By Jack Detsch
The White House’s new National Security Strategy, released on Friday, calls for the creation of a new international order based on trade and security.
On the heels of releasing a new national security strategy and budgets for the Departments of State and Defense last week, U.S. President Barack Obama spoke withVox’s Matt Yglesias in an interview released Monday about all things foreign policy.
Obama has often been maligned for a perceived lack of a clear international agenda. Neither the strategy nor the fresh budgets for diplomacy and defense have improved the President’s standing with his detractors. “I doubt ISIL, the Iranian mullahs, or Vladimir Putin will be intimidated by President Obama’s strategy of ‘Strategic Patience,’” Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, tweeted after the strategy surfaced, referencing an early passage. But on a whole, the documents may offer something else: the contours of a long-awaited “Obama Doctrine.”
It’s not a doctrine that fits into a single sentence. True to his time in the academy, the President rarely speaks in absolutes about America’s business abroad. “I think it’s realistic for us to want to use diplomacy for setting up a rules-based system wherever we can, understanding that it’s not always going to work,” Obama told Yglesias, pausing to add a caveat. “If we have arms treaties in place, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have a stray like North Korea that may try to do it’s own thing. But you’ve reduced the number of problems that you have and the security and defensive challenges that you face if you can create those norms.”
Read the full story at The Diplomat