Every so often, a president will outline a significant change in the foreign policy of the United States. That new course of action has usually been called a "doctrine" of some sort. It is a rather peculiar way to frame American diplomacy, for the word doctrine was primarily associated with religious dogma and law, promulgated by an organized religion. In Western civilization, this role was filled by the Vatican for at least a thousand years.
In America, we've come to associate this with a president's foreign policy. It began with President James Monroe's speech to Congress in 1823, when Monroe decided, without the consent of Congress or the legality of an international treaty, that America would be the supreme power over half the Earth. This policy was later made more formal in the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Teddy did not speak softly when it came to what he regarded as the United States' "police power" over the Western hemisphere.
It was Wilson who decided that the United States needed to spread its way of doing things around the world, sometimes with military force at the ready. Then there was the Truman Doctrine, which committed the United States to a global policy of containing Communism. The Kennedy Doctrine that followed was a great expansion of the Truman Doctrine, and carried on by President Johnson. That was followed by the more aggressively anti-Communist Reagan Doctrine and its mission of "rollback." And of course, the dreaded Bush Doctrine with its preemptive war and democracy-by-force philosophy.
You'll notice a commonality: Whenever a president gets a doctrine named after himself, the United States ends up in a messy, unnecessary war. Furthermore, it overcommits our resources and prestige, and sometimes our very lives, to the grand designs of what are sometimes megalomaniacs with too much power. We are better off without a doctrine.
That is why I am quite glad President Obama doesn't appear to have one. He handles each foreign policy situation on a case-by-case basis, carefully balancing U.S. interests and human interests as they appear. There is no philosophy to build on, nor any fundamental belief to adhere to. This allows the president to be flexible rather than, well...doctrinaire. I am not necessarily saying the president is making the correct decision in each matter nor am I saying he is making all the wrong ones. I am saying that he hasn't boxed himself into a one-size-fits-all approach and that therefore he is more likely to make the correct one.
Take the recent events in Egypt for example. President Obama has taken criticism from many quarters for coddling Mubarak before the protests began, not dumping him quickly enough after the protests began, and then dumping him too quickly without knowing what will come next. I disagree completely. What the president did, in fact, was do exactly what he should have done: nothing. If the people of Egypt, or any other nation in the Islamic world, want Western democracy, then they shall have it on their own without our support one way or the other. The United States does not need to commit itself to anything but what the president has provided: lofty rhetoric and meaningless platitudes. In fact, he's probably said more than he should, but we can take comfort he hasn't decided to do anything.
The reason the president has the freedom to do nothing about Egypt is because there is no "Obama Doctrine" compelling him to do so. He hasn't promised to, for example, defend the rights of free people everywhere, no matter the cost, no matter the time it takes. If he were so bound, he might one day in the future be forced to send troops into Egypt to protect the Egyptian people from a military government run amock. Do any of us wish to see this happen? I certainly don't. I believe a sternly worded speech will suffice. Or what happens when the pendulum swings the other way and there is a conservative backlash over democracy's failure to deliver work, bread, and a roof? Will we intervene with peacekeepers? A doctrine is a straightjacket when it comes to these issues.
The less the president says, the better off the United States is. President Obama has his hands full with ongoing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as an international mission to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons. These challenges are more than enough for three residents, but we only have one. There is no need to take on the additional burden of committing himself—and this country-to promises on problems that have yet to appear. If the movement in the Middle East continues and more governments fall, the president should take the exact approach he has taken so far: speak nicely and do nothing.
