The Obama Doctrine

The American Prospect's Spencer Ackerman has a reported essay about the scope and vision of Barack Obama's foreign policy. It's a provocative read. Note how the foreign policy team seems to consciously be operating against the 2004 rubric of "the politics of fear."

They envision a doctrine that first ends the politics of fear and then moves beyond a hollow, sloganeering "democracy promotion" agenda in favor of "dignity promotion," to fix the conditions of misery that breed anti-Americanism and prevent liberty, justice, and prosperity from taking root. An inextricable part of that doctrine is a relentless and thorough destruction of al-Qaeda. Is this hawkish? Is this dovish? It's both and neither -- an overhaul not just of our foreign policy but of how we think about foreign policy. And it might just be the future of American global leadership.

Ackerman notices how certain grievances and perspectives link Obama's fo-po advisers to each other. They've all been outsiders, rather than insiders. They have a history of seeking advice from those outside their comfort zones. And they almost all have a preference for "dignity promotion" over the type of "freedom" and "democracy" promotion that the Bush Administration wants to be known for.

Comments

This piece is honestly one of the most enlightening pieces I've read on the brains behind Obama this cycle thus far. I think it gives me alot of hope that our foreign policy priorities will be reoriented into effective action and the politics of cowboy diplomacy will end once and for all. Thank you marc for bring this one to the attention of your readers; i hope they all take note and read the linked piece.

Posted by Steven R | March 24, 2008 3:29 PM

And they almost all have a preference for "dignity promotion"

Oh, that shouldn't be hard to live down.

Posted by Cal | March 24, 2008 5:23 PM

To the extent that one can discern specifics, Obama's foreign policy is simply the same gibberish that liberals have advocated for 40 years.

The Obama/liberal position is this: Islamic fundamentalists aren't doing anything wrong, per se. Sure they're violent and they kill people, but that's because the devil made them do it. They are suffering from ________ (fill in blank here with any real or imagined oppression) and so are driven to make war and commit terrorists acts.

How did the liberalism of Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and JFK come down to rejecting the role of standing up for "democracy" -- notice Ackerman's pejorative use of the quotation marks -- in America's foreign policy?

One word: multiculturalism. For the liberal, all cultures are equal and cannot be judged by outsiders. So, the question of whether Islam is an ideological threat cannot be a subject of discussion or a part of US foreign policy. For the liberal Islam is off-limits.

So liberals like Obama scurry about building roads and sending food aid, hoping that the motivating factors that, surely, must be causing Islamists to make war can be eliminated.

I wonder what would have been America's fate if FDR had just helped the Nazis build clinics and roads?

Posted by ProfNickD | March 24, 2008 8:20 PM

> Islamic fundamentalists aren't doing anything wrong, per se. Sure they're violent and they kill people, but that's because the devil made them do it. They are suffering from (fill in blank here with any real or imagined oppression) and so are driven to make war and commit terrorists acts.

No, it's because they're violent jerks. But so are most people, when you get right down to it. The thing is, you definitely have to take that into account when dealing with them.

After all, if Iraq could be fixed by blowing up pieces of it, we'd have been out of there a very long time ago.

Anyhow, if you're so eager to talk about Nazis, take a look at how Germany got that way sometime.

They were facing constant imaginary threats (okay, the Reichstags fire was real, but the 'conspiracy' behind it was just some deranged guy), gave up all their freedom for promises of security to the government and supported any war that benefited them, not caring about what any other country thought.

Posted by Joe Gomez | March 24, 2008 8:59 PM

Clinton and McCain are both Judas's to the American people. Need proof? check this out.

"It's tag-teaming Burson-Marsteller style."

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/2/24/14518/22 13/544/463202

An excerpt...

Hillary Clinton's chief strategist is Mark Penn, and Charlie Black, John McCain's top adviser, is chairman of BKSH, the DC-based lobbying subsidiary of Burson-Marsteller -- of which Mark Penn is CEO.

Yes, this is the same lobbyist Barack Obama was referring to when he criticized John McCain for allowing lobbyists to conduct their business on board his bus.

BKSH is a bipartisan lobbying firm. Black, the chairman is the top Republican. The top Democrat is R. Scott Pastrick, who like Penn, supports Hillary Clinton.

Mark Penn's personal interests would clearly be best served by a Hillary Clinton victory.

A McCain presidency wouldn't be a bad consolation prize, however. It would be far better to have the head of his lobbying be tight with the president than to have a president like Obama who sought to impose new restrictions on his lobbyist operation.

Posted by Elbram | March 25, 2008 12:03 AM

To ProfNickD,
Hey prof,what part of Moron do you not understand,The question should be,What would America's fate be if FDR did'nt stop Prescott Bush{Dubya's Nazi partner Grandfather}form selling Hitler American steel to build bombs to kill American GI's.Go ahead and Google that asswipe.

Posted by Val | March 25, 2008 2:21 AM

To ProfNickD,
Hey prof,what part of Moron do you not understand,The question should be,What would America's fate be if FDR did'nt stop Prescott Bush{Dubya's Nazi partner Grandfather}from selling Hitler American steel to build bombs to kill American GI's.Go ahead and Google that asswipe.

Posted by Val | March 25, 2008 2:28 AM

An interesting comment! It is as well to read the article though. They share a grievance in anticipating the unholy mess we have created before we got into it and were shouted down. They seem to have real insight into what is going wrong and have the courage to try and fix it. They also seem to have a healthy streak of realism. It all looks very promising.

Posted by Chris Dornan | March 25, 2008 8:33 AM

In 1977, the Carter people rode into town all full of vim and vinegar. One of the first things they tried to do was to "make the world safe for Revolutions".

The Obama folks are warmed over Carterites, peddling Carterism. Democrats simply lack the historical perspective to see that they're peddling the same snake oil, complete with the same ol' Zbig.

Again, the profound similarity is the notion of America as global wrongdoer. This is a spectacular conceit, and one particular to liberals.

It is a profoundly ignorant misunderstanding of the world. Indeed, it would be highly amusing to watch Barack Obama get taken to the cleaners by the Mahmoud Ahmadhi-nejads of this world (and come back from Tehran with his underwear and a souvenir Persian Rug) were it not for the fact that so many lives could potentially be lost as a consequence of a policy of appeasement.

Liberals, in short, can't get past their corrosive sense of guilt and self-loathing. That's not the foundation for a foreign policy based on national self-interest, but it might serve them well at the analyst's office.

Posted by section9 | March 25, 2008 9:09 AM

The post by Val contains obscene, harassing and defamatory language. I suggest you delete it. It makes your blog seem like a restroom where people urinate on the floor.

Posted by David Todd | March 28, 2008 6:32 AM

ProfNickD writes: "I wonder what would have been America's fate if FDR had just helped the Nazis build clinics and roads?"

Yet, any time someone critiques the war effort in Iraq, apologists cry that the media never reports on "the good news." I mean, look at all the clinics and schools and roads we're building in Iraq.

Oh, but those are the good Muslims, right?

Look... this is not to say that building Iraq's infrastructure so that people in that nation have a future beyond suicide bombing isn't a good thing, just that so much political chatter sees Muslims as the enemy or as an ally based on ideology rather than reality.

The point being, if we considered the impact of our actions before we created messes, we wouldn't have so many to clean up. It's not about seeing America as the wrongdoer in the world, it's about being rational enough to acknowledge that even the best intended policies sometimes have unintended results, and our foreign policy is often misguided in exactly that fashion, precisely because we're too proud to consider that America's actions can be both noble AND harmful if poorly planned.

Posted by Double-Edged Sword of Islam | March 29, 2008 4:28 PM