Bit o' transcript from my appearance on Hewitt Monday/quote in Politico
Friday, March 25, 2011 at 12:01AM 
Found on a conservative blog:
“Well, you know, at first I was highly critical of kind of the foot dragging from the White House, but over time I think the negotiating ploy here is proving to be fairly… I mean I would say it’s brilliant. I mean I was surprised when the line was 'we won’t do anything unless the U.N. Security Council does something,' and NATO, and then NATO pointed to the Arab League and the African Union… you know, at that point you thought, 'wow, this is the lowest common denominator for strategic decision making – we’re never going to get anything on this basis.'
“But the foot dragging, I think, by Obama was purposeful. I think he really wanted an up-front approval by every relevant stakeholder to elicit and reveal a global demand for us to come in there and do what we can only… only we can do. And I think in that way he kind of launders our motives effectively through others, and the way that it should be when it is, in reality, a global demand that we come in and do something for the system that everybody wants done.
“So I’m… if there’s an Obama Doctrine I think that’s it. I think it’s sort of the polar opposite of the 'I’m going to do what I’m going to do' Bush model. And I think it’s more 'I’m not going to do anything unless I get up front approval and my responsibilities are limited and I’m going to incrementally negotiate every step along the way to make sure that I never get ahead of the global community on this one.'
“And to the extent that he can pull it off, I mean, that would be a heck of a model, if he can really do it, especially if we don’t have a big, you know, kind of, America hogs up the reconstruction process post-Gaddafi, God willing. That would be just a tremendous model, and in a way a triangulation between the Clintonian and of naïve expectations of handing-off to the U.N. and the Bush, kind of, you know too primacy oriented. It would be a nice balancing of those two and maybe the [inaudible] we’ve been looking for.”
Glenn Thrush piece in Politico called "In search of the Obama Doctrine."
Yet this is no blanket doctrine: Neither Obama nor anyone else in his administration has so much as whispered about a military response to the brutal crackdowns that are also taking place in Bahrain, Yemen, Syria and Iran.
“We’re going to go after dictators who are vulnerable, not countries with nuclear weapons or Iran with a population of 70 million,” says Thomas P.M. Barnett, a former Defense Department official who is now an analyst with WikiStrat, an international consulting firm.
“But,” pointing to Libya, “a country with 5, 6, 7 million people, all clustered on the coast in a few cities? Sure. Why not?”
Reader Comments (5)
My hope is that you have it pegged to a tee. That said. It would seem that if it were a “doctrine” it would have been approached in a direct way and with a much greater since of urgency. The way it came off was very confusing, amateurish at the best, and dangerous at the worst. The slow process cost the rebels’ momentum, a large area of land and number of cities.
Reading between the lines it appears that you are an advocate of global-governance. Could that be so?
If this is an intentional ploy to firmly establish the new "1st Half - Leviathan ", "2nd Half - Sys Admin" way of doing things, I will offer up significant credit - which will be deserved. If however, there is no 2nd Half plan, and I cant really see one yet, its a failure. It's only a doctrine if it's repeatable. What would that tell you about where President Obama is going? Frankly, I dont know. Being unpredictable to your enemies is sometimes good (sometimes not), but to your voters - never good.
Perhaps I'm over-simplifying, but how do you get a Bush doctrine of doing what he wants, after all the UN and Congressional prep he went through, and then differentiate Obama's actions as the opposite with as little of that work as he did?
I think to call the painful machinations of the past couple weeks in regards to Libya a 'doctrine' of any kind a pretty wide stretch of the imagination.
Seth,
There is isn't all that much difference in the outcome on Iraq, but the style matters plenty. Bush pushed very hard on everything and when we went in, everybody felt like it was America getting its way by twisting arms. And when we went in, we did our usual thing and insisted on running everything. And pretty soon, it was our burden to bear overwhelming.
Bush could have waited another six months and probably would have gotten the true UN buy-in, but as I remember the situation then working in OSD, the mindset of the administration was very firm. If they could get sort of a UN okay, that would be enough for the timetable to go as planned. As I written many times, if they do not screw up the occupation, then nobody cares and it's a huge success, but that too was screwed in the same, I don't-give-a-f@#k-what-the-world-thinks way, and when you do it like that, you get a big F grade from the planet on the whole deal.
That wasn't the model Clinton set up on the Balkans, where we did the Leviathan, and then supplied only a small fraction of the follow-on force. In Iraq, we were the 90 and not the 10 percent.
And most of that came down to the perception everybody had of America shoving this through and declaring it a mandate when few in the UN felt the same way.
If you read my Esquire post, it doesn't say the outcomes differ. It says the negotiating tactics differ.
I walk up to you and menace you into giving me your cigarette. When I walk away with it, you feel a whole lot different about what just happened than if I walk up, chat you up pleasantly and then ask if I can bum one.
Outcome is the same, but tactics and impression differ vastly. Bush came off like a bully on diplomacy. We signaled that we were going no matter what and we sort of got an okay from the UN, although many members thought we didn't.
That's a huge difference from how Obama ran this.
As usual, whenever I go counter-intuitive in a piece like this, it pisses some people off. They want you to always criticize or always praise somebody. Same thing happens whenever I switch gears on Bush, which I do all the time.
But again, diplomacy is all about getting your way but not in a way that leaves people angry. Obama pulled this off well--so far. His tactics may not work or be appropriate all the way through, especially if things turn sour. But nobody views this as unilateralist or America bullying people, and most of the world read it that way with Bush-Chency--from stem to very nearly stern. And that was their shtick, the neocon running-the-world thing, and it didn't run so well under them, so the country reached for a polar opposite and now we try this for a while.
It's the genius of the system that we get to change our minds- and our tactics. In this age, that's anathema to a lot of people who see things very black-and-white.
That's fine. When I discover something and write it up, I don't worry about that.