Is there an Obama doctrine?

By my calculation Obama’s 100 days will occur next Wednesday. In the run up a number of publications are analysing his policies. In today’s Independent Rupert Cornwell (arguably one of the most informed sources on US politics writing for a UK source) takes a lokk at his foreign policy. Lots of useful content for students and teachers covering presidents and foreign policy for the summer.

The article starts with an overview of what has changed in the new administration and has to be said that the list is impressive—a reminder that the new president has expended an enormous amount of energy on America’s relations with the world at a time when he is also attempting to deal with a domestic crisis. The danger is of course that the long term impact of his policy changes may not turn out as he would like.

‘Some already talk of an ‘Obama Doctrine’. Others, sensing that everything may end in tears, compare him to Mikhail Gorbachev, who set out to change the image of Communism and ended up by destroying Communism itself. One thing however is incontestable. Barack Obama has set a new imprint on his country’s foreign policy – and far more quickly than the last Soviet leader ever did.

Mr Gorbachev had been in power for 18 months before the “new thinking” and “perestroika” got under way in earnest in 1986. By contrast, Mr Obama still has a week left of his first 100 days in office, by which a new American president is judged, and his approach is visible everywhere.

The changes have been breathtaking in their speed and scope. He has signalled readiness to talk to those two longstanding foes of the US, Iran and Cuba. He has announced a “reset” of relations with Russia, launching a new round of nuclear arms negotiations and even offering to quietly drop plans to install missile defence units in central Europe, a plan Moscow detests, in return for Russian help in getting Iran to halt its uranium enrichment programme.

He has held a civil conversation with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, arch “Yanqui”-baiter and troublemaker of Latin America. He has admitted to the Europeans that, yes, a lack of regulation of US financial markets was largely responsible for the global credit crisis.

He has shut down the CIA’s ghost camps and ordered the publication in their virtual entirety of memos that set out in minute detail the “enhanced interrogation techniques” – i.e. torture – authorised by the previous administration of George Bush.

He has pledged a new drive for peace in the Middle East, that by all indications would involve a two-state solution for the Israel/Palestine conflict, and a deal between Israel and Syria that would return to the latter the Golan Heights. He has taken action on greenhouse gases and climate change that would have been unthinkable under Mr Bush. The world is still rubbing its eyes.

Indeed, in terms of style there is already an Obama Doctrine: of coming across as being as different from his predecessor as can be imagined.

“I have come to listen,” the 44th President said on his first trip to Europe last month, a trip that included both G20 and Nato summits, forums in which the US would have previously sought to lay down the law. Listening was never a quality attributed to Mr Bush.’

This week’s Spectator also contains a special pullout analysing Obama’s 100 days. See the content online here.