Abandoning solo run heroics of predecessors, Obama stresses responsibility not power, writes LARA MARLOWE
PRESIDENT BARACK Obama’s speech on Libya on Monday evening ushered in a new era in US foreign policy, which pundits immediately labelled the Obama doctrine, a subtle dosage of pragmatism, realism, morality and American exceptionalism.
“America cannot use our military wherever repression occurs,” Obama explained. “And given the costs and risks of intervention, we must always measure our interests against the need for action. But that cannot be an argument for never acting on behalf of what’s right.”
Repeating almost verbatim from his 2006 best-seller The Audacity of Hope, Obama said he would “never hesitate to use our military swiftly, decisively, and unilaterally when necessary to defend our people, our homeland, our allies and our core interests”. But contrary to George W Bush, who saw the world in terms of good and evil, black and white, those who are either for us or against us, Obama grapples with oceans of grey amid foreign leaders who are amenable to reason.
Obama confirmed defence secretary Robert Gates’s oft-expressed view that Libya “is not a vital US interest”, referring to “times . . . when our safety is not directly threatened, but our interests and our values are”.
Problems like Libya “may not be America’s problems alone, but they are important to us”, Obama said. “They’re problems worth solving.” Under the Obama doctrine, the US has shifted from the world’s policeman to its police chief, catalyst and co-ordinator.
“Our task is . . . to mobilise the international community for collective action,” he said.
“American leadership is not simply a matter of going it alone and bearing all of the burden ourselves. Real leadership creates the conditions and coalitions for others to step up as well; to work with allies and partners so that they bear their share of the burden and pay their share of the costs . . .”
On all the big issues of his presidency, Obama has proven too conservative for Democratic liberals, and too liberal for die-hard conservatives. Yet opinion polls consistently show that Americans want centrist, consensus-seeking politicians. Three weeks before he is expected to launch his re-election campaign, he has cautiously embraced the middle ground on Libya.
In his speech, he positioned himself between his two immediate predecessors. “When people were being brutalised in Bosnia in the 1990s”, he said, alluding to Bill Clinton, “it took the international community more than a year to intervene with air power to protect civilians. It took us 31 days . . . I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.” It “would be a mistake” to extend the military mission in Libya to regime change, Obama said, referring to George W Bush.
“To be blunt, we went down that road in Iraq . . . Regime change there took eight years, thousands of American and Iraqi lives, and nearly a trillion dollars. That is not something we can afford to repeat in Libya.”
He gave practical and moral arguments for his decision to intervene in Libya. Faced with the likelihood of “violence on a horrific scale” if Libyan forces continued their march on Benghazi, “we had a unique ability to stop that violence: an international mandate for action, a broad coalition prepared to join us, the support of Arab countries, and a plea for help from the Libyan people themselves.”
To his careful cost/benefit analysis, the president added a moral imperative: “To brush aside America’s responsibility as a leader . . . would have been a betrayal of who we are.
“Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different.”
There have been calls for Obama to seize this moment of transformation in the Middle East and make it his own, perhaps by travelling there and delivering a “Cairo II” address. If he succeeded, he could be to the democratisation of the Arab world what Ronald Reagan was to the break-up of the Soviet Union.
But under the Obama doctrine, the US will share credit or blame for whatever happens in Libya and the region, as surely as it spreads the costs and risks.
“The US will not be able to dictate the pace and scope of this change,” he said. “But we can make a difference.”