NYT: Obama's foreign policy - "the right’s rejection of multilateralism

[pampango]

and the left’s rejection of power projection are making it harder and harder to build support for a grand strategy based on liberal internationalist principles.”...In the long view, though, American exceptionalism can be isolationist as well as internationalist.

'Obama also emphasized re-engagement with international institutions. (Does anyone else remember him saying, as a candidate, that if elected he would go to the United Nations and declare, “We’re back”?)...The idea is to preserve or enhance power by sharing it. But the word “share” can have so many meanings, as every child knows, from the assertion of unrivaled power (“I shall allow you to share my Lincoln Logs, but only at a time and place of my choosing”) to dejected capitulation. Obaman multilateralism, for this reason, must continually inoculate itself against the charge of “declinism.”'

With respect to Libya "Obama said, “To brush aside America’s responsibility as a leader and — more profoundly — our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances would have been a betrayal of who we are.” I was struck by that sentence, too, and Ben Rhodes, who wrote the speech, told me at the time that this was a point Obama had insisted on at the start, later himself writing in the next two sentences: “Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different.” The context was a looming attack on Benghazi by Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces, an attack reasonably expected to lead to a massacre."

The paradox of Libya was that this was Obama’s first war but it was one he explicitly did not want to own, and the opportunities it offered for a statement of strategic principle — on preventing genocide, on international law, on the internationalist doctrine of “responsibility to protect” — were opportunities he deliberately did not seize. I spoke to many current and former administration officials as the war was just getting under way, and whenever I specifically asked whether the president would have intervened without participation by the Arab League, the answer was either no or probably not.

If a sufficient quantity and quality of international support had not been forthcoming, the U.S. would have let the likely massacre happen, as the country has let other massacres happen in the past. More than this, quite a few people emphasized that it was precisely Libya’s lack of strategic importance — it is small and far away, and most of its oil goes to Europe and Asia — that made it possible for the administration to go along with the war plan.

http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/13/the-obama-doctrine-revisited-again/