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The Obama Doctrine: Walk Softly and Offer a Big Apology

Try making sense of President Obama’s foreign policy and you might start wondering what it is that guides this Administration. Most of our leaders have followed a few guiding principles, whether it be promoting freedom and democracy, containing the spread of communism, or resisting terrorism. Whether right or wrong as judged by history, each American President has sent a clear message to the world that America was squarely on the side of freedom. What about Obama?

Candidate Obama stressed that he would change the “failed policies of the past eight years.” He said he would do this on the economy and we have seen the deficit explode. He said he would do this on foreign policy; are we now seeing the foreign policy of the United States implode? That platitude from the campaign is the only guiding principal we have to work with in analyzing current foreign policy decisions. But what happens when you adopt a platitude as policy?

Let’s look at the results of Obama’s foreign policy team so far. We have the “Spring 2009 Apology Tour.” Our president bowed to a King. America now supports the moral equivalency argument between Israel and Hamas (somehow bombing civilians is on the same shelf as building houses). In Honduras we are supporting a would-be dictator and slapping sanctions on an already impoverished country. In Iraq we have followed the strategy put in place by the “failed policy makers” and it is working. In Afghanistan we are delaying a decision to either commit to the action or keep the status quo, and all the while our casualties mount. We have placated Russia (getting nothing in return) by backing off on a missile defense program and cutting the development of new weapons systems.

To understand our current foreign policy you have to understand the campaign platitude and what Barack Obama meant when he said we will change the “failed policies of the last eight years.” The driving policy under Bush was to fight terrorism, and you were either with us or against us. There was a very clear line drawn in the sand. The “failed policy” that Obama desires to change has nothing to do with failures in execution of that policy. It is the fact that by taking a stand against terrorism, as often happens when you take a stand against anything, that stand alienated some. Therefore the “failure” is a failure to be liked by a large portion of the world. Our foreign policy has shifted from a determined effort since World War II to promote freedom, to become today an effort to be liked. Not to be liked by the people in these countries who are not free; Obama is already liked by the people, but to be liked and accepted by the leaders who curtail freedom.

Though Obama stressed in his speech to the UN that he would never apologize for acting in the interest of the American people, he then spent most of the speech contrasting, on a variety of issues, past administrations to his own . While maybe just short of an apology, but it was a clear signal to despots around the world that Obama considers taking a stand as the wrong action in the face of tyranny.

Obama’s biggest foreign policy test so far has been Iran. Iran has been a foreign policy challenge for a number of administrations and most telling for the Obama Administration may be how they have handled the Iranian regime.

Rewind to the campaign when Candidate Obama mentioned that his administration would meet, without preconditions, with the leaders of Iran. Later in the campaign the President backpeddled and said “of course there would be preconditions.” Yet upon taking office, Obama decided that there did not even need to be the precondition of the other side attending a meeting, and he unilaterally sent a video taped message to Iran.

Faced with evidence that Iran was continuing to pursue nuclear weapons, Obama sent an envoy to Israel to make sure that the Israelis would not act upon their intelligence by removing the nuclear threat. Faced with a popular uprising among the Iranian people, the Administration failed to publicly denounce the leaders’ brutal treatment of pro-democracy demonstrators, and commented that they stood willing to work with whatever government emerged victorious. Finally, confronted with hard evidence that Iran had built a previously undisclosed nuclear facility, Obama chose not to confront its leaders for fear of causing confrontation at the UN, and instead waited a few days. When the charge finally came, it was met by a new challenge a missile test from Iran. In the meantime, Iran filed a disclosure of the facility, though certainly the timing was a coincidence. Even France who had been somewhat friendly with Iran on issues not involving nuclear arms, has become frustrated with the lack of a strong position from the United States (see the videos below).

So what guides this Administration in foreign policy? What is it that we and the world can expect from Barack Obama? Judging from what we have seen so far, President Obama will continue to pursue the approval of leaders from Venezuela, North Korea, Iran, Hamas, Syria, The Taliban, Honduras, and Russia while distancing our foreign policy from long time allies like Britain, France, and Israel. In short, the Obama doctrine will be to walk softly and offer a big apology. We meet with Iran on October 1^st and the President says Iran is “on notice to come clean.” However, if their leaders can be believed; Iran expects an apology.