Obama: A Pragmatist without a Doctrine

Americans have often identified a president with a doctrine that bears his name; thus we speak of the “Obama Doctrine.” But this title doesn’t reflect reality. Obama is first and foremost a pragmatist who doesn’t want to be tied down in any way. His foreign policies eloquently attest to this. Let’s take the war in Iraq as an example. Obama’s goal was to end the war and leave. Formally, that’s clearly what’s happened — but at what cost? The Iraqi government increasingly resembles a Shiite dictatorship backed by Iran.

The case of Afghanistan is different because, in that country, Obama clearly assumed the choice of war. He certainly obtained a symbolic victory by eliminating bin Laden and placing the Taliban on the defensive. But, despite the increased American military presence in the country, the United States will start to withdraw troops after 2014 without having implemented any lasting solution to the political crisis in the country. The Kabul government is one of the most corrupt on the planet, thanks notably to American aid. Replacing the American military with Afghans seems more like a masked political failure than a tangible reality, given the high degree of infiltration of the army by the Taliban. The American failure in Afghanistan is colossal. The capacity to absorb failures is one of the key characteristics of American power, but the hallmark of this power is a withdrawal of convenience.

More worrying still is the failure of Obama’s Pakistan strategy. For Pakistan, an alliance with the United States could be strategically advantageous, allowing Pakistan to press its advantage with Delhi. But this is still not the case. The Obama administration has not succeeded in advancing the dialogue between Delhi and Islamabad on the Kashmir issue, a source of disagreement between the two countries. Thus, Pakistan is not holding back the Taliban in any way and is instead using its allies to weaken the Kabul government, considered to be too close to Delhi.

In reality, in all of the American security issues that he has inherited — Iran, North Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — Obama has not obtained any significant results because the U.S.’ power to constrain has eroded. From this point of view, we can easily conclude that his results are modest. Obama has, to his credit, restrained Israel’s wish to bomb Iran for now; everyone knows that that decision would be disastrous for the entire region. Obama thinks that increased sanctions will force Tehran to delay its nuclear weapons program, even if, historically, there is no practical example of a country ever halting its nuclear weapons program under pressure.

In fact, Obama’s only big achievement in foreign policy, which is not negligible, was to break the U.S. out of the ideology of September 11, which the previous administration deliberately maintained as a pretext for using U.S. military action and didn’t give the U.S. an advantage abroad. Obama has compensated for his innumerable failures in the Middle East by engaging the U.S. in a strategy of “containment” of Beijing, a strategy that has been particularly evident since 2010. Faced with a China that wants to deny the U.S. regional arbitration between China and its neighbors (“area denial strategy”), the U.S. has reacted by strengthening ties with the Association of Southeast Asian Countries, Japan and Korea with the goal of slowing Asian economic integration around Beijing. The American version of the Trans-Pacific Partnership was proposed by Obama to Asian countries at the end of 2011. This version seeks to exclude China by placing a very high regulatory bar for “beyond borders issues,” the regulatory barriers that slow the penetration of imports. The Americans want more reciprocity with China, as do the Europeans. They have thus buried the multilateral negotiations at the WTO. They believe that only aggressive bilateralism will allow them to open emerging markets. The Europeans feel the same way. But, as usual, they aren’t making the choice.