The Obama Doctrine

By Jon Meacham

Foreign policy tends to be about realism rather than philosophy or still less poetry, and there was much realism in President Obama’s speech at West Point. But I think historians in search of the president’s vision not only of America’s role in the world but of America itself—at home and abroad—will long look to the final few paragraphs of Tuesday night’s address.

It began, as so many things in contemporary American life, with FDR. “Since the days of Franklin Roosevelt, and the service and sacrifice of our grandparents”—the president apparently ad-libbed “and our great-grandparents”—“our country has borne a special burden in global affairs. We have spilled American blood in many countries on multiple continents … We have not always been thanked for these efforts, and we have at times made mistakes. But more than any other nation, the United States of America has underwritten global security for over six decades.”

Here, then, is Obama’s vision of the ancient notion of America as a city upon a hill—the phrase from Jesus evoked by John Winthrop and given new life by Ronald Reagan. We are an exceptional nation, the president was saying, but ours is an exceptionalism that imposes as many (if not more) burdens as it does blessings. It is an exceptionalism of obligation—to whom much is given, much is expected.

“For unlike the great powers of old, we have not sought world domination,” Obama said. “Our union was founded in resistance to oppression. We do not seek to occupy other nations. We will not claim another nation’s resources or target other peoples because their faith or ethnicity is different from ours.”

This section of the speech could be profitably read and pondered by both left and right. It offers a justification, rooted in our history and values, for the projection of our power. And it reminds those who need no convincing of the virtues of hawkishness that we are a special kind of empire—one, to borrow a phrase of Jefferson’s, of liberty, not of conquest.

We may have heard the opening notes of an Obama doctrine there in the Eisenhower Auditorium: “We will go forward with the confidence that right makes might.” We will hear these words again. And we should.

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