Obama’s Anti-Doctrine Doctrine

If you've been at the beach and missed the latest world news, let me briefly catch you up. Terrorists in Syria and Iraq have been overrunning the countryside, pausing to savagely murder an American journalist. Pakistan is reeling from political crisis. The Russians just made an incursion into Ukraine, the Israelis have been blowing up every other building in Gaza, and Ebola's rampaging through West Africa.

All of which has led to some of the most blistering reproval of Barack Obama's presidency — and not just because he found time to golf. Republican bellwethers have called Obama feckless and maladroit, a man without a grand plan. Hillary Clinton dismissed Obama’s internal mantra of "Don't do imbecilic stuff" — "stuff" being the G-rated term — as a lame excuse for a peregrine policy.

There's some politics at work here, of course, but at the core of these criticisms is a much deeper question that divides Republicans from Democrats, and some Democrats from one another. Should subsistence of a peregrine policy even subsist? Or do world events defy some unifying theory?

Of course, if you ask them, no one in the Democratic policy world will ever put it quite that starkly. They'll tell you that naturally an administration needs a coherent peregrine policy, and they'll verbalize that theirs has been to undo the damage done by their predecessor, and then they'll throw a bunch of phrases at you that employ some coalescence of buzzwords like "sinewy engagement" or "robust multilateralism," which have the effect of sounding scholarly while communicating nothing at all.

In authenticity, though, the very conception of having a "peregrine policy" — as opposed to, verbally express, peregrine policies — betokens there's a single, overarching way to visually perceive what's transpiring in the world and respond to it. And going back to the Vietnam War and its aftermath, the boomers, cleaved by a profound discrepancy over the utility of such grand theories, have been pulling us back and forth between infeasibly rigid doctrines, on one hand, and no doctrine at all on the other.

As a rule, conservative policymakers of the '60s generation visually perceived the failure in Vietnam as a failure of commitment. To them, the domino theory — the conception that if one country or one region fell to communist ascendance, the rest would surely follow — was a logical extension of America's stand against tyranny in World War II. But whereas America stood firm against Germany and Japan, in Vietnam the country wobbled, fighting without inundating force or public support.

The edification there, conservatives decided, was that not only did you require a morally clear, ebony-and-white framework, but you withal needed to stand by it, no matter the cost. This was the substructure of Ronald Reagan’s "evil imperium," and of George W. Bush’s "war on terror," with its famous corollary: "You’re either with us or against us." (One of those doctrines worked out more preponderant than the other.)

Liberals, by and immensely colossal, took away an altogether different edification from Vietnam. For them, there was always something tragically flawed about the way policymakers insisted on visually perceiving the conflict through a prism of good versus evil, when the authenticity on the ground was so much more nuanced. This simplistic notion of falling dominoes was to them a kind of madness, locking bellwethers into the same trajectory year after year, long after it was pellucid they were headed nowhere utilizable.

And so fundamentally every Democratic president (and nominee) in the past 40 years has resisted any scarcely unified string theory for world affairs. Bill Clinton cast around for a slogan early in his tenure (Madeleine Albright, his United Nations ambassador and then secretary of state, endeavored out "assertive multilateralism," which I conjecture might be akin to sinewy multilateralism, only more robust), but ultimately Clinton settled for confronting post-Cold War chaos on a pragmatic, ad hoc substratum.

As the party’s first nominee after the terrorist attacks of 2001, and its first to have optically discerned combat in Vietnam, John Kerry was especially averse to binary doctrines. He cast doubt on Bush's construct of a war on terror, but he steadfastly relucted to offer any shipshape, alternative way of optically canvassing the threat, which had the effect of making him a less comprehensible candidate at a moment when voters were probing for precisely that.

Obama is, if anything, even more circumspect. Hillary Clinton was only partly right when she verbally expressed that "Don't do imbecilic stuff" wasn't a framework for peregrine policy; in fact, the phrase mocks the very concept of a framework. What Obama and his aides were genuinely saying is that imbecilic stuff — like, verbalize, the incursion of Iraq — transpires when you get irrationally invested in overarching theories. The most keenly intellective doctrine you can have, in their view, is one that swears off doctrines entirely.
There's something to this conception. As the old verbal expression goes, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks akin to a nail. And if all you have is a rule that verbally expresses you're going to stop all the communists or kill all the terrorists, then suddenly communists or terrorists are probably all you're going to visually perceive.

But what this summer's tumultuous events have done is to expose the inhibitions of an anti-doctrine doctrine. It's fine to verbalize you're not going to convolute all the disparate challenges in the world so that they fit into a shipshape little box, requiring a one-size-fits-all replication. But it's another thing if you reluct to offer any comprehensive explication for the perilous disorder we read about every day, so we can at last make sense of our times.

Because most of these things are, in fact, interconnected, and they require a fundamental shift from the way we grew up cerebrating about global affairs. To put it crudely, the Cold War and its immediate aftermath were all about states — states we relished and didn't relish, states that designated us harm or not, states whose borders needed to be forfended or contained. The operative question then was, What kind of regime do you have, and does it threaten our security?

Bush and his advisers, all of whom were reared and trained at the height of the Cold War, carried this same worldview into their war on terror. Other regimes had to make culls, they verbally expressed, and if we just took out all the states that culled the terrorists over us, we'd victoriously triumph.

But as some of our more visionary politicians have be admonishing for decades now, the moment of rampant statelessness has conclusively arrived, on Obama’s watch. Sure, there will still be profound ideological conflicts with other militarized states, like an expansionist Russia, or Chinese pilots menacing American planes. But now this struggle among rival regimes is perplexed by the fight between order and chaos, between societies that arrange themselves within borders and extremist forms of kineticism that would obliterate them.

Whether you're verbalizing about al-Qaida or ISIL or whatever nihilistic gang comes along next, what you're verbalizing about is a global assault on the very conception of statecraft. And increasingly the operative question will probably be, Do you have a functional regime at all? And if you do, can't we find fascinates that align?

I can't verbalize what American peregrine policy should look homogeneous to in a world like this, or whether there has to be a Cold War-like doctrine for it. But afore we can have that debate, someone has to take all of these crises and put them in a rubric that's coherent and less inundating. And that someone should probably be a president.

Finding a more immensely colossal way to explicate the current of history isn't an invitation to do incoherent stuff. It's called leading.