Conor Friedersdorf alerted me to this remarkable post at the blog of the Heritage Foundation. Conn Carroll has posted the main arguments from a new paper from James Carafano and Kim Holmes on what they believe the Obama Doctrine is. The post provided me with some very satisfying laughs before I had to start lecturing this morning.

I understand that the people who work on the subject at the Heritage Foundation do not and never will share my critique of U.S. foreign policy, nor would they agree with me on most international issues. They have a profoundly mistaken understanding of what America’s role in the world should be, and I assume they would say the same about me. Even so, they can avoid making complete fools of themselves, can’t they? For example, Carafano and Holmes believe Obama’s foreign policy has a lot in common with that of Wilson, so it is significant that they have such a bizarre view of what was wrong with Wilson’s foreign policy. It partly helps to explain why they end up making no sense when they talk about current debates. They wrote:

After the war, Wilson sought to revive his “concert of nations” idea by establishing the League of Nations, the failed forerunner of the United Nations. He also chose to emphasize soft-power diplomatic tools; he wanted Congress, for example, to issue an official apology to Colombia for U.S. actions in Panama. Congress refused.

Wilson’s brand of foreign policy became synonymous with an American idealism which presumed that traditional exceptionalism was somehow parochial and not universal enough. Ironically, just as this posture failed to stem World War I, it also helped to foster the isolationism of the 1920s and 1930s that inadvertently eased the road into World War II.

Progressive policies like Wilson’s generally reject the grounding of foreign relations in the principles on which this nation was founded—the same principles that undergird American exceptionalism.

Woodrow Wilson was misguided because he didn’t resort to hard power often and soon enough? What a warped and mistaken way to attack a truly terrible President. Oh, and he couldn’t prevent WWI! I have contempt for the foreign policy of Woodrow Wilson, but this critique of Wilson is nonsensical. We are supposed to blame Wilson for failing to prevent WWI, which no American President had any chance of preventing, and we are supposed to find fault with him because his intervention in Europe prompted a backlash against future intervention in foreign wars. According to the Heritage writers, the problem wasn’t that he plunged America into a European war in which Americans had no business fighting and no interests at stake, but that in the process he stirred up opposition to sending Americans into other unnecessary foreign wars later on.

They seem not to understand that Wilsonian idealism was an aggressive, foolish application of the idea that American principles are universal, which means that Wilson made the mistake of treating them as guiding principles for the conduct of foreign policy. Wilson’s error was almost the opposite of what they claim, and they seem not to grasp that they are themselves heirs to his foreign policy tradition, and they prove it with most of their other complaints against Obama. Indeed, the authors lauds the Presidents they like in this way: “They combined the pressing demands of their times with the universal principles of America’s Founding [emphasis and bold mine-DL] to leave a legacy in American foreign policy.” The authors naturally cite Truman and Reagan as their two modern examples. Bear in mind that their foreign policies have almost nothing in common with those of Washington and Monroe, the two early republican examples they cite, and note that their enthusiasm for the “universal principles of America’s Founding” as grounding for the conduct of U.S. foreign policy is a largely progressive and Wilsonian idea.

We could go through the entire paper line by line to demonstrate how their specific complaints against Obama are mostly misrepresentations, falsehoods or exaggerations. For example, despite what the authors say, the new START represents no threat to American sovereignty, and the administration has specifically pledged to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and the nuclear labs are awash with new funding specifically for this purpose. Leaving that aside, their amazing misrepresentation and misunderstanding of Wilson and his legacy seem even more telling, because it suggests that the authors don’t really know that most of the things that offend them about Obama’s foreign policy have nothing to do with Wilson and that they have no idea what Wilson got wrong.

P.S. The authors’ hostility to the new START is all the more amusing when they make a point of emphasizing Washington’s willingness to sign treaties to prove that he was not an “isolationist”: “He did not fear making binding commitments to other nations.” True enough, which would put him on the other side from the silly opponents of the new START. Their approval of Washington’s willingness to negotiate and sign treaties is all the more strange when you consider that one of their main lines of attack against Obama is that “Obama has made it clear that he will rely more on the “international system” and treaties to address critical problems.” Furthermore, if multilateralism and reliance on treaties are proof of “ineffective” presidential foreign policy doctrines, how exactly do Truman and Reagan make the authors’ cut? The administrations that gave us NATO and START are very strange ones for the authors to idolize.

Update: For a serious look at Obama’s foreign policy on the main blog, Leon Hadar makes the far more plausible argument that it resembles the policies of the elder Bush and Clinton. This argument has the advantage of being based in reality.