Dangerous Doctrine by Kaufman Robert G.;
Author:Kaufman, Robert G.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2016-03-18T16:00:00+00:00
Conclusion
This book makes the case that the Obama administration’s grand strategy reflects a clear, coherent, consistent doctrine. What this writer calls the Obama Doctrine is a synthesis of various elements of classical realism, neorealism, and liberal multilateralism; it appropriates the most problematic features of these paradigms without their countervailing virtues. Like neorealism, the Obama Doctrine underplays the importance of ideology and regime type in determining friends, foes, threats, and opportunities. This conceptual error accounts largely for the administration’s serial miscalculations dealing with Putin’s authoritarian Russia, an authoritarian, revisionist China, and radical Islamist regimes and entities in the Middle East, such as a revolutionary Shiite Iranian regime, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah, and ISIS. It accounts likewise for the administration’s propensity imprudently to subordinate the concerns of liberal democratic allies such as the Eastern European members of NATO, Japan, Colombia, and Israel in favor of engagement with authoritarian rivals or competitors of the United States. Like liberal multilateralism, the Obama Doctrine overrates the efficacy of international institutions as arbiters of legitimacy, while unduly discounting the imperatives of traditional geopolitics and benefits of American military preeminence the administration’s improvident defense policies have dangerously undermined. The president’s aversion to risk often magnifies dangers because he focuses almost exclusively on the cost of action, oblivious to the often greater cost of inaction.
The Obama Doctrine also reflects an inordinately pessimistic projection of America’s relative decline that neither the rise of other powers nor America’s prospects make desirable or inevitable. Historically, the free market, favorable demographics, an abundance of untapped energy, limited government, and the creativity of the American people have served as the wellspring for American political and economic renewal that has repeatedly proved the pessimists wrong. Today the United States and its democratic allies possess the resources to maintain a preponderance of power in the world’s most important geopolitical regions—even in East Asia, where an authoritarian China, still growing prodigiously, economically and militarily, confronts the United States with its toughest long-term challenge for the twenty-first century. Together, the United States, Japan, India, and South Korea can afford, by a wide margin, to craft and sustain a muscular deterrent to an authoritarian China’s potentially hegemonic ambitions. Such deterrence is achievable especially if China’s growth slows through a combination of its entering a more mature stage of development, the stifling effect of the Communist Party’s determination to maintain absolute power, and the inherent unsustainability of dynamism in the long run of a closed society. Denying China an outlet for its expansionism militarily, while engaging Beijing economically, may eventually catalyze the domestic reforms that will liberalize the regime, tame its ambitions, and make it a more benign neighbor in Asia. Thwarting rather than enabling Russian expansionism with misguided resets based on false assumptions would reassure America’s European allies while increasing pressure on an authoritarian Russia to reform benignly or collapse ignominiously. Defeating rather than propitiating radical Islam constitutes a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for tranquilizing the toxic political culture of the Islamic Middle East—the root cause of the most pernicious dangers emanating from that strife-ridden region.
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