What’s Wrong With Doctrines?

A lot of really strange analysis has been coming out on the subject of Obama Administration foreign policy following the apparant toppling of the Ghaddafi regime in Libya. Broadly criticized by opinion leaders of the left and right on his Libya policy until recently, it seems that many decided this past week that the policy is a major success, and at least one columnist has written that Libya suggests that Barack Obama might ultimately be regarded as a “great” foreign policy president. So what changed?

The gist of it seems to be that success in toppling Ghaddafi is being understood by some to retroactively validate Obama Administration policy in a few ways; one of these ways is that it is being seen as an example of the wisdom of not having a foreign policy doctrine. This is an unusual argument, so I’m going to examine it here in some detail.

We can begin with the words of The Guardian’s Michael Tomasky, who thinks that differences in the Obama Administration’s approaches to Libya, Egypt, Syria, etc. reveal a special insight into the workings of international relations:

Call it the doctrine of no doctrine: using our power and influence but doing so prudently and multilaterally, with the crucial recognition that Egypt is different from Libya is different from Syria is different from someplace else. According to the foreign-policy establishment, if you want to have a self-respecting big-D doctrine, you’re not supposed to recognize differences. The doctrine must guide all cases. But that is exactly the kind of thinking that has led—always—to tragedy…If the Obama Doctrine is nothing like those, so much the better.

For the record, it is Tomasky who thinks Obama’s foreign policy is trending towards relative greatness. David Remnick (who, among other things, authored Lenin’s Tomb, which is a really great book about the end of the Soviet Union that I recommend) made a similar case in a recent New Yorker piece:

Part of Obama’s anti-doctrinal doctrine is that it insists on the recognition of differences in a way that Bush’s fixed ideas did not. Complex as Libya was, and remains, Syria is infinitely more so. Qaddafi had been despised in the Arab world for decades; support in the region for his removal was hardly impossible to conjure. Bashar al-Assad is proving himself no less a despot, but Syria, because of its relationship with Iran, has ties to countries on the Security Council (Russia, for one) that Libya did not. Obama has tried to embolden the opposition; he has urged countries like Turkey to cut off trade, and pushed for tougher sanctions, to make it clear that displays of tyranny will not be without cost.

What is a doctrine? It’s not precisely clear how Tomasky and Remnick are defining the term, but from their arguments it can contextually be derived that they understand it to mean some sort of formal outlook that groups related challenges together and results, intentionally or not, in a standardized course of action for resolving them. This can be concluded by working backward from the fact that they think the principal problem with doctrines is that they prevent policymakers from “recognizing differences” between similar-but-subtly-different challenges, leading to cookie-cutter approaches to issues that require unique solutions. Tomasky’s and Remnick’s specific arguments are somewhat different, but they share this assumption.

The trouble is that this is not actually what a doctrine is or does. A much better description is furnished by Michael Green who discussed the subject in response to a similar article by Fareed Zakaria:

There is a difference between doctrine and strategy. Doctrines articulate aspirations for strategy and are therefore arguably expendable. Strategy is not. Small powers can go without grand strategies. Great powers cannot. Either the United States seeks to shape the direction of key regions like the Middle East and Asia, or it perpetually reacts to the initiative of revisionist powers and forces within those regions until friends and allies lose confidence and American preeminence is undermined. (Emphasis mine.)

Take an instructive historical example. President Harry Truman laid out his doctrine in a single sentence during an address to a joint session of Congress in 1947:

I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.

Note how general this statement is. It doesn’t actually commit the U.S. to any specific course of action or suggest that all free peoples must be supported, although he did specifically request – and critically later received – Congressional support for aid to the Greek and Turkish governments in this speech. What it does do is delineate what the U.S. is for (free people) and against (attempted subjugation of free peoples by armed minorities or by outside pressures), and it is intentionally left general in recognition of the fact that every case is different, not in spite of it as Tomasky suggests.

What about the supposedly-rigid Bush Doctrine? In his memoir, Decision Points, Bush defines his doctrine in four points:

First, make no distinction between the terrorists and the nations that harbor them – and hold both to account. Second, take the fight to the enemy overseas before they can attack us again here at home. Third, confront threats before they fully materialize. And fourth, advance liberty and hope as an alternative to the enemy’s ideology of repression and fear.

Note here that the language is somewhat more restrictive than in the Truman case but still leaves extensive latitude to tailor policies to specific challenges. The U.S. is opposed to terrorists and their supporters and for liberty and hope. But there are many ways that idea can be actualized. What does it mean to “hold to account” a nation that engages in terrorism or harbors terrorists? In Afghanistan, it meant toppling the al Qaeda-friendly Taliban. In Libya, it meant negotiating an agreement with Gaddafi to abandon terrorism and his WMD program in exchange for normalized relations – an example of rewarding good behavior. In Pakistan, it meant accepting what counter-terrorism help the government was willing and able to provide and regularly pressuring it to do more. What does it mean to “confront threats before they fully materialize?” In Iraq, it meant toppling Saddam. In Iran, it meant uniting with the other four Permanent Members of the UN Security Council and Germany in a diplomatic effort to stop the regime from enriching uranium. Globally, it meant innovations like adding “strategic interdiction” to the DIMEFIL toolbox for countering WMD proliferation, and domestically it meant augmenting legal regimes and the capabilities of law enforcement to track threats within the U.S. borders. What does it mean to “advance liberty and hope as an alternative to the enemy’s ideology of repression and fear?” It meant promoting democracy in the Middle East in some cases, but it also meant launching a historic anti-HIV/malaria/TB initiative in Africa to help stabilize those crises, improve the continent’s future prospects and, in doing so, reduce its susceptibility to extremism. For all their concern about nuance, I’m not sure Tomasky and Remnick fully appreciate how flexible the Bush Doctrine was in theory or in practice.

There just isn’t any evidence to support this anti-doctrine argument that Tomasky, Remnick and others are advancing. It’s true that there have been differences between the Obama Administration’s treatment of Libya, Syria, Egypt and so on, but the same was true of each of its predecessors; there is nothing novel about this. What I think we are seeing here is that the supposed “success” of the Libya campaign is being used as a starting point for reframing the history of Obama Administration action on the Arab Spring uprisings as a series of calculated successes that resulted in the toppling of unpopular dictators when, in reality, things were quite a bit more haphazard than that at the time, and the events themselves are still in flux. The risk in all this is that it may create the impression that the U.S. mission was accomplished when the dictators fell when, in reality, it’s really only the end of the beginning. And that is why I put “success” in quotation marks above.