{"id":24236,"date":"2016-01-19T06:00:54","date_gmt":"2016-01-18T19:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=24236"},"modified":"2016-01-18T16:48:37","modified_gmt":"2016-01-18T05:48:37","slug":"sotu-and-the-obama-doctrine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/sotu-and-the-obama-doctrine\/","title":{"rendered":"SOTU and the Obama doctrine"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/SOTU.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"640\" height=\"409\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-24237\" src=\"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/SOTU.png\" alt=\"SOTU\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/SOTU.png 640w, https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/SOTU-205x131.png 205w, https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/SOTU-600x384.png 600w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>President Obama has delivered his last State of the Union address and thoughtful assessments of it can be found <a href=\"http:\/\/www.brookings.edu\/blogs\/fixgov\/posts\/2016\/01\/12-obama-2016-state-of-the-union-reaction-galston\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/01\/13\/us\/politics\/final-state-of-the-union-address.html?_r=0\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>. But in this post I want to look more closely at what the speech tells us about Obama\u2019s strategic policy. The recent publication of Fred Kaplan\u2019s essay in <em>Foreign Affairs<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.foreignaffairs.com\/articles\/2015-12-07\/obamas-way\" target=\"_blank\">\u2014\u2018Obama\u2019s way\u2019<\/a>\u2014explores Obama\u2019s foreign policy record. But after seven years in office, what can be said about the narrower topic of strategic policy?<\/p>\n<p>Kaplan takes as his template for measuring Obama\u2019s foreign policy record the president\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.whitehouse.gov\/the-press-office\/remarks-president-acceptance-nobel-peace-prize\" target=\"_blank\">Nobel Prize acceptance speech<\/a> in Oslo in December 2009. I\u2019m not sure this is an ideal template for measuring strategic policy success\u2014it reads more like a modern liberal statesman\u2019s search for a moral compass than a framework for US strategic thinking. So I\u2019m proposing to use a different metric to compare \u2018early\u2019 Obama with \u2018late\u2019 Obama.<\/p>\n<p>Back in early 2010 I attempted to clarify the \u2018Obama doctrine\u2019 by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/publications\/strategic-insights-49-obama-in-his-own-words-on-leadership,-force,-and-rebuilding-us-primacy\/SI49_Obama.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">an examination of the president\u2019s speeches, statements and remarks<\/a>. I argued then that:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\u2018Obama is interested in a \u201chumbler\u201d, more ethical form of global leadership than President Bush espoused\u2014but he is committed to the notion that America must lead, and to rebuilding American primacy<\/li>\n<li>Obama accepts that American power underwrites global security and that force is necessary to fight evil adversaries in the world\u2014but he believes US domestic opinion is now so fractured on use\u2011of\u2011force issues that only \u201cwars of necessity\u201d can be waged<\/li>\n<li>Obama believes unconventional threats trump the threat of inter\u2011state conflict, and particularly of great\u2011power conflict\u2014but he acknowledges that those unconventional threats pose unique challenges, and require the US to use force more \u2018nimbly\u2019<\/li>\n<li>Obama is uninterested in nation building in distant parts of the world, but is overwhelmingly committed to addressing the US\u2019s domestic challenges\u2014he believes the restoration of the American middle class is the key to ensuring that the 21st century is\u2014like the 20th\u2014an \u201cAmerican century\u201d.\u2019<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There\u2019s something of a Goldilocks quality to the four points\u2014an insistence that the porridge be neither too hot nor too cold. Still, the State of the Union speech confirms all four judgments. Let\u2019s start with the leadership point. The president chooses to focus on US global leadership as one of his four major themes. He likes the middle ground: \u2018[keeping] America safe and strong without either isolating ourselves or trying to nation-build everywhere\u2019. Many of his examples of leadership tend to be the humble, ethical ones: leading coalitions against Ebola, fighting climate change, eradicating HIV\/AIDS. He sees no challenge to US leadership: \u2018when it comes to every important international issue, people of the world do not look to Beijing or Moscow to lead\u2014they call us\u2019.<\/p>\n<p>Second, on the use of force issue, Obama speaks of \u2018a wise application of military power\u2019, and a \u2018world [that] respects us not just for our arsenal\u2019. In place of military force, he continues to champion \u2018a patient and disciplined strategy that uses every element of our national power\u2019. He doesn\u2019t talk of the fracturing of US domestic opinion on distant military engagement, but does argue for global coalitions to address problems like Syria and the Iranian nuclear issue. Virtually all of his references to the direct use of military power occur in the context of counterterrorism.<\/p>\n<p>And that, in turn, reinforces the third point\u2014the president\u2019s vision of the threat spectrum hasn\u2019t changed. Terrorism remains his number one priority in terms of keeping Americans safe, even though he accepts that terrorists don\u2019t constitute an existential threat to the US. In his speech he points to the breadth of coalition efforts: \u2018to cut off ISIL\u2019s financing, disrupt their plots, stop the flow of terrorist fighters and stamp out their vicious ideology\u2026We\u2019re taking out their leadership, their oil, their training camps, their weapons\u2026Just ask Osama bin Laden.\u2019 Beyond the terrorist threat, Obama didn\u2019t focus on the challenge of other great powers, which seems to be driving the nuclear modernisation effort and the idea of the Third Offset, but on instability.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, the president remains opposed to nation building abroad. \u2018We\u2026can\u2019t try to take over and rebuild every country that falls into crisis, even if it\u2019s done with the best of intentions. That\u2019s\u2026a recipe for quagmire\u2019. There\u2019s a continuing emphasis on domestic challenges and reviving the US economy\u2014but perhaps a shade less emphasis now on the notion of rebuilding the American middle class as a key means of ensuring a future American age. Obama probably still believes in the principle, but the objective has been hard to realise. The middle class is struggling in America.<\/p>\n<p>We shouldn\u2019t overlook what\u2019s not in the speech. There\u2019s no vision of what a new world order might look like. There\u2019s no doctrine of enmeshment of rising powers. There\u2019s little in the way of democratic enlargement after the bitter fruits of the Arab spring. And there\u2019s a stubborn denial of the fact that US relative strategic weight is decreasing as other powers rise. Kaplan, in his essay, concludes that patience and pragmatism are the hallmarks of Obama\u2019s foreign policy. We might also reasonably conclude that there\u2019s been a central consistency to his core strategic policy settings, though consistency is only one measure\u2019s of a policy\u2019s success. Still, those settings aren\u2019t about to change in Obama\u2019s final year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>President Obama has delivered his last State of the Union address and thoughtful assessments of it can be found here and here. But in this post I want to look more closely at what the &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":24237,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[176,285,127,31],"class_list":["post-24236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-barack-obama","tag-foreign-policy","tag-terrorism","tag-united-states"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v19.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>SOTU and the Obama doctrine | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/sotu-and-the-obama-doctrine\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"SOTU and the Obama doctrine | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"President Obama has delivered his last State of the Union address and thoughtful assessments of it can be found here and here. 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