Since when does Obama need an eponymous doctrine?

I watched Obama’s Libya address on CNN yesterday, and I was met by a mix good and bad coverage immediately afterward. I thought Anderson Cooper hit the nail on the head by focusing on Obama’s framing of “the national interest,” a debate which as I’ve argued is usually framed in outdated terms. Cooper paid attention to Obama’s articulately argued realpolitik reasoning behind intervention:

It was interesting, the president not just trying to explain the mission in terms of sense of moral responsibility to act, to stop the potential slaughter of civilians in the seconds largest city in Libya, in Benghazi, but also along strategic interests, the grounds of national interest — strategic interest, by saying to not have acted would have sent a message to other repressive leaders in the region perhaps that they can respond to democratic uprisings in their countries through greater acts of violence, and also explaining the flood of refugees would have upset the fragile movements in Egypt, as well as in Tunisia.

I was especially impressed with Obama’s phrasing in one section:

Gaddafi declared that he would show “no mercy” to his own people. He compared them to rats, and threatened to go door to door to inflict punishment. In the past, we had seen him hang civilians in the streets, and kill over a thousand people in a single day. Now, we saw regime forces on the outskirts of the city. We knew that if we waited one more day, Benghazi – a city nearly the size of Charlotte – could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.

It was not in our national interest to let that happen.

To me, this was the most important refutation of the arguments critical of Obama from the non-interventionist side. Call it hypocrisy or cognitive dissonance or whatever, but those who criticize American overreach internationally also often expect the U.S. to uphold human rights when no one else can.

I was less impressed by the normally astute Wolf Blitzer’s analysis. Blitzer — and subsequently many others — started talking about the speech containing an “Obama doctrine.” I’m not convinced of this, nor am I convinced Obama wants a foreign policy doctrine, consciously or subconsciously.

One journalist covering Obama’s rise to stardom noted,

As Obama famously declared in 2002, he did not oppose all wars, but he did oppose a “dumb war.” Isolationism must not be the reaction to a dumb president and a dumb war.

There is no Obama Doctrine because Obama is not a doctrinaire kind of leader who operates according to fixed policies. Instead, Obama believes in a set of principle (democracy, security, liberty) for the world and tries to come up with practical measures for incrementally increasing US security and global freedom. He rejects isolationism and he tries to steer clear of unilateralism.

To the extent that Obama’s approach to foreign policy can be developed into an explainable set of policies, it’s this: He rules out the worst policy options and considers the remainders, rather than trying to predetermine the best outcome and stick to it (like George W. Bush). He is guided by a set of principles (e.g., homeland security, “soft power,” economic prosperity, international security) that — depending on the issue at hand — can work in tandem or against each other. When enough of these competing principles align toward one policy action, the president has a clear choice of action. When they are in conflict, he must make a careful decision, knowing there will be opportunity costs.

What this leaves us is not a foreign policy doctrine, but a method of approaching problems. This deliberate and analytical strategy speaks to Obama’s legal and academic background. It has its ups and its downs — slow-moving problems are better suited to this type of approach — but it’s not a doctrine in any real sense. As if he needed one.