The Obama Corollary

Throughout American history, presidents have made major pronouncements or taken some action that make them stand out or be remembered for having set direction.

Some pronouncements are derived from experience or clear analysis of existing situations and have long lasting impact and are considered so crucial to the setting of policy that they are nicknamed “doctrine”.

Those that are perceived to be derived from “doctrines” are occasionally labelled “corollary”.

Corollaries are improvements to a given doctrine that are issued by a future president in responding to prevailing conditions.

The latest of the “doctrines” appears to be the “Bush Doctrine” that is seemingly reinforced by what can be termed the “Obama Corollary.”

Not all important pronouncements that influence policy are termed “doctrine” or “corollary”.

For instance, Washington’s “Farewell Address” which he gave on his way out of office after two terms was a reflection, and a warning, on the hazards facing a young country.

Noting the tendency for political factions to obstruct national focus, he advised against development of what would become political parties, the Americans ignored him.

He also noted the danger of his country being beholden to any foreign power and warned against trusting, or having permanent alliances with, any other country.

For roughly 150 years, the Americans tried to follow this injunction.

There was Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg Address in the midst of the civil war, which gave the North a moral high ground.

Lincoln redefined the objective of that war from simply being preservation of a union to one of promoting the cause of freedom so that a government of the people by the people and for the people that was conceived in liberty would not perish from the face of the earth.

Although the union was maintained, it took a long time before any of the liberties could be enjoyed by many of the people who had been slaves.

This necessitated the civil rights movement led by Douglass, Du Bois, Randolph, and King.

Along the way, civil rights had to contend with Woodrow Wilson who rapidly acquired the presidency seemingly without having mastered nuances of American domestic politics.

He is remembered for promoting his “New Freedoms” that excluded blacks and Fourteen Points that undermined Bolshevism in Eastern Europe and persuaded Germans to stop fighting.

He was later accused of being idealistically unrealistic in dealing with men like Britain’s Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau of France.

Although the nuances undercut his diplomacy, he received the 1919 Peace Nobel and his Fourteen Points continue to influence debates on international politics.

There are those statements called “doctrine” which outline what the United States expects to do or negate what other countries should do.

The Monroe Doctrine told the Europeans to keep out of the Americas.

Even when trying to collect debts, Theodore Roosevelt insisted, they should stay out because the United States would collect debts for them.

That became the Roosevelt Corollary.

There then came the Truman Doctrine that, in the name of “freedom”, made the United States the financier of regimes that claimed to be anti-communist.

The Truman “doctrine”, however, boomeranged in Vietnam, Iran, Nicaragua, and led to policy re-evaluation which, Henry Kissinger wrote, rejected the essence of American foreign policy.

This meant the negation of the Truman Doctrine and search for alternative foreign policy tools.

The result was a Ronald Reagan-George Bush policy of sponsoring local entities as proxies to dismantle “friendly” regimes that had outlived usefulness.

The proxies became regular new instruments of foreign control.

The new “tools” are part of the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive strikes on non-compliant small countries.

They are also useful in a seeming “Obama Corollary” that empowers Americans to punish those that fail to embrace “Western” mandated “reforms”.

Statements from Washington, and repeated in Nairobi, show that Obama is similar to Bush in forcing countries to comply with American dictates.

It is the Obama Corollary.

Munene is Professor of History and International Relations, USIU Nairobi