The Obama Doctrine: Made for the '90s, Disastrous Today

James F. Jeffrey

Security, Americas

The president is yielding to the dangerous currents that oppose the global status quo.

Among the copious commentary on President Obama’s extraordinary foreign policy interview with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg (“The Obama Doctrine”), Paul Pillar’s approving piece in the National Interest stands out with its cogent summary of Obama’s thinking. Pillar sees in Obama’s views "Splendidly clear. . . realist principles,” to “deal with the world as it is” and “address specific problems. . . rather than subordinating everything under general labels.” Pillar notes that for the president, “not every troublesome dictator is a Hitler,” “solving a problem does not always mean it is the United States that should do most of the work” and “states have no permanent friends or allies, only permanent interests.”

From all this it is clear that the president sees the world as a continuation of the happy post–Cold War era, with his policies tailored to it. As he told Goldberg, he is generally optimistic about the world’s trajectory. The president’s mindset clearly is strongly influenced by the “realist” approach following the Cold War, associated with General Brent Scowcroft, George H.W. Bush’s national security advisor, whom Obama offers much praise. That mindset assumes that no one is challenging that trajectory—namely, the expanding dominance of the liberal, collective security, market-and-law-based international order. Given this, and the absence of existential military threat to either America (as Obama emphasized) or most other significant states, policy issues involving possible force, such as Kosovo, North Korea, Saddam in the 1990s, and Ukraine and Syria today, are to be viewed like other issues—refugees, climate, the financial crisis—as individual sui generis problems with which a state can chose to engage seriously, halfheartedly (Somalia, Syria) or not at all (Rwanda, Crimea).