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Barack Obama's Post-American Foreign Policy: the Limits of Engagement

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Barack Obama's Post-American Foreign Policy: the Limits of Engagement Singh, Robert. "The Obama Doctrine: “Leading From Behind”." Barack Obama's Post-American Foreign Policy: The Limits of Engagement. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012. 39–65. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 2 Oct. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781780931111.ch-003>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 2 October 2021, 01:17 UTC. Copyright © Robert Singh 2012. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 3 The Obama Doctrine: “Leading From Behind” I hope that Obama will have as successful a term as I had in dealing with our nation’s domestic and international affairs. —Jimmy Carter, September 19, 2010 1 ... Barack Obama seems to have chosen Carter’s ideological path over Clinton’s pragmatic one. As his foreign policy appears more and more ideologically driven, erratic, uncertain and out of the mainstream, the president’s response is to try to fi nesse the glaring contradictions in his initiatives by the power of his person. If there is no midcourse steering correction towards a more moderate appreciation of American interests, Obama might fi nd that the people of this country will become disturbed by America’s increasingly precarious position in the world and the messianic pretensions of their transnational commander in chief. —Victor Davis Hanson, How The Obama Administration Threatens Our National Security 2 I greatly admire his insights and understanding. I don’t really think he has a policy that’s implementing those insights and understandings. The rhetoric is always terribly imperative and categorical: “You must do this,” “He must do that,” “This is unacceptable” ... He doesn’t strategize. He sermonizes. —Zbigniew Brzezinski (National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, 1977–81) 3 Introduction Scholars of US foreign policy, rather like Republican and Democratic Party lawmakers in the contemporary US Congress, are not well known for easily achieving lasting consensus. But even by the polarized and reliably fractious standards of today’s political commentary, the breadth and depth of academic disagreement over Obama’s foreign policy is striking. Obama’s approach to international affairs since assuming the presidency has seen him defi ned and 39 40 BARACK OBAMA’S POST-AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY defamed variously as a foreign policy “realist,” 4 an “accommodationist,” 5 a “liberal internationalist,” 6 a “neo-conservative,” 7 an “isolationist,”’ 8 a “liberal-realist,”9 and a “war addict.”10 Daniel Drezner raised the question of whether Obama actually followed a clear grand strategy in foreign affairs, only to conclude that his administration has pursued no fewer than two such strategies – “multilateral retrenchment” and, subsequently, “counter- punching.”11 The administration’s central failure, for Drezner, has consisted principally in failing to articulate its latter-day pugilism suffi ciently clearly to the American people. Such dissensus seems to confi rm Obama’s own belief – and, arguably, as the last chapter suggested, his wilfully opaque self-defi nition – as a human Rorschach test: exactly what Obama thinks about the world seems to be strongly in the eye of the beholder. The originator of the term “post-American world,” Fareed Zakaria, even responded to such critical tumult by concluding that the elusive search for a comprehensive “Obama Doctrine” was simply futile – the doctrinal approach to foreign policy no longer making sense in today’s complex and multi-layered world – and should simply be abandoned as unhelpful to understanding the multifaceted nature of Obama’s internationalism. 12 In fact, fl eshing-out the campaign commitments that he had staked-out as a candidate during the 2008 campaign, Obama’s grand strategy became quite rapidly apparent in his early months as president, building on but clarifying those commitments and undertakings from his presidential campaign. Seeking to blend together a combination of the types of hard military and economic power employed by previous US administrations with a greater appreciation of the utility of soft power in an increasingly networked era, the administration’s deployment of “smart power” was premised on the tough reality of rising powers, American decline, and power diffusion in an international order that was simultaneously changing and challenging Washington on multiple fronts around the globe. With an increasing range of rising powers competing for infl uence and resources, and the US quest to maintain primacy running directly against the opposition to such leadership in many parts of the world, the Obama approach resisted a one-size-fi ts-all dogmatism in favor of an eclectic mixture of instruments and tactics. What united them was a conviction in the need for Washington to calibrate its commitments carefully to its newly constrained capacities in order to maintain and maximize its potential still to lead a post-American world. The fault-line of American foreign policy debates has for several decades fallen squarely between realists and idealists. Crudely put, this pits those primarily concerned with states’ external behavior and relations – for whom “regime type” is simply an irrelevant black box – against those for whom the internal nature of states matters greatly, both as an intrinsic issue and as a guide to their external behavior (and for whom, therefore, the quest to shape that internal confi guration, however diffi cult, should be a vital part of THE OBAMA DOCTRINE: “LEADING FROM BEHIND” 41 foreign policy). But Obama consistently sought to resist – or, more precisely, transcend – such traditional categories and conventional ideological tendencies. As one account put it, befi tting a former editor of the Harvard Law Review , “Obama has emphasized bureaucratic effi ciency over ideology, and approached foreign policy as if it were case law, deciding his response to every threat or crisis on its own merits.” 13 Keenly anti-ideological, Obama appeared to have taken to heart H. L. Mencken’s injunction that for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. Instead, the Obama Doctrine appeared to consist in a steadfast rejection of doctrine or visionary thinking as inappropriate and ineffective for today’s especially complex world. In its place was a style of international leadership that resembled the one Obama had previously employed as a community organizer on Chicago’s South Side – assiduously seeking broad consensus, working closely with allies, and assembling or enabling coalitions to achieve shared collective goals. In eschewing traditional foreign policy divisions, following a relentlessly cost-benefi t logic, and seeking a pragmatic balance in US foreign policy, Obama’s approach alternately frustrated realists and idealists alike. Increasingly, as his term progressed, Obama offered what one of his White House advisors infelicitously termed a “different defi nition of leadership than America is known for”: “leading from behind.” 14 Obama’s grand strategy: engagement As his 2008 election campaign had made clear, Barack Obama’s election as forty-fourth president promised major change in US foreign policy and a new phase in America’s international relations; one calibrated to the arrival of a “post-American world.” 15 Although relatively short on detailed policy specifi cs, the public record of Obama’s many statements and speeches – from The Audacity of Hope through the long 2008 election campaign to his inaugural address – repeatedly emphasized several distinct but interrelated themes that implied a decisive break with the divisive George W. Bush years: America’s growing interdependence with the world; the persistence and centrality – for good and ill – of globalization; the need to strengthen alliances and international institutions to tackle shared global challenges, from terrorism and failed states to climate change, nuclear proliferation and pandemics; reinvigorating multilateral action and institutions like the UN, NATO and G20 that conferred legitimacy upon collective action; engaging US adversaries in a spirit of mutual respect; and restoring the vital ethical link – widely viewed as having been fatally compromised under Bush – between America’s internal values and external policies. Such clear commitments to renewing US foreign policy on a platform of strategic restraint served as an emphatic repudiation 42 BARACK OBAMA’S POST-AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY of his predecessor, and signalled a keen willingness to adapt the US to the emergence of a more multi-polar, interconnected and interdependent world. Simultaneously, though, for all the obvious historic contrasts with its forty- three predecessors, Obama’s administration also appeared as only the latest in the modern era to be committed to preserving and – if possible – enhancing and extending US primacy. In her US Senate confi rmation hearings to become Secretary of State, in January 2009, Hillary Clinton declared that “we must strengthen America’s position of global leadership” in order to ensure that America remained “a positive force in the world.”16 Similarly, although expressly recognizing the emergence of a “changed world” in his relatively subdued inaugural address of January 20, 2009, Obama also stated explicitly that “we are ready to lead once more.” 17 The Obama administration thus commenced offi ce in January 2009 apparently conscious of a changing world but at the same time committed
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