The Obama Doctrine of the title of Jeffrey Goldberg’s Atlantic article on the foreign policy views of America’s 44th President seems to involve what the author calls, at the end of the piece, “a number of dovetailing conclusions about the world, and America’s role in it.” How accurate are these conclusions?
The first of them is that “the Middle East is no longer terribly important to America’s interests.” It is true that the region is relatively less important than it was during the quarter century of the post-Cold War era, which ran from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the Russian assault on Ukraine in 2014, when Europe and Asia were peaceful. Now, with a mounting Chinese maritime challenge in the western Pacific and Russia back in the business of invading its neighbors, the Middle East must share whatever time and resources the United States has for geopolitical problems. That does not, however, make it unimportant. Even with the development of fracking, oil from the region continues to be crucial for global well-being. The hegemony of a single, hostile power in the Middle East—in current circumstances, Iran—especially if equipped with nuclear weapons, would pose a serious threat to American interests. The dysfunctions of the countries of the region (Israel excepted) and the unhappy American encounter with Iraq make the temptation to steer clear of the Middle East a powerful one. Because of its continuing importance, however, giving in to that temptation would have serious costs.
The second precept of the Obama Doctrine, according to Goldberg, is that “even if the Middle East were surpassingly important, there would still be little an American president could do to make it a better place.” Like the first proposition, this one is true up to a point, but not necessarily a good guide for the conduct of American foreign policy. Making the region a better place requires transforming the political and economic institutions of the countries there. Like all countries, those in the Middle East would be better off with free speech, free elections, and free markets. The United States cannot, however, cause these freedoms to take root in those countries. In the past quarter century America has tried and failed to do so both there and elsewhere. (These efforts and their consequences are the subject of my new book Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era.) The necessary institutions must be homegrown, and that takes time. They cannot be imported or imposed.
If the United States cannot make the Middle East a better place, however, it can and should act to keep it from becoming a worse one, especially a worse place from the point of view of American interests, the defense of which is, after all, the purpose of American foreign policy. In the Middle East this means preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, dominating the region, and controlling its oil. The contribution that the United States can make to improving the Middle East (and has made to improving other regions) is to support the international conditions favorable to the kinds of domestic transformations that the local people have to make for themselves.
The third element of the Obama Doctrine holds that “the innate American desire to fix the sorts of problems that manifest themselves most dramatically in the Middle East inevitably leads to warfare, to the deaths of U.S. soldiers, and to the eventual damaging of U.S. credibility and power.” That is a (very) roughly accurate description of the American encounter with Iraq, an experience Americans should not and in fact do not wish to repeat. The challenge in the Middle East for the next President, therefore, is to protect American interests in the region without becoming bogged down in a military occupation for the purpose of fostering political and economic transformation. This will not be easy. Then again, the presidency is not an easy job.
The fourth part of the Obama Doctrine is that “the world cannot afford to see the diminishment of American power.” This is true, and all the more important because the challenges to global order, of which the United States is the chief custodian, are more formidable now than at any time since the end of the Cold War. Moreover, what follows these four propositions in the article serves to emphasize, apparently unintentionally, the need for the continuing exercise of American power. Obama believes, Goldberg writes, “that history has sides and that America’s adversaries—and some of its putative allies—have situated themselves on the wrong one, a place where tribalism, fundamentalism, sectarianism and militarism still flourish. What they don’t understand is that history is bending in his direction.” The values and institutions that the United States cherishes, which are the opposites of tribalism, fundamentalism, sectarianism, and militarism, have made remarkable progress around the world in the past hundred years, but in the interest of historical accuracy and political clarity it must be said that the things that Obama rightly deplores are more familiar, more “normal,” more deeply grounded in local experience, and more firmly entrenched in the Middle East, and not there alone, than what America and other democracies preach and, on the whole, practice. American power cannot banish these things, but it can oppose the foreign policies of countries that seek to spread them and support the efforts of other countries that are willing, if in the Middle East sometimes only partially and tentatively, to resist them. If history is truly to bend, or to continue bending, in the direction that Obama favors, it will need ongoing assistance from the United States.