What would an assertive doctrine do for Obama?

In Libya the civil war continues to take its toll, particularly among the civilian opposition. In Syria, and despite President Bashar’s declarations that the emergency laws (dating back to 1962) will be lifted, civilian casualties continue to mount. In Yemen, the general call for Ali Abdullah Saleh to go gains intensity by the day. In the face of this scenario, one of the center-stage questions has become whether Obama’s doctrine—if there exists one, as questioned by a few pundits—can provide the basis to deal with the crisis in the Arab world.

An army of commentators accuse Obama of having to soft a doctrine that downplays America´s national interests for the sake of international legitimacy. Particularly when judged against a tradition of strong assertiveness in what concerns international issues of various American presidents over the last 70 years, the Obama doctrine is characterized as “a recipe for inaction and paralysis”; “like chardonnay to moonshine: pleasing to the palate and easy on the blood, but without punch and power.”

But what does it mean to have a doctrine? Essentially, a doctrine is a statement of policy, whereby a few ideas, principles and values set the guidelines for political action. In the United States, one can go as far back as President Monroe, whose doctrine declared any colonization attempts by European powers in the western hemisphere to be acts of aggression against the United States.

More recently, George W. Bush’s doctrine of unilateralism and preemption served as the starting point for various policy approaches to a variety of issues, from the withdrawals from the AMB Treaty and the Kyoto Protocol, to the way the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq were conducted. In Bush’s doctrine ideology occupied, to an unusually explicit degree, a central role in US foreign policy. The result of this dogmatic approach, prone to generalizations and a champion in alienating not only enemies but most importantly its allies, proved extremely costly to the United States in economic, strategic and international legitimacy terms.

It is hard to see how an assertive doctrine would be of any use to the Obama administration when it comes to its dealings with current crisis in the Arab world. One thing is to put forward the principle that human rights matter. Surely human rights should matter, and this seems to be the case with the current American administration. Another thing is to define the principle of the protection of human rights as the cornerstone of US foreign policy, and to couple this principle with a willingness to go as far as needed, including through the toppling of rough governments, to uphold that principle.

Good intentions do not make for a good foreign policy. In the face of a crisis characterized by its unpredictability and composed of a variety of extremely diverse scenarios, what one needs is pragmatism and case-by-case analysis, not dogmatism and generalization, two components very typical of foreign policy doctrines. The question pundits should be asking is not so much whether or not Obama has a clear foreign policy doctrine to deal with the Arab crisis, but what real use could he make of one.

By Manuel Almeida

Published: Thursday 21 April 2011 Updated: Thursday 21 April 2011