http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-there-is-no-obama-doctrine/

Why There Is No Obama Doctrine

The Obama Doctrine: American Grand Strategy Today, Colin Dueck, Oxford University Press, 336 pages

By Leon Hadar • November 19, 2015

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It has become a media ritual in Washington. A few months after a president takes office, pundits start debating whether the new White House occupant has a foreign-policy “doctrine.”
This preoccupation is another example of either the increasing sophistication of American journalists or of the intellectual pretensions of our pundits—not unlike their use of the term “narrative,” once employed mainly by literary scholars, or their frequent references to a professional economist’s favorite, “moral hazard.”
What pundits really have in mind when they ask whether this or that president has a foreign-policy doctrine is whether he has, well, a foreign policy. But it’s not clear what political scientist Colin Dueck means when he discusses the foreign-policy doctrine of President Obama: he seems to be using the terms “doctrine” and “grand strategy” interchangeably, as in the title of this book, The Obama Doctrine: American Grand Strategy Today. This confusion is evident from the first sentence, where Dueck suggests that every modern American president “has a foreign policy doctrine” and then goes on to critique the grand strategy of President Obama. So what is it: doctrine or grand strategy?
We’re not engaged in semantic nitpicking here, but recalling some basic stuff we studied—and in the case of Dueck and yours truly, have taught—in Foreign Policy 101.http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-there-is-no-obama-doctrine/