Libya: The Obama Doctrine comes into focus

Finally, our cautious, pragmatic president has laid out his “big ideas’’ about the use of American power abroad, said Steven Metz in The New Republic online. In a speech on Libya on national television this week, President Obama explained why he sent in U.S. military forces only when the U.N. and Western allies agreed to help restrain Muammar al-Qaddafi’s attacks on rebels. Even in crises such as Libya’s, “when our safety is not directly threatened,” Obama said the world’s only superpower has a “responsibility to act” in defense of innocent civilians, such as those likely to have been massacred in the city of Benghazi. But he rejected calls for the U.S. to take a more active role in Libya and other Middle Eastern revolutions, arguing that if we try to seize control of the Arab Spring, we could wind up mired in another Iraq war, or provoke a bitter backlash against America. Qualifications aside, said William Kristol in WeeklyStandard.com, the Obama Doctrine was an “unapologetic, freedom-agenda-embracing” commitment to use our military might as a force for good in the world.

That’s “wishful hearing,” said Michael Hirsh in NationalJournal​.com. Sure, Obama gave us a perfectly “cogent argument” for our intervention in Libya, but this was hardly the kind of grand, foreign-policy vision for which the term “doctrine” is usually reserved. We have a duty to prevent the slaughter of civilians, Obama said, but only when it’s practical to do so. The U.S. reserves the right to act unilaterally…but feels more comfortable in a coalition. At one point Obama even offered the lawyerly caveat that the grand principles he was espousing applied only to “this particular country, Libya, at this particular moment.” In other words, “the real Obama Doctrine is to have no doctrine at all.’’ Obama vowed that on his watch, America would fight tyranny and defend the weak, said John Dickerson in Slate.com, but don’t forget to read the fine print: “Offer valid only if it’s a relatively easy military mission and we have a lot of allies.”

Clearly, Obama hasn’t forgotten his long-standing opposition to the Iraq war, said David Ignatius in The Washington Post. Events in the Middle East, however, have forced him to fine-tune his aversion to U.S. military intervention. In Obama’s formulation, the U.S. will no longer “act as the world’s policeman,” but more in the role of a “police chief,” directing and coordinating joint action. It’s just as we conservatives suspected, said Stanley Kurtz in NationalReview.com. At the core of this internationalist’s foreign-policy thinking is a “progressive vision of a U.N.-dictated rights regime,” in which the United States surrenders its authority to a global collective.

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What you neocons won’t admit, said Fred Kaplan in Slate​.com, is that “the U.S. is not as powerful as it once was.’’ We’ve learned the hard way in Iraq and Afghanistan that America’s military might can’t magically transform backward autocracies into friendly democracies. Thank goodness we have a president who understands that. Libya “is a wreck,’’ and we have no idea what happens if Qaddafi falls. The same is true of Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, and the rest of the Mideast; each uprising is unique, and full of peril. “Carving firm guidelines in stone would probably be not only impossible but dangerous.” After the “good-versus-evil, binary logic of the Bush years,” said Dana Milbank in The Washington Post, Obama’s nuanced, case-by-case approach to foreign policy can seem “maddeningly subtle” at times. “But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”