Obama and the Ghost of Lyndon Johnson

Obama and the Ghost of Lyndon Johnson

08/14/14

Peter Harris

The Presidency, History, Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics, United States

"Like LBJ then, Obama will do all he can to avoid his foreign-policy problems becoming disasters for his presidency—even if this means perpetuating them as disasters for other people, now and in the future."

President Obama’s foreign policy is under fire—again. As the security situation in Iraq continues to worsen and the humanitarian crisis there mounts, some critics accuse the president of doing “too little, too late” to staunch the loss of civilian lives, while others chastise him for getting dragged into yet another unwanted (ill-advised, they say) military engagement. Even Hillary Clinton, Obama’s own first-term secretary of state, has lambasted the White House for lacking “organizing principles” when it comes to foreign policy.

The point that Clinton’s charge addresses, that there has been no coherent plan to govern how the administration has deployed U.S. military and diplomatic power over the past six years, has been one of the most vexing aspects of the Obama presidency. Is there an Obama Doctrine? If so, what is it? If not, why not? Is Obama a realist, a liberal internationalist or something altogether different?

In truth, Obama has not made himself beholden to any single set of codified foreign policy principles. There is no Obama Doctrine. But nor is the president purely reactive as others would have it, lurching from crisis to crisis without any sense of what he wants to achieve from his foreign policy. What too many people miss, however, is that foreign policy is not merely an instrument of solving international problems. Rather, it is also deployed with reference to domestic political goals firmly in mind. In this sense, the official language of not doing “stupid stuff” is probably quite an accurate description of the decision-making code that operates within the White House.

Read full articlehttp://nationalinterest.org/feature/obama-the-ghost-lyndon-johnson-11077