Obama just announced the most anti-war foreign policy doctrine in decades [View all]

[babylonsister]

http://www.vox.com/2014/5/28/5757630/obama-foreign-policy-anti-war-speech-doctrine

Obama just announced the most anti-war foreign policy doctrine in decades

Updated by Max Fisher on May 28, 2014, 12:40 p.m. ET @Max_Fisher [e-mail]


President Obama speaks at West Point JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images


President Obama made a commencement speech at West Point on Wednesday that the White House had aggressively billed as a grand articulation of Obama's foreign policy vision. This was not the first time he had attempted to lay out a foreign policy doctrine, and few expected much more than the usual vague policy mish-mash — when it's year six of your presidency and you still need to explain your doctrine, it's not a great sign that you really have one.

So it was a legitimate surprise when Obama articulated a unified, tightly focused vision of America's role in the world. And while it's not a vision that will thrill many foreign policy hands, including perhaps some of those in his administration, it is the clearest Obama foreign policy doctrine he's made in years: no war, no militarism, no adventurism. With the possible exception of Jimmy Carter's 1977 Notre Dame speech, it may well have been one of the most dovish foreign policy speeches by a sitting US president since Eisenhower.

Obama argued, directly and repeatedly, that the US would have to reduce its use of military force as a tool of foreign policy. Obama argued that the US could not and should not use military force, including even limited actions such as off-shore strikes, except when absolutely necessary to defend "core interests" or to "protect our people, our homeland, or our way of life."

That's a very high bar for the use of military force. Obama didn't just make the point abstractly, going through several major US foreign policy changes to explain why, in each, military force was not and should not be applied.

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This doctrine means less of putting Americans into harms way, less of committing the United States to difficult and far-away conflicts, but it also means accepting some problems and risks as just a fact of life, beyond our ability to fix. As an example, he pointed to the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram as a problem the United States had to admit it couldn't solve. "Tragically, no American security operation can eradicate the threat posed by an extremist group like Boko Haram," he said, adding that "global leadership requires us to see the world as it is, with all its danger and uncertainty."

The Obama administration had previewed the speech as staking a middle ground between military adventurism and old-fashioned isolationism, and on the merits Obama did articulate such a foreign policy doctrine, one that replaces military-led foreign policy with multilateral diplomacy and alliance-building.

But, in execution, doing away with militarism and the use of force will be the much easier half of that. It's relatively easy to not order a cruise-missile strike or troop redeployment. Replacing that hard military power with soft power, and making it work, is a lot harder. Obama's got two years to prove to the world that he can do it. If he wants to see his superdove foreign policy doctrine survive beyond his time in office, he'll have to do a lot more with this doctrine than make speeches about it.