How Much of the Obama Doctrine Will Survive Trump?
President Obama delivers his final major speech on U.S. foreign policy, at MacDill Air Force Base. Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY MANDEL NGAN / AFP / GETTY
On Tuesday, President Obama delivered what was billed as his last big foreign-policy address before his term ends. Speaking at MacDill Air Force Base, in Tampa, the headquarters of Central Command and Special Operations Command, Obama called for the United States to adhere to the law and to abstain from using torture, imposing religious tests, stigmatizing Muslims, and other illiberal acts that Donald Trump has, at times, advocated. “These terrorists can never directly destroy our way of life, but we can do it for them if we lose track of who we are and the values that this nation was founded upon,” Obama declared.
This stark and timely warning dominated the news coverage, but Obama’s speech also went beyond these issues. It was a broad defense of his approach to defending the country and confronting Islamic terrorism, an approach sometimes referred to as “the Obama doctrine” and sometimes, less charitably, as “leading from behind.” (The latter phrase was originally used in an April, 2011, article by my colleague Ryan Lizza.) With Trump having already tapped for his national-security team two vocal critics of Obama’s efforts against ISIS—retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn and retired General James (Mad Dog) Mattis—the common assumption in Washington is that the Obama doctrine is destined for the history books, and that it will be replaced by a much more bellicose, combative approach. But how far is that assumption justified?
Rhetorically, there is obviously an enormous difference between Obama’s measured tones and Trump’s revanchist rabble-rousing. It is perfectly possible that Trump will follow through on his pledges to reinstitute waterboarding and send terrorism suspects to languish for years on end in Guantánamo Bay. (Back in February, he said, “We’re gonna load it up with some bad dudes.”) And, judging by his conduct since the election, there is also a real possibility that Trump’s incessant lashing out on social media could embroil the United States in a succession of international incidents, some of which could be serious. And if, God forbid, a major terrorist attack occurs in the United States, he could well repeat the mistake of the Bush Administration, reacting in ways that benefit only the jihadis and enemies of America.
That is the nightmare scenario. The unnerving truth is, however, that we don’t know what Trump will do. It is at least possible that, for all his bluster, he could end up preserving, or being forced to preserve, parts of the Obama doctrine, at least when it comes to using military force.
Constructed in response to the disaster that was the Iraq War, the Obama doctrine abjures direct U.S. military intervention in countries that don’t represent a direct security threat to the United States, such as Syria. It favors working quietly through allies and proxies, such as Kurdish peshmerga forces, and even, where necessary, Iranian militias, to attack America’s enemies, and also through deploying U.S. military and technological assets that can be operated from afar, such as cyber-spying systems, reconnaissance planes, and drones.
It is a common mistake to interpret this policy as America drawing back into itself and turning against military intervention. The record shows that the Obama Administration has launched, or helped enable, military strikes in more countries than the Bush Administration did, extending the campaign against Islamist extremism to places like Mali and Libya. But, whereas the Bush Administration will always be known for the large-scale wars it initiated in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama seems to prefer “waging war in the shadows with a light footprint and if possible limited public scrutiny,” as Andreas Krieg, a foreign-policy expert at King’s College, London, wrote in a recent paper published by Chatham House, a British think tank. “Externalizing the strategic and operational burden of war to human and technological surrogates has developed into America’s preferred way of war under the Obama administration.”
Trump, of course, could choose to reverse this approach, sending in the 101st Airborne whenever it suits him. But that doesn’t seem likely. Like Obama before him, he will be dealing with an American public that is tired of foreign wars and wants the federal government to focus on domestic issues. A survey that the Pew Research Center carried out earlier this year found that almost six in ten Americans want the United States “to deal with its own problems and let other countries deal with their own problems the best they can.”
Far from arguing against this current of public opinion, which Obama himself gave voice to during his 2008 campaign, Trump has embraced it and articulated it as his own, portraying the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan as misguided. At a rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on Tuesday, where he introduced Mattis as his nominee for Secretary of Defense, Trump said, “We will stop racing to topple . . . foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn’t be involved with.” He went on, “This destructive cycle of intervention and chaos must finally, folks, come to an end.”
To be sure, Trump says a lot of things, many of which contradict one another, directly or potentially. In Fayetteville, he also repeated his promise to smash ISIS, but he didn’t detail how he’ll do it. His transition Web site says only that a Trump Administration would “work with our Arab allies and friends in the Middle East in the fight against ISIS. Pursue aggressive joint and coalition military operations . . . international cooperation to cutoff their funding, expand intelligence sharing, and cyberwarfare to disrupt and disable their propaganda and recruiting.”
This happens to be a pretty accurate description of what the Obama Administration has been doing in concert with Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and other countries. Flynn and Mattis have both criticized Obama’s campaign against ISIS as half-hearted, but how much further would they, and Trump, go? They could order more bombing sorties by coalition warplanes and drones, but that would almost certainly generate a big increase in civilian casualties. Sending in more U.S. ground troops and special forces is another possible option, but the last thing the uniformed services (and the American public) want is to get bogged down in another lengthy occupation of cities like Mosul and Raqqa.
These are the sorts of difficulties and complications the Obama Administration has been dealing with for eight years. They are what the President was talking about when, shortly after the election, he said of his successor, “Reality will force him to adjust how he approaches many of these issues. That’s just the way this office works.”
On the campaign trail, it is easy to ignore complexities and attack the policymakers who are dealing with them. But, once you are in power, they can’t be ignored, and they tend to multiply. Trump, for example, has said he would “dismantle” the nuclear deal with Iran and adopt a more confrontational approach to Tehran generally. But how would that effect the war on ISIS, in which Iranian-trained militias have played a key role? Or Trump’s desire for improved relations with Russia, which now has strong military and political ties to Iran? Or U.S. relations with France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, which are all strongly committed to the nuclear deal?
At some point, Trump will also have to face fiscal reality. He has promised to rebuild a U.S. military he claims has been depleted, but he also wants to introduce big tax cuts at a time when the federal budget is already straitened by the rising demands of programs like Social Security and Medicare, along with interest on the national debt. One of the virtues of Obama’s light-footprint approach is that it is relatively cheap, a fact he pointed out this week in Tampa. After detailing how the U.S.-backed campaign in Iraq and Syria was taking territory away from ISIS and killing many of its leaders, Obama said, “We’ve accomplished all this at a cost of ten billion dollars over two years, which is the same amount that we used to spend in one month at the height of the Iraq War.”
The Obama doctrine didn’t emerge from the ether. It represented an adjustment to the reality in which America, as the lone superpower, is still expected to provide global leadership, but is also operating under tight political and economic constraints. Trump, for all his bluster, will be working in the same environment. While he is unlikely ever to admit it and credit Obama, he could end up moving at least part of the way in the same direction. Let’s hope that he does.
