Abstract
All foreign policy is part of one or several traditions, and the United States is the country where references to these traditions most abound. US diplomatic history is full of references to these traditions, which often become doctrines: Monroe’s Doctrine with its Polk, Ohney, and Roosevelt corollaries, Manifest Destiny, the Open Door Policy, President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, Acheson’s doctrine, Nixon’s doctrine, Reagan’s doctrine, and Clinton’s doctrine.1 Every president claims, or is identified with a foreign-policy doctrine. Barack Obama is no exception. As described below, however, he challenged attempts to define his policy with regard to the Arab Spring. This is the crux of the problem. The press and academic circles often use the term “doctrine” to mean guidelines, which can be more or less strict. What is sometimes pompously called the Clinton doctrine, based on the idea of “democratic enlargement,” was in fact but a bureaucratic exercise to theorize US foreign policy after the end of the Cold War, even though the term doctrine is probably not the most appropriate to describe a fundamentally pragmatic, post—Cold War policy.2 These doctrines often serve to give formal coherence to tentative policies, but also to rationalize policies and constraints. The Nixon doctrine was nothing more than a means to prepare the United States for a withdrawal from Vietnam by emphasizing that it was time for the Vietnamese to take responsibility for their security.
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Notes
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Cited in Edward Howland Tatum Jr., The United States and Europe, 1815–1823, A Study in the Background of the Monroe Doctrine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1934), 244–245.
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© 2012 Zaki Laïdi
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Laïdi, Z. (2012). No More Monsters to Destroy?. In: Limited Achievements. The Sciences Po Series in International Relations and Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137020871_3
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