The Incredible Obama Doctrine

The Incredible Obama Doctrine

Speak softly and claim to carry a big stick, which you have no intention of ever using.

By Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal

Last weekend, with the ink on the Iran nuclear deal still being deciphered, the Obama Doctrine fell out of an interview between President Obama and Thomas Friedman of the New York Times.

“You asked about an Obama doctrine,” Mr. Obama said. “The doctrine is: We will engage, but we preserve all our capabilities.”

In nine words, Mr. Obama explained what has been going on the past six years, culminating in what we now see is the nucleus of the Obama worldview, an accommodation with Iran.

The corollary of the Obama Doctrine, as the president explained, is that if engagement with a hostile power turns dangerous, everyone in the world knows that U.S. “military superiority” will emerge and prevail. In case of emergency, Uncle Sam will break glass.

Mr. Obama then offered an example of how this would work—U.S. support for Israel: “What we will be doing even as we enter into this deal is sending a very clear message to the Iranians and to the entire region that if anybody messes with Israel, America will be there.”

This statement, and indeed the Obama Doctrine, is a hoax.

Set aside that “messes with Israel” and “America will be there” are phrases with no real operational meaning.

“America will be there” could mean that if someone set off a nuclear backpack bomb in Tel Aviv, where the Obama administration would be the next day is on New York’s east side, condemning the attack in a U.N. Security Council resolution.

Any American foreign-policy doctrine needs interpretive wiggle room for the commander in chief. But anyone would assume that the phrase “America will be there” refers to the deployment of what Mr. Obama invokes as “our military superiority.”

Unless it doesn’t.

In the case of the Obama presidency, it doesn’t. There is next to no chance that this president under any circumstance—and that would include China’s invasion of Taiwan—will use the U.S. military on the scale he implies here.

Dick Cheney said Tuesday Mr. Obama is the worst foreign-policy president ever. Sen. Lindsey Graham said Sunday Hillary Clinton would be better. Personalizing criticism of the Obama foreign policy like this is a mistake.

It is a mistake to suggest U.S. foreign policy is weak only because Barack Obama is running it. On the cusp of a presidential election, the more pertinent question is whether U.S. foreign policy is weak because a Democrat is running it.

Would U.S. foreign policy be substantively different if run by a President Clinton or President Warren or President O’Malley?

Mr. Obama’s “doctrine” is essentially that if something bad happens, he will send in the 82nd Airborne Division. But he won’t. No Democrat whose view of large-scale U.S. military power was formed by the Vietnam War or the Iraq War will do that. Other than aerial bombardments, using the full range of U.S. military assets ended for Democrats with the Johnson presidency.

The last Democrat in that earlier tradition, former Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, was expelled from the party precisely for this reason. The assertion today that they can take risks because of overwhelming U.S. power is a public-relations bluff.

Put it this way: Any conceivable Democratic presidential candidate would associate with Teddy Roosevelt’s foundational dictum—Speak softly and carry a big stick. That sounds like the Obama Doctrine, or what Hillary Clinton and progressive foreign-policy pundits call “smart” power. But the reality of modern Democrat foreign policy is—Speak softly and claim to carry a big stick, which you have no intention of ever using.

To understand the bluff, look closely at the Democrats’ Doctrine on paper or in practice, and you’ll notice that it’s always prospective. It promises to act at some point in the future if circumstances become so dire that they oblige the U.S. to “overwhelm” the problem with superior power. Never has there been a bigger “if.”

This verbal reassurance always gets rolled forward to the horizon, never quite arriving at a decision to coerce adversary behavior. “Smart” policy means stringing together endless casuistic reasons for not acting.

Instead, their real imperative is to temporize with high-minded “talks”—at the U.N., with allies, enemies, even with our own bureaucratic selves, as with the inability in 1996 to attribute blame for the Khobar Towers bombing.

U.S. responses to the crises in Ukraine and Syria are case studies of the “overwhelming-power” bluff. The Iran deal, a monument to talk, is its apotheosis.

The Democratic Party’s promise of threat when set against its doctrinal aversion to act means it is not credible, and so it is dangerous. It is dangerous because it incentivizes opportunists like Vladimir Putin or Islamic State’s Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to act, knowing the U.S. will wait for the “mess” to build into a crisis beyond control. At that point, the U.S.’s options collapse to two—the massive, indiscriminate use of U.S. military power. Or losing.

The Obama Doctrine has been conventional Democratic foreign policy since the presidential election of 1972. It is not going to change in 2016.