The Obama Doctrine

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Ricochet: The Obama Doctrine

Ricochet Editor's Desk / March 10, 2016 / 5 COMMENTS

Jeffrey Goldberg, at the Atlantic, has better access to Obama and his entourage than any other journalist in America. He was given hours of interviews with the president for this week’s cover story, The Obama Doctrine, which is a must-read for anyone wondering what the president and his administration have been thinking about foreign policy for these past seven years — or at least, how they want the public to understand their thoughts. It’s destined to be a famous piece of journalism.

 

It’s long — the longest piece The Atlantic has published this decade — but the editors highly recommend it. It’s particularly interesting in the context of this election campaign and the candidates’ foreign policy platform, as well as what we’re growingly learning about the electorate’s foreign policy preferences from the way it casts its primary votes.

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Strategika

 

Obama’s Foreign Policy: No Easy Fix

by Thomas Donnelly

Monday, October 31, 2016

 

All of the Obama administration’s strategic initiatives will have lives that endure beyond the next president’s term, and three of them are quite likely to have even more profound effects.

 

The fundamental tenet of the “Obama Doctrine” has been to deconstruct and delegitimize the global order built on Anglo-American political principles, and to reverse the previous course of U.S. strategy. The “world that America made” rested on five pillars—preserving a favorable balance of power in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East, sustaining sufficient military power to lead coalitions in each of these theaters, and, through promoting Americans’ sense of “exceptionalism” and moral ambition, preserving the domestic political will to exercise geopolitical leadership.

 

President Obama has achieved measures of success in each of these areas. The least change has come in those areas—Europe and East Asia—where the efforts of previous presidents were longest-standing, most institutionalized, most deeply rooted and, consequently, the balance of power most durable. Americans have been directly involved in Europe for a century, been the dominant military power since 1945, and the dispositive power since the end of the Cold War

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