A President's Legacy

Like most of his predecessors, President Obama surely keeps a keen eye turned toward his historical legacy. Nearly every modern president since Truman has become associated with a particular doctrine, an articulation of foreign policy attitudes and positions in relation to the international circumstances of the moment. No matter how future journalists and scholars define the Obama doctrine, it has become clear that the current events over Syria will change their analysis of it in an important way.

While the Obama Doctrine has no specific definition yet, it seemed clear up until the past month that it would involve the transition to a “light footprint,” a strategy that minimizes the public visibility of the mechanisms of American influence. Rather than the use of forces on the ground and intensive nation-building efforts, the Obama administration emphasized the use of covert operations, drone strikes, and cyber-warfare as the means to address perceived security threats.

Of course, the light footprint always appeared more of a public relations tactic rather than a significant strategic shift. The priorities of the Obama administration, to the dismay of progressives everywhere, were always more similar to his predecessor than they were different. What changed were the means of combat and the visibility of American force throughout the world. Still, these changes were effective enough to sustain the President’s reelection campaign.

Up until this month, it also seemed clear that the Obama doctrine would incorporate some sort of emphasis on international institutions and a rebuke of the unilateralism that defined the Bush administration. His campaign speeches in 2008 spoke of a need to engage the world and act through international institutions. His later speeches in Egypt and, recently, Germany have affirmed that principle, as did the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya.

To be clear, his first term never rebuked unilateralism out right. In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize, he implicitly defended the ability of the United States to use force under particular circumstances. In fact, the anticipation of multilateralism may have always been something of a liberal pipe dream. Multilateral engagement mostly came through rhetoric. In this way, it also appeared more as a public relations tactic than a significant shift in strategy. While the president has cautiously cultivated this global perception of multilateralism, he has continued to follow the general strategic framework established by his his hawkish predecessor.

The current crisis in Syria, however, threatens to undermine these policies. At the moment, it remains unclear whether the president will be able to maintain the semblance of a light footprint and of multilateral engagement.

In terms of the light footprint, it is true that President Obama has made it clear that he will not deploy soldiers to Syria. Instead, he envisions specific strikes as punitive measures against the Assad regime. Leaving the merits of that particular action aside, these strikes would still represent a shift away from the light footprint as Obama has articulated it.

The light footprint involves significant realpolitik calculations about the nature of particular threats in relation to America’s strategic interest. As Tufts professor Daniel Drezner noted back in June, these calculations would explain the rationale for President Obama’s actions over the past couple of years. The proposed strikes, particularly given their liberal internationalist justifications as a punitive measure against an international norm, represent a significant shift away from the previous strategic calculations about America’s strategic interest and the use of force.

In terms of multilateralism, the current crisis in Syria presents the first explicit instance in which the President might reject multilateral institutions outright by acting directly against the will of the United Nations Security Council and many sovereign states. While the administration’s rhetorical attempts to continue some form of engagement (it appeals to a norm rather than to an actor), the actual decision to use force would still present a reenactment of the unilateralism that defined the Bush administration.

If Congress provides him the authority to act, these strikes will still remove the veneer of international engagement that he has developed throughout his presidency. If Congress does not provide him the authority to act and he chooses to do so anyway, then he would have narrowed the definition of unilateralism from the actions of United States as a nation to those of the executive branch as an actor.

Both the light footprint and multilateral engagement are two ways in which President Obama has attempted to develop a coherent doctrine that allows the United States to continue the use of force in a particular manner while appearing more genial and beneficial to the world. He has cultivated this image strategically and cautiously. The current debate over Syria has produced a variety of strategic casualties by the administration; Obama’s foreign policy legacy may just be another one.

Raul P. Quintana ’14, a Crimson editorial writer, is a social studies concentrator in Leverett House.