Weighing the Obama Doctrine

The previous installments discussed how we can analyze Obama’s foreign policy approach and track record, along with the importance of this subject. They also examined some of the criticisms and evaluations of Obama’s foreign policy that have arisen from within Washington. In continuing to examine these criticisms, this installment will take a look at the statements of Obama’s political opponents regarding foreign policy, the right wingers and Republicans.

First, we must emphasize that right-wing American government is in no way monolithic and contains many different strains. In the midst of this historic turmoil that the Republican Party is facing, right-wing and left-wing moderates hold different views on domestic and foreign policy issues. At the same time, we must keep in mind that they all have different levels of interest in foreign affairs. Still, the majority of them are in agreement with respect to the major points of criticism they will level against American foreign policy during Obama’s terms in office.

Among the Republicans in Congress, Sen. John McCain – Obama’s opponent in his first presidential election – has been the most vocal about attacking America’s acting foreign policy. McCain’s major criticisms have been that Obama is “showing weakness,” “retreating from the world stage,” and “neglecting America’s allies.”

Neoconservatives and people like William Kristol, who chiefly publish in magazines such as The Weekly Standard, have repeated these same criticisms.

The conservative newspaper The Wall Street Journal repeats the aforementioned points about Obama’s foreign policy on a weekly basis, but it must be said that the foundation of these criticisms is not based on Obama’s actual policy, but rather on structural opposition of the right wingers and Republicans to Democrats in general, and Obama in particular. This phenomenon reveals that Republican opposition of all different stripes is quite serious.

The majority of them [i.e. Republicans] still have not been able to accept the presidency of a dark-skinned, African-American with different economic and social views. As such, they take advantage of every opportunity to critique, weaken, and drag down the Democrats, especially Obama. Michael Cohen published an article in this vein in the April 12, 2014 edition of the Observer. While enumerating the criticisms of Obama by conservatives, he points out that their aim in calling attention to the weakness of America’s foreign policy is to prevent him from succeeding in the face of several challenges, like the Syria crisis or Iran’s nuclear program. But as Cohen puts it, they forget that Obama has witnessed the American war effort in Afghanistan up close for over a decade, and even himself increased American military forces there in 2009, adding 30,000 troops, although the plan did not work.

Similarly, Republicans also forget about Iraq, where America was unable to accomplish its aims, despite the loss of 4,000 American lives and several trillion dollars spent on military activities there. Cohen adds that McCain is accusing Obama of weakness even in the Ukraine crisis, although even if the U.S. deployed military forces there, it would be unable to prevent Russia from attaining its goal of annexing Crimea.

Another Republican criticism is the lack of support for the Zionist regime and several countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council. Cohen sees it as misplaced since during Obama’s two terms, America’s military and security commitments to these nations have not decreased, but rather increased. What happened was that Obama did not grant the requests of those allies in employing U.S. military forces in recent crises.

In addition to Democratic and Republican criticisms of Obama’s foreign policy, we must evaluate Obama’s international approach and record independently and weigh his foreign policy doctrine against domestic security concerns. This will be the subject of the next installment.