Testing Obama’s Doctrine

Testing Obama’s Doctrine – David Ignatius, Washington Post opinion.

Is there an “Obama Doctrine” lurking among the zigs and zags of the president’s foreign policy over these first nine months? I think there is, in his repeated invocation of global rights and responsibilities. The problem is that this lawyerly framework hasn’t been applied to the really tough issues, such as what to do in Afghanistan. I have been looking for a “doctrine” because, frankly, strategic thinking has been this administration’s weak spot. A pragmatic president has surrounded himself with pragmatic advisers – a retired Marine general as national security adviser, a former senator as secretary of state, a career intelligence officer as secretary of defense. None are grand strategists on the model of Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Reviewing Barack Obama’s major speeches, I do find one theme that he returns to again and again. To take the version that the president used in his inaugural address: “What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility.” This involves a reciprocal exchange – “mutual interest and mutual respect” is how Obama put it that cold day in January, and he has returned often to that formulation. This idea – of balancing rights and responsibilities – strikes me as a central pillar of Obama’s foreign policy. Iran has the right to civilian nuclear power but the responsibility to abide by the Non-Proliferation Treaty; Israel has the right to live in peace but the responsibility to refrain from building settlements, which Obama rejects as illegitimate…

More at The Washington Post.