Fulbright, Democrat of Arkansas, famously called “the arrogance of [American] power.” This theme, the frequent acknowledgment of “past mistakes,” and the pledge to listen rather than dictate all pervade many of President Obama’s landmark foreign policy speeches.¹⁵

Consider, for instance, Obama’s address to Turkey’s Grand National Assembly in Ankara on April 6, 2009—his first trip to a majority Muslim country. Obama praised Turkish democracy effusively, while highlighting the less-than-perfect record of our own. “The United States is still working through some of our own darker periods in our history,” Obama said. “Facing the Washington Monument that I spoke of is a memorial of Abraham Lincoln, the man who freed those who were enslaved even after Washington led our Revolution. Our country still struggles with the legacies of … the past treatment of Native Americans.”¹⁶ In his landmark speech to the Muslim world delivered in Cairo, Egypt, on June 4, 2009, President Obama assigned the Western world major responsibility for this “time of tension” with the Middle East and North Africa, saying that “colonialism … denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims,” and that during the Cold War, the superpowers treated Muslim countries “too often … as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.” Moreover, he concluded that “sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.” Obama went on to rebuke not only George W. Bush’s war deposing Saddam in Iraq, but, by implication, the legacies of past leaders endeavoring to change the regimes of enemies: Woodrow Wilson in Latin America and toward Germany in World War I; Harry Truman’s imposing democracy on a vanquished Germany and Japan after World War II; and Reagan’s strategy to transform the Soviet regime through unrelenting comprehensive pressure. “So let me be clear,” Obama told his audience. “No system of government can or should be imposed by one nation on any other.”¹⁷

Speaking at the United Nations on September 23, 2009, Obama reiterated his categorical opposition to forcible democratic regime change, unaware of the irony of extolling in the next breath the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who violated Obama’s dictum with impunity, demanding at Casablanca in January 1943 unconditional surrender of and regime change in Germany and Japan. Obama also attributed the “skepticism and distrust” with which “many around the world had come to view America” partly to the belief that America had “acted unilaterally, without regard for the interests of others.” He condemned his predecessor for using torture and prohibited its use “without exception or equivocation,” declaring that under his administration, America would live its values and lead by example.¹⁸

At an April 4, 2009, meeting of the G-20 in Strasbourg, the president dismissed the notion of an exceptional America endowed with exceptional responsibilities. “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”¹⁹ Obama also chided his fellow Americans for “failing to appreciate Europe’s leading role in the world. There have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.”²⁰ These statements elicited ferocious criticism. Ever since, President Obama and his leading officials have not only backed off from any outright repudiation of American exceptionalism, but rhetorically reaffirmed it. Obama clearly believes, however, that we in the United States should have more respect for “the opinions of mankind,” more modesty about our own virtues, and more awareness of our own vices, which would inoculate us from the perennial human temptation for absolute power to corrupt absolutely. “The United States has a hard-earned humility when it comes to our ability to determine events inside other countries,” Obama averred.²¹ In a glowing account of Obama’s foreign policy, Ryan Lizza concurs: “The one consistent thread running through most of Obama’s decisions has been that America must act humbly in the world. Unlike his immediate predecessors, Obama came of age politically during the post–Cold War era, a time when America’s unmatched power created widespread resentment. Obama believes that highly visible American leadership can taint a foreign-policy goal just as easily as it can bolster it.”²²

Or as David Remnick put it approvingly in the January 14, 2014, issue of the New Yorker, on the basis of a series of lengthy personal interviews with President Obama:

He has not hesitated in his public rhetoric to acknowledge, however subtly, the abuses, as well as the triumphs, of American power. He remembers going with his mother to live in Indonesia, in 1967—shortly after a military coup, engineered with American help, led to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people. This event … made a lasting impression on Obama. He is convinced that an essential component of diplomacy is the public recognition of historical facts—not only the taking of American hostages in Iran, in 1979, but also the American role in the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, in 1953.²³

Predictably, conservatives have rebuked Obama for his predilection to concede past American sins, for distorting the historical record, and for undermining the legitimacy of American power. Not all the criticism, however, comes from the conservative side alone. Ray Takeyh—a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who served in the Obama administration and has written extensively about the Middle East—warned of the consequences of President Obama’s “not well founded” declaration in this Cairo speech that “the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government.” Iranian clerics have exploited “this myth,” which Takeyh argues the United States must jettison to “develop a less self-defeating approach to the Islamic Republic today.”²⁴

Tenet II: Embrace multilateralism rather than unilateralism or narrow coalitions of the willing as the default presumption for American grand strategy.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Main Tenets of the Obama Doctrine
• 2. The Obama Doctrine and International Relations Theory
• 3. The Obama Doctrine and Rival Traditions of American Diplomacy
• 4. The Obama Doctrine’s Reset with Russia and Europe
• 5. The Obama Doctrine Meets the Middle East and Afghanistan
• 6. The Obama Doctrine’s Asian Pivot
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index