Obama: George W. Bush With Drones

Tuesday April 5, 2016

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It is a testament to how deeply the doctrine of neoconservatism has left its mark on the American foreign policy that the Obama Doctrine, for all its professed restraint, has ended up in practice looking very similar to the gung-ho interventionism of the George W. Bush administration, with the main difference being the degree of intervention.

While engagement with Iran and Cuba are victories for realism that would have been unthinkable during the Bush years, Obama has not shied away from unnecessary military action—action that does not improve the United States’ security situation or shore up the international order.

In the past seven years Obama has, in addition to continuing to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, conducted airstrikes to remove Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya, conducted airstrikes against Islamic State in Syria, funded rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, supported Saudi Arabia’s air campaign in Yemen, and conducted extensive drone strikes in Pakistan, Syria, Yemen and Somalia.

Is it inevitable that anyone in the Oval Office will succumb to the tragic pressure to use the military to put out fires around the world? Or is there a way to uphold the United States’ role as defender of the world order without falling into the neoconservative morass of constant military intervention that by bleeding America dry of treasure and blood, will precipitate in not greater but lesser America security? President Obama himself got it right when he said that “we can’t, at any given moment, relieve all the world’s misery. . . we have to choose where we can make a real impact.”

This might be best accomplished by following the example of the British in the nineteenth century, whose role the United States has now assumed. Militarily, this would consist of three primary components: (1) maintaining American forces near key chokepoints, such as the Gulf of Hormuz and the Malacca Straits to ensure the freedom of the seas; (2) shoring up relations with close allies in prosperous and free rimland of western Europe and East Asia that give the international system global staying power; and (3) only using force to prevent any power from using armed force to seize enough territory and resources to threaten the world order. Most other countries, including other great powers, are disinclined to rock the boat and dispute this basic order, which provides enough space for most of their ambitions and internal arrangements.

Yet, instead of pursuing the very commonsense ideas he himself seems to advocate, Obama’s policy in the Middle East and North Africa has been a disaster, though he himself has acknowledged that he was dealt a bad hand to begin with. Mindless intervention, for no good purpose but to influence domestic arrangements in other states, has led to unintended consequences.

Removing Muammar el-Qaddafi has left Libya an all-but-failed state and destabilized surrounding states like Mali. Half-hearted support for Syrian rebels has only contributed to the years-long stalemate. Yemen is fast becoming a second Syria, a humanitarian catastrophe affording terror groups free reign. These events are of no benefit to anyone.

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