Presidential Doctrines are Tough.....

President Obama was at West Point Wednesday to deliver a commencement speech to the new crop of officers, and reset the stage for American foreign policy (transcript linked here) as the United States winds things down in Afghanistan, possibly later this year. In many quarters, both at home and abroad, his speech has gone over like a lead balloon. The President's supporters think he is threading the needle perfectly between intervention and restraint in global affairs (see story). Others think Obama's approach is just the latest bit of evidence that the President is willfully hastening America's slide into irrevocable decline (see story). Some of the punditry and arm-chair quarterbacking is predictable, perhaps including this blog post.

Only the most delusional of partisans would describe President Obama's foreign policy as successful. However, Obama is not the first American president to have their foreign policy efforts blow up in their face. At bottom, I think President Obama would rather the world take a time out so he could focus entirely on issues he cares much more deeply about, such as healthcare, climate change, and the economy. Unfortunately, the world is a messy little place in which foreign policy aims regularly seem to wash up on the complicated rocks of reality.

Those who study American foreign policy spend a lot of time teasing out "presidential doctrines" on foreign affairs. These so-called "doctrines" have become shorthand for both the world view and policy emphases of every U.S. president since Monroe. Experts focused on Wednesday's speech saw in it modifications to Obama Doctrine. Yet, what and who doctrines are for is itself a curious thing. In the rest of this post, I offer a few thoughts about why....



First of all, it is worth noting that foreign policy seldom registers highly with the American public, and even less frequently influences elections. Many will recall that George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004, in spite of the debacle that Iraq had become in the aftermath of the March 2003 invasion. That election was about security, but it was domestic security, not foreign policy, that dominated the debate. President Obama's evident discomfort on matters of foreign policy is, in part, anchored in Tip O'Neil's time-tested axiom that "all politics is local." In spite of being citizens of the world's indispensable country, Americans are alarmingly more interested in getting their roads fixed, schools built, and jobs created (see article). Obama was elected in 2008 on a massive agenda of social and economic change, but an agenda that also included completing the extrication of the U.S. from Iraq (actually started by Bush) and winding things down in Afghanistan (light at end of the tunnel). In some ways, foreign affairs has been a loss-leader for Obama's domestic agenda; a distraction. One reading of the President's West Point speech is as an expression of anxiety about America's role in the world after a decade of war; America must be engaged, BUT engagement must be carefully considered. The angst is palpable.

It's hard not to think about what might have been in Rwanda in 1994 had there not been the "Black Hawk Down" incident in Somalia in 1993 which ushered in a period of careful consideration on military deployments. As we watch the tragedy in Syria unfold and events in Ukraine deteriorate, the same questions arise today regarding America's willingness to get involved anywhere after more than a decade of war (See leader in The Economist).

Secondly, the entire notion of presidential doctrines in foreign policy is curious, particularly since presidents seldom refer to them as such nor do they make policy with an eye toward it constituting a "doctrine." The most famous presidential doctrine, the Monroe Doctrine, was actually just a threat issued to Europeans in President Monroe's 1823 State of the Union Address not to interfere in the Americas. Moreover, Monroe Doctrine was really more of a bluff than rigid, enforceable policy since America had virtually no deep water naval power with which to enforce it. Instead, Monroe Doctrine as a respected policy norm was the beneficiary European powers too busy fighting each other to worry about challenging Monroe's little doctrine. By the time Europe was able to challenge Monroe Doctrine, American power in the Western Hemisphere had become dominant and Monroe Doctrine increasingly came to symbolize American hegemony there as well.

It's unclear exactly when the phrase Monroe Doctrine was coined, or who did so, but several sources date it to 1850, more than 25 years after Monroe's State of the Union Address. Such posthumous characterizations of a president's foreign policy as a kind of "doctrine" are more common than not. Moreover, most of that characterization is the purview of scholars and pundits who follow foreign policy rather than presidents themselves (President Nixon being a notable exception). In fact, the parsing of a president's "doctrine" from many sources quickly mushrooms into a cottage industry of some importance in large part because of the significance of American engagement abroad. This has been particularly true in the postwar era where American power and engagement in international affairs has often been essential.
  It seems ridiculous to try and parse out presidential doctrines at the earliest stages of a president's term, but we tend to look for signals as to what that doctrine might be well-before the president even takes office. Indeed, prospective presidential candidates (or their surrogates) often pen lengthy pieces on foreign policy, most prominently in the pages of the influential Foreign Affairs. As speculation about a 2016 run by Hillary Clinton heats up, many are already parsing the words of her still-to-be-released biography, Hard Choices (June 2014), for indications of what (Hillary) Clinton Doctrine would look like.

Among recent presidents, Clinton Doctrine is possible one of the most challenging to put in concise terms. The end of the Cold War arguably brought about one of the most confusing and dynamic periods in international affairs every confronted by a U.S. president. Hence, the essence of what Clinton Doctrine was didn't really come to the surface until late in is presidency. Once again, Clinton himself didn't identify anything in his speech as "doctrine." Instead, it was academics that pointed to what they saw as an identifiable pattern in Clinton's approach to foreign policy they labeled
Democratic Enlargement.The point is that presidential doctrines are much more about academic and popular interpretation of U.S. policy outlooks than policy prescriptions to be pulled out of a drawer like military battle plans.

Thirdly, presidential doctrines are also fraught with problems because while a "doctrine" suggests there is a stable, consistent approach to policy, the world often has other ideas. Consider President George W. Bush once again. During the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush and his surrogates were promoting a more restrained foreign policy than had been practiced under Clinton. Intervening in places like Somalia, or the civil war in the former-Yugoslavia, seemed like things other should assume responsibility for and not in the American interest. Indeed, once in office, foreign observers expressed alarm that the Bush administration was pandering to American isolationist tendencies and about to retreat from world affairs; and through September 10, 2001, that was the course taken. The next day, terrorist attacks on U.S. ushered in one of the most aggressive and interventionist periods of foreign policy in American history, radically reshaping what Bush Doctrine would become.

Bush Doctrine itself is most strongly identified with a speech the President gave at West Point's commencement in June 2002 in which concepts like preemption, unilateralism, strength beyond challenge, and democracy promotion were asserted (link to speech). Yet, even the explicit articulation of an approach to foreign policy quickly washes up on the rocks of reality. In a fascinating piece on the evolution of Bush Doctrine, Newsweek's Jacob Weisberg argued that there were no fewer than six versions of Bush Doctrine, each groping to deal with an evolving situation on the ground (see article). Importantly, Weisberg argues that one of the main failings of Bush Doctrine was the very effort to formally craft one.

All of this begs the question of whether foreign policy can in fact be conducted on the basis of "doctrines" at all? The United States can hardly be without a set of foreign policies. Yet, articulating them automatically opens you up to withering criticism about the consistency with which they are applied. The mixed reaction to Obama's West Point speech yesterday, and his foreign policy generally, has been no different.

In trying to thread several needles with a single thread at West Point yesterday, President Obama was fine-tuning a policy doctrine that was first articulated in the 2010 National Security Strategy of the United States and given the label "necessary force" by scholars and pundits. Critics point out that few concrete criteria have been put forward for when the use of force would actually be deemed necessary, making "necessary force" inherently subject to case-by-case evaluation. Hence, the air campaign over Libya to remove Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 seemed "necessary." Intervention in Syria, as of now, does not. The reticence to intervene in Syria has strained relations with allies in the region (notably the Saudis), and exposed the Obama Administration to the critique that "necessary force" simply provides a rationale for evasion to an administration more interested in domestic affairs. A very different set of criticisms were leveled at George W. Bush when, in his second inaugural address, he argued that it would be the policy of the United States to "support democratic movements... in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." Critics of Bush Doctrine 5.0 (according to Weisberg) pounced on its grandeur as so far beyond the capacities of the United States to implement that it was effectively not a policy position at all.

Whereas President Bush was overly ambitious in his belief in the capacity of American power and influence to remake the world, President Obama might be accused of being too timid in declaring the need for "necessary force," or in his belief in the essential qualities of American engagement abroad. The lesson in all of this for future presidents is not that "doctrines" are to be avoided. They will remain a fascination of those of us that study American foreign policy because of their utility in comparing presidents to one another and in evaluating how well a president's policies stacked up to the "doctrine" as it evolved throughout their presidency.

Hence, Obama's West Point speech is part of a collection articulated policy positions against which U.S. actions in a changing world will be both anticipated and evaluated. How President Obama puts his words (we'll still call it doctrine) into practice as world events unfold will be a major variable in how history judges the success or failure of his presidency. Six years into his presidency, my assessment is that "necessary force" has provided a rationale for a decline in America's indispensability in international affairs-- generally not for the better. I don't go so far as Walter Russell Meade in suggesting Obama has a form of indecisiveness about how he sees the world that Meade labels "The Carter Syndrome." However, like the Carter era, I do think Obama Doctrine reflects a country deeply divided about foreign policy, perhaps less sure than it used to be about its place in the world, and uncertain about how to navigate its choppy waters.

We get to package things up nicely into doctrines, presidents are called upon to take action. The tougher of the two jobs is pretty obvious....