Kill List, drones, cyber warfare, unmanned naval vehicles. In the coming months, you’ll be hearing plenty about these new means of war and destruction that have come to define the Obama Doctrine. Here's a glossary to help you through:
In Obama’s first bid for the presidency, he vowed to reverse many of the defining Bush-era foreign policies: clandestine CIA bases and prisons, coercive interrogation techniques, torture, indefinite detention without trial or accusation, drone strikes and civilian deaths. But for the most part, Obama’s foreign policy has been a continuation of what we now call the Bush Doctrine.
In an interview with David Rothkopf of the Carnegie Institute, David Sanger, the author of Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, describes it well:
When Barack Obama came into office, there were many liberals and other supporters of the new president who were ready for the end of the Bush era that they gave little thought to what "hard power" techniques were likely to be necessary — and so they were surprised about the hard edge to much of the Obama approach to foreign policy.
At the same time, there were many conservatives who thought that he was naïve in his approach to "engagement." And they were surprised, too, about the new president's decision to double down on some the Bush-era initiatives.
This realist approach to foreign affairs shocked those who imagined Obama to be a humanitarian, idealistic president. Sanger goes on to describe the two defining features of the so-called Obama doctrine: first, a direct threat to the US justifies the use of unilateral force and retaliation without regard to state sovereignty; by contrast, when the US does not have a direct interest (like when the US takes a stance on supporting a global good) Obama sidelines US military efforts — covert and overt — opting to let other countries take the lead.
| Related: Drones And The Law: A PoliticOlogy Analysis |
According to Nick Turse of The Nation, the Obama Doctrine has six main parts: highly circumscribed drone assassination, limited cross-border commando raids, full-scale robotic air war, cross-border helicopter attacks, CIA-funded kill teams, and elite special operations ground missions.
Of those, the Obama Doctrine has primarily been defined by drone strikes and kill-lists, which are cheaper than boots-on-the-ground operations and put fewer American lives at risk. However, Malou Innocent of the Cato Institute argues that drone strikes, which kill way more civilians than militants, alienate "hearts and minds" and strengthen jihadist forces. "Even if tomorrow Osama bin Laden were killed by a UAV," Malou wrote in 2009, "the jihadist insurgency would not melt away. The ability to keep militant groups off balance must be weighed against the cost of facilitating the rise of more insurgents."
The benefits are clear: low cost, covert operations that put few American lives at risk. But drone attacks, which frequently violate state sovereignty, kill way more civilians than militants leading to incensed factions around the world, especially in the east Africa and the tribal areas of the middle-east. You have to wonder how effective a counterterrorist program is when it's actively creating more terrorists.
That said, here’s a limerick:
Uncle Sam’s gotta drone
The liberal press they moan.
And when he hits
They have their fits
And hit their kids at home
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