The foreign policy of the Obama administration has been variously characterized as: ad hoc, lacking strategic vision, naive, courageous, and prioritizing the immediate over the long term. In April Thomas Friedman attempted to explain the coherence of the Obama administration foreign policy, coining the term Obama Doctrine.

To summarize the assumptions of the Obama Doctrine:

• There are no current existential threats to the U.S.
• The U.S. is a declining hegemon and the world is destined for multipolarity
• Diplomatic engagement is a more useful tool to changing hostile state behavior than coercive measures

From these assumptions, flows the following policy choices:

• The U.S. strategic posture viz. Eurasia can be recalibrated to off-shore balancing
• Coercision of U.S. adversaries should be reversed
• U.S. allies need to carry a greater burden in providing global public goods

There is an Obama Doctrine and it is coherent, being based on common strains of thought in the field of international relations. Obama claims to be a realist, and realists get indignant. What Obama really means is that he accepts one underlying premise of contemporary structural realism: that the international states system is characterized by anarchy–i.e., there is no global government to regulate the affairs of state. It is pretty clear that the president is not a proponent of liberal cosmopolitanism that believes that there should be a global government. There have been no major advances towards empowering the UN as you would expect of a cosmopolitan outlook. Instead he is invested in liberal internationalism–states are the main actors and they should not be surrendering their sovereignty to a world government. A better characterization of the administration’s outlook is a combination of several liberal strains of thought: classic commercial pacifism, neoliberal institutionalism, and constructivism.

The administration has, in opposition to the Democrat party’s ideological base, promoted international trade. This is a core tenant of commercial pacifism. Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations made the argument that trade ties deter war, because trade ties and the financial ties that go with them raise the cost of international conflict. This tenant was the core of Angellism, named after Norman Angell, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, whose book The Great Illusion made the argument that war doesn’t pay. The book was an extended polemic on the folly of the Anglo-German arms race that preceded World War I. (The final edition of the book appeared on the eve of war.)

Neoliberal institutionalism (NLI) makes the related claim that interconnectedness in the world makes the cooperation among states more likely than realists claim (because a fundamental tenant of realism is that given anarchy, the states system is a self-help system, and states prioritize security over all other issues). What makes NLI “neo” is that it accepts the structural realist proposition that the international states system is anarchic, contra classical liberalism, which holds that war is caused by either human nature (that is changeable), or the nature of states (democracies don’t go to war). NLI assumes though that existential threats don’t always exist and there is no inherent competition for relative gains among states, particularly when the number of states is above two. There is a whole literature using game theory to prove the proposition. When there are no existential threats, security (and relative gains in power) does not dominate all other issues and states are free to cooperate on global issues. This is a core belief of Davos Man, not that Obama is a member of that species like Bill Clinton.

This brings us to constructivism. Constructivism, is less a theory than it is a methodology. The underlying assumption of constructivism is that states have psyches just like people and that identity is a social construct. In the foundation text of constructivism, Alexander Wendt’s “Collective Identity Formation and the International State,” Irving Goffman’s theories about reflexive identity formation are applied at the state level. Wendt reasons analogically that if a state has an identity, that identity can be molded by the behavior of other states towards it. If you are conciliatory to a state, it will have a positive self asteem and be conciliatory toward you. Constructivism underlies the administration’s policy choices.

Is the above correct?

Commercial pacifism by itself is not a solution to the problem of war. It is predicated on the assumption that states are rational economic actors and that every decision is motivated by a cost-benefit that can be measured in currency, not in power. Additionally, today’s wars are actually a new kind of war. Previous wars between states were motivated to power either defensively to prevent a rival from acquiring too much power and threatening a change in the status quo, or to acquire sources of power such as arable land, population, industrial plants, sea ports, etc. The “new wars” as Mary Kaldor calls them in her book New and Old Wars are motivated by identity. Ethnicity and/or religion becomes the motivator for conflict rather than power. It accurately describes the current conflicts across Africa, the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the India-Pakistan conflict as well as several conflicts in the former Soviet Union.

NLI is an extremely useful theoretical construct, but it does not really explain what happens when existential threats assert themselves and it doesn’t give useful policy prescription for how status quo powers should handle revisionist powers. Some point to the success of NATO, but that is a very unique historical circumstance. You had a bipolar international order, not a multipolar international order. NATO has begun showing its weakness recently, due to the change in relative power and policy preferences of states in Eurasia.

Constructivism is just plain bunk. It uses manifestly discredited psychological models of the individual in society (for example, there is an underlying assumption that the human psyche is a tabula rasa) to analogically explain state behavior and preferences. It is old wine in a new bottle, which is mainly an attempt to resurrect the progressive assumption that war would be abolished if leaders and/or populaces were just better psychologically adjusted and states felt safe in their international relations. There are too many pregnant ifs to accept policy prescriptions.

Therefore, the return of geopolitics with a vengance in the last year has really challenged this administration, because it doesn’t have the intellectual tools to deal with the new (old) world order. China and Russia, two revisionist powers, one on the rise and one on the decline, are exploiting and disrupting an order constructed at great cost in the immediate years after World War II. It is time for the Obama policy team to brush up on Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Hobbes.

Applaud the administrations moves regarding Cuba, but lament the decisions in the Middle East, Asia, and Eastern Europe.