Chris Good flags President Barack Obama's remarks at today's press conference with Mexican President Felipe Calderon, explaining his thinking on intervention and the upheaval in the Middle East:
Number one, no violence against citizens. Number two, that we stand for freedom and democracy.
And in the situation in Libya, what you've seen is, number one, violence against citizens, and the act of urging of violence against unarmed citizens by Qaddafi, and, number two, you have seen with great clarity that he has lost legitimacy with his people. And so let me just be very unambiguous about this: Col. Qaddafi needs to step down from power and leave. That is good for his country, it is good for his people, it is the right thing to do. Those around him have to understand that violence that they perpetrate against innocent civilians will be monitored and they will be held accountable for hit, and so to the extent that they are making calculations in their own minds about which way history is moving, they should know history is moving against Col. Qaddafi ...
...a stalemate that could be bloody, that is obviously something we are considering. What I want to make sure of is that the U.S. has full capacity to act rapidly if the situation deteriorates in such a way that you had a humanitarian crisis on our hands, or a situation in which defenseless civilians were finding themselves trapped and in great danger.
I think it's very important for us to do this in consultation with the international community. One of the extremely successful elements of Egypt is the ... ownership that the Egyptian people felt for that transformation. That served the Egyptian people well, and it served American interests well. We did not see anti-American sentiment arising out of that situation in Egypt because they did not feel we had tried to impose any particular outcome ... the world will be watching to make sure we are on the right side of history, but also to make certain we are doing so as a member of the world community, and ... willing to act on these values by doing so in a way that takes all these various equities into account ... We are looking at every action that's out there. In addition to the non-military actions we're taking, i want to make sure that the full range of options are available to me.
Spencer Ackerman has always done a great job of rendering the mindset behind Obama's foreign policy outlook, and his 2008 piece titled the Obama Doctrine, was a prescient assessment of the balancing act between the lofty values and realist instincts prevalent among his foreign policy brain trust. I still think this description holds up, especially in light of the president's comments today:
They envision a doctrine that first ends the politics of fear and then moves beyond a hollow, sloganeering "democracy promotion" agenda in favor of "dignity promotion," to fix the conditions of misery that breed anti-Americanism and prevent liberty, justice, and prosperity from taking root. An inextricable part of that doctrine is a relentless and thorough destruction of al-Qaeda. Is this hawkish? Is this dovish? It's both and neither -- an overhaul not just of our foreign policy but of how we think about foreign policy. And it might just be the future of American global leadership.
Ending the politics of fear, not so much. But everything else is pretty much flush with what Obama said today.
Depending on how events in the Middle East play out, this could be the beginning of the end of al-Qaeda and like-minded groups who are opposed to democracy and have argued that only violence can bring freedom to the Muslim world. The administration, for its part, is keenly aware of this. To the extent that there's a role for the U.S. here, America's job isn't to take ownership of these uprisings, but to do what it can to facilitate their successful conclusion through non-counterproductive means. Sometimes, that's going to mean mostly getting out of the way. As Ackerman wrote the other day, patience doesn't necessarily mean disengagement, but engagement doesn't mean rushing in before you need to so we can prove some abstract point about how awesome America is.
