The purpose of military force and the Obama doctrine: no fighting for face

Defining presidential doctrines

Many US presidents have come to be associated with distinct foreign policy doctrines. These usually pass what one author calls the ‘bumper sticker test’, that is, they can be summarized in a few words: the Monroe doctrine, for example, has come to mean ‘Hands off!’, the Truman doctrine ‘containment’, and the Reagan doctrine ‘rollback’. ⁵ But while there is widespread agreement on the content and meaning of specific presidential doctrines, it is less clear what makes a foreign policy doctrine. Compared to regular references to doctrines in journalistic commentary, there is a conspicuous lack of conceptualization in International Relations scholarship. As one author notes, presidential doctrines ‘defy simple definition, even if they are a recognized phenomenon in political discourse’. ⁶ The resulting ambiguities have caused conflations with grand strategy as a cognate concept. In fact, many authors use the terms doctrine and grand strategy interchangeably or define one in terms of the other, rendering presidential doctrines conceptually redundant. ⁷ If doctrines were simply a ‘codification of “grand strategy”’, ⁸ we would not need them as an analytical category.

For presidential doctrines to be analytically useful, they need a distinct conceptual footing. To provide one, I define presidential doctrines as a president’s distinctive specification of a purpose for which the given administration intends to bring military power to bear in its foreign relations. Doctrines demarcate the line between theoretically conceivable functions of military force and those for which the president deems the actual application of force worth pursuing. ⁹

No matter their varying demarcations, doctrines zoom in on military force; they do not touch on other important aspects of foreign policy, for example foreign economic policy or diplomacy. ¹⁰ Some examples of such demarcations are in order. The Monroe doctrine focused attention on the ‘American continents’, implying that US military force would be used to confront any attempts of ‘future colonization by any European powers’ in the western hemisphere. ¹¹ The Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe doctrine, stipulated by Theodore Roosevelt in December 1904, added ‘the exercise of an international police power’ as an auxiliary rationale for the use of military force in the wider region. ¹² Finally, the Bush doctrine elevated forcible regime change to the rank of conceivable purposes of force, ¹³ treating violent overthrow as a viable tool to enhance the reputation of the United States as a resolute great power. ¹⁴

Although most doctrines delineate the purpose of force affirmatively, they can equally rule out purposes for which a given administration could leverage military force but deliberately intends to abstain from. The Nixon doctrine, for example, meant to foreswear the deployment of US troops to states threatened by Soviet encroachment, and instead announced US reliance on local forces. In the words of president Richard Nixon, his administration would ‘look to the nation directly threatened to assume the primary responsibility of providing the manpower for its defense’. ¹⁵ As such, rather than being affirmative, the Nixon doctrine ruled out a potential rationale for using force. Serving as another example of a non-affirmative delineation of purpose, observers speculated before the inauguration of George W. Bush that his foreign policy doctrine would include resisting the ‘deployment of American troops on humanitarian missions abroad’. ¹⁶ The notion that presidential doctrines can serve to rule out purposes for the use of military force is akin to how nuclear doctrines limit and specify the role of nuclear weapons. With the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, for example, the Barack Obama administration limited nuclear employment options to the ‘fundamental role’ of deterring nuclear attack on the United States, its ‘allies, and partners’, thereby ruling out other potential functions. ¹⁷

In line with the proposed definition presented here, presidential doctrines are marked by a discernible level of distinctiveness. For a given approach to the use of military force to qualify as doctrinal, it must exhibit a sense of specificity, allowing a given president to ‘make their mark’. ¹⁸ Presidential doctrines offer ‘new and at times innovative approaches’ to US foreign policy. ¹⁹ They set a given president’s approach to the use of force apart from her immediate predecessors, potentially amounting to the ‘inauguration of a new era in the nation’s foreign relations’. ²⁰ At the same time, however, doctrines are not exhaustive in their specification of the purpose of US military force. While they exhibit specificity, they do not necessarily provide a comprehensive list of all potential purposes for which a president deems force suitable. The George W. Bush doctrine is an illuminating example of both distinctiveness and non-exhaustiveness. The doctrine’s reliance on preventive war, perhaps its ‘most controversial element’, ²¹ was, if not necessarily a complete reinvention of US foreign policy, ²² a break with the way previous US presidents understood the purpose of military force. In other words, the doctrine relied on a distinctive doctrinal attribute. At the same time, the Bush doctrine and its reliance on preventive war did not exhaust all potential purposes for which the George W. Bush administration intended to use force. Preventive or not, Bush considered military force an effective tool to strengthen a reputation for resolve, for example, arguing that because the US showed resolve in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, ‘no one can now doubt the word of America’. ²³

A corollary of the specificity of presidential doctrines, there are only few that outlive the presidency that is credited for their name. While the Monroe and Truman doctrines ‘proved outliers as enduring templates’, ²⁴ most doctrines lose their significance after their namesake leaves office. This is because new presidents introduce their own visions of the ends for which US military force should be employed. Both the Reagan and Nixon doctrines relied on local proxies to counter Soviet communism, for example, but the Reagan doctrine turned the Nixon doctrine’s defensive posture into an offensive one centered on rollback rather than containment. ²⁵ The longevity of doctrines hinges equally on the stability of circumstances. Shifts in the external environment of US foreign policy can moot the relevance of a doctrine or make them inapplicable, as seen with the Carter doctrine after the collapse of the Soviet Union. ²⁶

Defined here as specifying the purpose of military force and exhibiting presidential distinctiveness, doctrines are distinguishable from grand strategy, a related yet different concept with which they are oftentimes conflated. First, doctrines and grand strategies serve different goals. While grand strategies are a ‘nation-state’s theory about how to produce security for itself’, ²⁷ doctrines are more limited in scope. Substantially, doctrines have a narrow focus on the purpose of military force and therefore do not capture the totality of a country’s foreign policy. Grand strategy, in contrast, defines the ultimate ends of foreign policy and informs all aspects of it, including ‘consideration of the use of all the state’s resources, not just military power’. ²⁸ Geographically, doctrines can have a narrow focus on specific world regions. The Eisenhower and Carter doctrines, for example, were solely focused on the Middle East, unconcerned with other world regions. ²⁹ Grand strategy, in contrast, calibrates a country’s global foreign policy posture. Although prioritizing world regions is possible, indeed even desirable according to some grand strategies, ³⁰ a focus on specific world regions is no more than a function of the overarching quest to produce and maintain state security. ³¹

Finally, doctrines need not be a president’s own proclamation. Because doctrines elevate policies to a level where they become impossible to be ignored, ³² presidents oftentimes announce them in major policy speeches, for example in the state of the union address. Others, like the Reagan doctrine, are identified by outsiders like political commentators or historians. ³³ If presidents are not forthcoming in defining doctrines, it falls to these outsiders to identify the distinct tenets of a president’s approach to the use of military force. Such is the case with Barack Obama, who was reluctant to promote any of his policies to the doctrinal level. As a result, there has been a remarkable debate about how to define the Obama doctrine.

Existing accounts of the Obama doctrine

There is no dearth of interpretations of the Obama doctrine in the academic literature. These interpretations cluster in three different camps, characterizing Obama’s foreign policy as retrenchment, focused on narrow national interests, or non-strategic. This section presents a critical assessment of each of the three interpretations, creating space for the article’s argument about Obama’s reluctance to fight for face.

The first cluster of perspectives characterizes Obama’s foreign policy as one of retrenchment. According to this view, Obama considered international strategies ‘subordinate to domestic considerations’. ³⁴ Careful not to derail his domestic political agenda, the US president adopted a cautious approach to international politics, even one of ‘hesitation, delay and indecision’. ³⁵ The focus on domestic matters, so the argument goes, created a deep aversion to all things military. Defense spending cuts were a consequence of Obama’s ‘paramount objective of enlarging the size, cost, and scope of government at home’. ³⁶ In his dealings with international adversaries, Obama preferred gestures of concession and accommodation over military engagement. ³⁷ Because of the ‘diminished role of American military power’ in Obama’s foreign policy, ³⁸ the US president tended to engage in multilateralism and concerted action with US allies. Some go so far as to argue that Obama’s aversion to the use of force was so strong that he intentionally chose suboptimal strategies simply to end foreign military engagements. In Afghanistan, for example, his goal was not success, but rather how ‘quickly he can get America out’. ³⁹

The retrenchment view illuminates parts of Obama’s foreign policy agenda, particularly the president’s preference for a quick withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. Yet, it conveniently plays down instances in which Obama did not shy away from the use of force. Though the killing of Osama Bin Laden is mentioned, even affirmatively called ‘courageous’, the Obama administration is nonetheless portrayed as doing ‘whatever it can to discredit and preclude [unilateral action]’. ⁴⁰ This distorts Obama’s overall foreign policy record, most prominently his ten-fold increase of the covert drone program in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, ⁴¹ but also the surge of US troops in Afghanistan, the 2011 intervention in Libya, and military action against the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria.

The first view’s apparent distortion of Obama’s attitude toward the use of force has led to a second cluster of interpretations of the Obama doctrine. Taking issue with the retrenchment view, these views focus on Obama’s manifold engagements in military action more systematically. Their proponents argue that the Obama administration embraced the use of force abroad whenever narrowly defined US interests were at stake. One author, for example, cites the bin Laden raid as the ‘boldest example’ for the claim that Obama did not ‘hesitate to use military force in defense of American’s direct interests’. ⁴² Another argues that one of the most distinctive aspects of Obama’s foreign policy was that he ‘was not squeamish about employing American military power’, ⁴³ noting his intensification of ‘both the war in Afghanistan and the use of drones’. ⁴⁴ To be sure, this view acknowledges that Obama generally adopted a ‘light footprint’ around the world and avoided ‘lengthy entanglements’. ⁴⁵ But it suggests that Obama was far from reluctant to engage in military action. Whenever his administration identified direct threats to US security, the president did not hesitate to use military force. ⁴⁶

The second view offers a more nuanced picture of the Obama doctrine. For two reasons, its emphasis on narrowly defined national interests remains unpersuasive nonetheless. First, the 2011 intervention in Libya and the anti-ISIS campaign starting in 2014, two of Obama’s most notable military actions, were not a response to direct threats to US security. In the case of the former, Obama not only provided essential support to a multilateral military campaign against the regime of Muammar Qaddafi; he also convinced US allies to go beyond the proposal of the no-fly zone by sending out ‘planes to strike at Libyan military targets’, ⁴⁷ even though ‘no vital American interests were at stake’. ⁴⁸ In the case of the latter, the plight of the Yezidis in the area of Sinjar, besieged by ISIS militants, prompted Obama to order targeted airstrikes, a ‘humanitarian effort to help save thousands of Iraqi civilians’, ⁴⁹ as the president himself put it. Second, the argument about narrowly defined US national security is based on a purported ‘realization in Washington that the United States [. . .] is not omnipotent’, ⁵⁰ portraying the narrowing of national interests as a consequence of growing systemic constraints and US decline. Yet, evidence shows that confidence in US power, not a realization of decline, was the dominant sense within the Obama administration. Diplomatic initiatives with adversaries like Cuba and Iran, for example, were premised on the widespread notion that ‘overwhelming power’ allowed the US government to ‘have the self-confidence to take some calculated risks to open important new possibilities’. ⁵¹ In Obama’s own words, the US possessed ‘unmatched power’ and had therefore choices ‘about what and when and how to fight’. ⁵² The link between a purported awareness of decline and the narrowing of US interests is thus far less plausible than the second view has it.

A third camp of authors urges us to stop looking for an Obama doctrine. According to this view, there was no consistent, overarching foreign policy approach during Obama’s presidency. Rather, the president ‘failed to formulate strategy and understand its interplay with power’. ⁵³ The real Obama doctrine was ‘to have no doctrine at all’. ⁵⁴ Particularly prevalent in the early years of the Obama administration, ⁵⁵ this view was reinforced by the president himself, who argued in an interview that he did not ‘really even need George Kennan’, ⁵⁶ and that ‘blanket policies’ should not be applied on ‘the complexities of the current world situation’. ⁵⁷ Ben Rhodes, one of Obama’s most trusted advisers, confirmed that the administration avoided providing a definition of the Obama doctrine. ⁵⁸ Obama’s much-quoted quip that his doctrine was ‘Don’t do stupid shit’, while implying a critique of past instances of overreach, ⁵⁹ did not offer much in the way of a substantive description of his foreign policy approach. Yet, the third view obscures more than it reveals. True, no president consistently acts upon a predefined doctrine, nor is there any presidency that systematically lives up to its own designs, however carefully preconceived. Arguing, however, that no patterns can be discerned from Obama’s foreign policy creates blind spots that make us miss defining traits in his attitude toward the use of force. The following section shows why and points to his reluctance to fight for face.

No fighting for face: uncovering the Obama doctrine

The scholarly endeavor to find identifiable patterns in Obama’s foreign policy has rightly focused on Obama’s attitude toward the use of force. Not all aspects of a president’s foreign policy are reducible to this specific relationship, but it is here where presidential doctrines are typically discernible. Previous scholarship, however, has mostly focused on and argued about the extent to which Obama turned to military force rather than, more fundamentally, his views on the purpose of military force. Focusing on the latter brings to the fore a distinct relationship to the use of force that has been hitherto overlooked, illuminating the Obama doctrine and the conditions under which Obama resorted to military action.

Military force can serve varying purposes. In practice, it is oftentimes difficult to adjudicate its goal. Consider, for example, the US killing of the Iranian Quds Force general Qassem Soleimani in early January 2020 and the various justifications the Donald Trump administration provided for it, ranging from self-defense against an imminent threat to establishing deterrence. ⁶⁰ Not all – perhaps not even most – justifications for military action are empirically veracious. Yet, they illustrate that military force, like any other tool of statecraft, ⁶¹ is an instrument of power with potentially varying ‘logics of employment’. ⁶² At the most basic level, tools of statecraft can be utilized either to serve the ‘logic of integration’ or the ‘logic of fragmentation’, that is, to facilitate or disrupt joint action and collective mobilization. ⁶³ Military force can be put to use for defense, deterrence, compellence, or swaggering. ⁶⁴ Others associate military force with achieving different state goals like power, security, wealth, or glory. ⁶⁵

Cognizant of the varying purposes of military force, I focus on one specific differentiation: regarding the ends of military force, I distinguish between the application of military force to uphold or create a reputation for resolve – fighting for face – and the application of military force for non-reputational reasons, that is, for immediate material objectives on the ground. The latter is perhaps the most intuitive purpose of military force. It puts force to the service of eliminating a ‘military obstacle’ and represents a ‘unilateral exercise’. ⁶⁶ Thomas Schelling characterizes this purpose of force, which he calls ‘brute force’ or ‘forcible accomplishment’, ⁶⁷ as unilateral and impersonal, because it is unconcerned with ‘enemy interests’. ⁶⁸ Unlike fighting for face, which relies on influencing the behavior of other states, forcible accomplishment is akin to an imposition, ‘a tank or a bulldozer’ that ‘can force its way regardless of others’ wishes’. ⁶⁹ Its purpose is straightforward, as ‘the attainment of the immediate objective itself satisfies the purpose for which the force was used’. ⁷⁰ When military force is used for such non-reputational reasons, it represents a ‘martial instrument’, ⁷¹ the purpose of which is always directly related to what is achieved on the ground, be it a simple ‘amble across an undefended border’ or a fully-fledged invasion to topple the leader of another state. ⁷² Irrespective of its extent, the intent of forcible accomplishment follows a distinct logic that discounts the motives, calculations, and interests of its target, essentially treating the latter as a mere military obstacle rather than a political actor.

The use of force for a reputation for resolve, or simply fighting for face, ⁷³ represents an alternative purpose of military force. Reputation denotes beliefs others hold ‘about persistent characteristics or behavioral tendencies of an actor, based on the past actions of the actor’. ⁷⁴ These beliefs can be used to gauge the likelihood of an actor’s future behavior. ⁷⁵ Resolve denotes a state of ‘firmness or steadfastness of purpose’, the extent to which a state maintains a policy ‘despite contrary inclinations and temptations to back down’. ⁷⁶ A state’s reputation for resolve is the belief of others that the state’s leaders will stand firm and demonstrate a ‘willingness to pay high costs and run high risks’. ⁷⁷ Consequently, fighting for face describes a situation in which a state employs its military not to achieve immediate objectives on the ground, but rather to project an image of firmness to its international audience. Military force is thus used as a ‘political instrument’ in order to ‘influence, or be prepared to influence, specific behavior of individuals in another nation’. ⁷⁸ Writing on the US involvement in the Korean War, for example, Schelling argued that the US lost ‘thirty thousand dead in Korea to save face for the United States and the United Nations, not to save South Korea for the South Koreans’. ⁷⁹ As Keren Yarhi-Milo notes, ‘contests over “face” in their purest form are conceptually different from struggles over things that have intrinsic material value’. ⁸⁰ As such, fighting for face follows a distinct logic that sets it apart from forcible accomplishment.

Scholars have hotly debated the utility of projecting a reputation for resolve through military means ⁸¹ ; most US presidents have bought into its logic. At least since the end of World War II, various US administrations have shown an extraordinary willingness to uphold a reputation for resolve by going to war. Be it in the afore-mentioned Korean War or in other military conflicts, reputational reasons have been at the forefront in decision-making processes culminating in the use of force. ⁸² For example, US leaders defended their commitment to South Vietnam ‘so frequently in terms of the need to prove U.S. credibility that their statements resemble ritualistic incantations’. ⁸³ Even after the end of the Cold War, US presidents have frequently exhibited concerns about a reputation for resolve in their military actions, irrespective of partisan divides. ⁸⁴ Indeed, one scholar contends that post-Cold War US foreign policy has suffered from a ‘credibility fetish’. ⁸⁵

Against the backdrop of US presidents’ continuous concern for a reputation for resolve, I argue that the Obama doctrine broke with that tradition. Indeed, what is most striking about Obama’s views on the purpose of military force, bringing to the fore his distinct foreign policy approach in comparison with the George W. Bush administration, was his relative reluctance to project resolve through military means. Obama’s redefinition of the purpose of US force can be read as a direct reaction to the Bush doctrine’s strong conviction that military force, particularly preventive war and regime change, would send a signal of firmness to the world. Apart from its direct goal of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, the 2003 Iraq War, for example, has been characterized as Bush’s attempt to ‘send a clear signal to other challengers’. ⁸⁶ As such, Bush’s approach to military force, in contrast to Obama’s, was strongly guided by reputational considerations. In the aftermath of the international backlash to Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Obama desired to correct the perceived overreach of the Bush years.

Despite his reluctance to fight for face, Obama did not shy away from resorting to military force as such. The distinctiveness of his approach to military force was a matter of intent, not extent. Examples provided by the second view on the Obama doctrine outlined above testify to a considerable extent of force used during his presidency – including the 2009 surge in Afghanistan, the secret drone war in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, the 2011 intervention in Libya, covert support for Syrian rebels under the aegis of the CIA-operation ‘Timber Sycamore’ starting in 2012, ⁸⁷ and the 2014 anti-ISIS intervention. Yet, throughout his presidency, Obama treated military force as a ‘martial instrument’ as opposed to a ‘political instrument’, showing high willingness to fight for material objectives on the ground and little willingness to fight for a reputation for resolve. Unlike other US presidents before him, particularly his immediate predecessor George W. Bush, he did not believe that the military was a suitable instrument to project resolve. In his own words, bombing a country to preserve US credibility was ‘the worst reason to go to war’. ⁸⁸

Fighting for face assumes that one’s actions have a significant bearing on the calculus of other states. Obama’s available statements indicate that he did not share this assumption. To the contrary, he assumed that states, including US adversaries, responded ‘based on what their imperatives are’. ⁸⁹ Irrespective of US projections of resolve, Obama believed that countries acted upon their own internal calculus. With respect to the Iranian nuclear program, for example, he professed that it had become ‘a matter of pride and nationalism’ to Iran and that the Iranians would therefore not ‘capitulate completely’, implying that it would be unlikely for his administration to change Iran’s calculus. ⁹⁰ More explicitly still, Obama confronted the hypothesized relationship between a reputation for resolve and deterrence. Discussing Russian interventions in Georgia, Ukraine, and Syria, he asserted that Russian actions were ‘the exact same thing’ across these cases and that ‘Putin went into Georgia on Bush’s watch, right smack dab in the middle of us [the United States] having over 100,000 troops deployed in Iraq’. ⁹¹ In the same interview, Obama argued that ‘the belief in the possibilities of projected toughness is rooted in “mythologies” about Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy’. ⁹² Based on these statements, Obama did not assume that US military action would have a strong bearing upon the decision-making of relevant international audiences, a precondition for the use of military force for reputational reasons.

Obama’s skepticism toward the relevance of protecting a reputation for resolve through military means should not be conflated with a general skepticism toward reliability, moral authority, and responsible leadership. In fact, Obama cared deeply about the latter qualities. According to his aide Rhodes, Obama ‘turned to speeches as a vehicle to reorient American foreign policy’. ⁹³ Especially in his first term, he utilized a number of high-stakes addresses, not military force, in order to ‘reverse the entrenched perceptions of American unilateralism’ by discursive means. ⁹⁴ His main goal, Rhodes argues, was to signal to international audiences that his administration was willing to ‘reestablish American standing and leadership in the world’. ⁹⁵ In order to have the moral authority to lead internationally, Obama projected a collaborative image to the world and emphasized ‘the necessity and efficacy of collective action’. ⁹⁶ Underlying the necessity for international outreach and thus international credibility was the realization that ‘America cannot meet the threats of this century alone’. ⁹⁷ As such, reputations writ large mattered to Obama. Yet, he was not convinced that toughness could be upheld on the battlefield.

The Obama doctrine in practice

To probe the plausibility of the claim that Obama abstained from using force for the purpose of projecting resolve, the following will provide a brief analysis of three decision points during his presidency: the 2009 surge decision in Afghanistan, the 2011 intervention in Libya, and the abstention from intervention in the 2013 Syrian chemical weapons crisis. The variation of these cases in terms of the extent of military force, ranging from abstention to regime change, allows me to differentiate the extent of military force from its intent.

Discriminating among different purposes of force analytically remains ‘easier than applying them in practice’. ⁹⁸ To infer the purpose of force in the following cases, I pay particular attention to two observable implications: first, for each case, I identify the most reputation-focused policy option presented to the president by surveying what cabinet members, Obama’s aides, but also domestic political adversaries and the media thought of conceivable policy options in terms of their reputation-generating qualities. If we find that Obama put a premium on the most reputation-generating option, I will infer that reputation played a dominant role in the choice of strategy. If, in contrast, we find that Obama disregarded attributions of reputation to policy options, I will infer that his choice was rather dominated by material considerations on the ground. Second, I will pay additional attention to the prevalence or absence of reputation talk in Obama’s public justifications for his decisions. Here, I rely on the assumption that fighting for face leaves traces of discursive evidence, as presidents concerned with reputation are likely to ‘voice, repeatedly and consistently, in public and private, concerns that not standing firm in a particular crisis will adversely affect others’ perceptions of American resolve’. ⁹⁹ If such reputation talk is present, I will infer that reputation played a key role in his choice of strategy; if it is not, I will infer that reputation did not play a role.

The first important foreign policy decision on the administration’s foreign policy agenda was the war in Afghanistan. In the summer of 2009, the Afghan Taliban were gaining momentum. ¹⁰⁰ To counter the insurgency, the US military demanded more US troops and lobbied for the adoption of a counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy. ¹⁰¹ The alternative was a more modest counterterrorism strategy that would have relied on fewer troops and less ambitious political goals. Within Obama’s cabinet, the argument for counterinsurgency and a major buildup of 40,000 additional US troops had found supporters in secretary of state Hillary Clinton and secretary of defense Robert Gates. Republicans and the media followed the administration’s 3-month-long strategy review closely, ¹⁰² knowing that ‘any decision that provides less [fewer troops] will expose the president to criticism’. ¹⁰³ One commentator asserted that influential observers were worried about Obama’s determination, whether he would ‘persevere through good times and bad’, and argued that if ‘these experts do not know the state of President Obama’s resolve, neither do the Afghan villagers’. Obama lamented in private that his administration’s strategy review ‘was being framed around whether I [Barack Obama] have any balls’. ¹⁰⁴ Despite being aware of these accusations of a purported ‘determination vacuum’, ¹⁰⁵ however, he decided to cap the surge at 30,000 troops and to focus his strategy on defeating Al Qaeda rather than the Afghan Taliban. ¹⁰⁶

If Obama had wanted to project a reputation for resolve to his domestic and international audiences, accepting the military’s request for a COIN strategy would have been the easiest way to accomplish that. After all, the proponents of a COIN strategy within the government explicitly linked their preferred way forward to the question of resolve in the administration’s last national security meeting – on 23 November 2009 – before Obama’s final decision: Clinton, a vocal COIN strategy supporter, argued that the US needed ‘to act like we’re going to win’, ¹⁰⁷ while US ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson asserted that the ‘most important element [in the decision] was to show resolve and assure Pakistan that the U.S. would not leave a mess on its doorstep’. ¹⁰⁸ Earlier, Gates had argued that not following up on Obama’s publicly shown commitment to the war in Afghanistan would ‘be seen as a retreat from Afghanistan, with all the implicit messages that that would send to the Afghans, Pakistan, our Arab and NATO allies, Iran, North Korea, and others about American will and staying power’. ¹⁰⁹ The COIN strategy was therefore the most reputation-generating policy option among Obama’s options.

Yet, after months of weighing options, Obama turned down the recommendation that he start a COIN campaign in Afghanistan. Instead, he identified the defeat of Al Qaeda rather than the Afghan Taliban as central to US national security, thereby adopting a more modest goal and, consequently, a more modest counterterrorism strategy. ¹¹⁰ To be sure, Obama’s decision still amounted to a significant escalation of the war in Afghanistan. Far from showing reluctance to deploy US forces abroad, the president adopted the strategy that, according to him, was most likely to achieve his predefined goals, that is, the defeat of Al Qaeda and the elimination of its sanctuary. ¹¹¹ The stated criticism, however, that his refusal to endorse a COIN strategy damaged US reputation for resolve, ¹¹² did not persuade Obama. Protecting a reputation for resolve played no role in his public announcement of the surge. ¹¹³ Looking back at the decision-making process, Obama explicitly notes in his memoir that his ‘frustrations would flare’ whenever his aides made the argument that ‘we needed to send more troops in order to show “resolve”’. ¹¹⁴ Worse still, he considered claims that US standing in the world required the US to ‘do all that we could for as long as we could in every single instance was an abdication of moral responsibility’. ¹¹⁵

Less than 18 months after the 2009 surge in Afghanistan, the US government was confronted with an unfolding crisis in Libya. Inspired by anti-regime protests in Tunisia and Egypt, a rebellion against regime leader Muammar Qaddafi was gaining momentum in the early months of 2011. In stark language not unusual for the eccentric Libyan dictator, Qaddafi threatened to exterminate the rebels, planning a military advance toward Benghazi, the rebels’ stronghold. ¹¹⁶ As a reaction, calls for a no-fly zone became louder in the first days of March. John Kerry, for example, then-chairman of the senate foreign relations committee, publicly demanded swift action in case Qaddafi used ‘his airpower to kill large numbers of civilians’. ¹¹⁷ Internationally, France and Britain started drafting a no-fly zone resolution for the United Nations security council, while Obama faced domestic accusations of signaling ‘a decline in American fortitude’ because of his perceived inaction. ¹¹⁸ Despite these calls for a no-fly zone, proposed and defended on reputational grounds, Obama eventually settled for a ‘no-drive zone’ that had the purpose of changing the material conditions on the ground.

If projecting a reputation for resolve had been Obama’s primary motivation, consenting to domestic and international proposals for a no-fly zone would have served the purpose. After all, showing resolve to ‘crater his [Qaddafi’s] runways and take out his antiaircraft weapons’, as Anne-Marie Slaughter, the head of policy planning at the state department, proposed, would have fulfilled the demands of the no-fly zone supporters. ¹¹⁹ Yet, Obama’s week-long reluctance to embrace a no-fly zone was not due to an alleged opposition to the use of military force, as his critics asserted, but rather because he felt that meeting their demands would be merely symbolic, insufficient to halt Qaddafi’s expected advance toward Benghazi. ¹²⁰ Michael Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, revealed in a hearing in early March 2011 that the US had not been able to ‘confirm that any of the Libyan aircraft have fired on their own people’. ¹²¹ Rather than aerial bombardments, the ‘real problem for civilians [was] persistent oppression from ground forces’, meaning that a no-fly zone would have ‘little or no impact in protecting the vulnerable’. ¹²² Indeed, when the no-fly zone option was presented to Obama in a national security council meeting on 15 March 2011, Obama complained that he was presented with an option that ‘will do nothing to stop’ Qaddafi from ‘tearing through his country, about to overrun this city of seven hundred thousand people [Benghazi], and potentially kill thousands of people’. ¹²³ In the president’s own words, a no-fly zone ‘would make everyone look like they’re doing something but that won’t actually save Benghazi’. ¹²⁴ Instead, he demanded ‘something far, far bigger’ than a no-fly zone, ¹²⁵ instructing UN ambassador Susan Rice to introduce a security council resolution authorizing ‘all necessary measures’ to protect civilians, that is, a ‘no-drive zone’. ¹²⁶

Because of its multilateral nature and Obama’s insistence that the US would lead the effort only at the beginning of the operation, the Libya campaign has come to be identified with ‘leading from behind’, a quote from an unnamed presidential adviser. ¹²⁷ This lasting characterization, however, obscures the surprise of both the media and US allies at the time, when it became clear that the Obama administration, after weeks of seeming inaction, went beyond calls for a no-fly zone. According to UN ambassador Rice, her French counterpart at the UN was so ‘flummoxed’ by the US draft for the security council resolution that he suspected the US was ‘upping the ante so far that we were trying to ensure our [the United States’] draft would fail’. ¹²⁸ Remarkably, even though the Obama administration expanded the UN mandate and moved it into a more interventionist direction, Obama did not highlight but minimized the leading role of the United States. ¹²⁹ Seemingly unconcerned with reputational concerns and unwilling to seize the opportunity for presenting himself as tough and resolute, the US president for military intervention in Libya in a ‘sort of stealth, quiet way’ without ‘making a big, splashy announcement’. ¹³⁰ Thus, the absence of reputational discourse coupled with a concern with changing the material conditions on the ground support the notion that Obama used military force for non-reputational reasons.

Among Obama’s foreign policy decisions, his lack of interest in upholding a reputation for resolve through military force became most evident in Syria. In August 2013, Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad used sarin gas in a large-scale chemical attack on the rebel-held neighborhoods of Ghouta. Although the evidence was overwhelming that the Syrian regime had crossed Obama’s red line, the US president first sought authorization for military action from Congress and then abstained from responding with cruise missile attacks altogether. Instead, he opted for a diplomatic solution that would eliminate Assad’s chemical stockpiles without the use of military force. Because of Obama’s military abstention, accusations quickly emerged that the president’s diplomatic solution amounted to a loss of face. Obama had stated in August 2012 that ‘seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized’ would change his calculus. ¹³¹ One publication asserted that ‘if bombs don’t fall on Syria, President Obama will have bombed his own credibility into oblivion’. ¹³² Criticism was not limited to voices outside the administration. Obama’s former middle east adviser Philip Gordon argued in a later interview that ‘on the credibility point, on the deterrence point, you actually have to be willing to do things that are a cost to you’. ¹³³ Former secretary of defense Leon Panetta wrote that Obama’s decision not to use force ‘was a blow to American credibility’, sending ‘the wrong message to the world’. ¹³⁴

During the decision-making process, authorizing airstrikes was clearly seen as the most reputation-producing policy option. Despite growing pressure to respond militarily to Assad’s use of chemical weapons, however, Obama dismissed what he later derisively called the ‘Washington playbook’, that is, prescriptions coming out of Washington’s foreign policy establishment that ‘tend to be militarized responses’. ¹³⁵ Instead, when Russian president Vladimir Putin showed willingness to persuade Assad to let the international community identify, transport, and destroy his chemical weapons stockpile, the US president instructed his secretary of state John Kerry to pursue this prospect with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. ¹³⁶ Publicly, Obama asked Congress to ‘postpone a vote to authorize force while we [the United States] pursue this diplomatic path’. ¹³⁷ Indeed, on the basis of an agreement between the US and Russia, the UN security council passed resolution 2118 on 27 September 2013, obligating Syria to destroy its arsenal by mid-2014, ¹³⁸ lest it face consequences falling under chapter VII of the UN charter. ¹³⁹ In June 2014, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) announced the removal of the last of the remaining chemicals from Syrian territory. ¹⁴⁰

Obama’s willingness to forgo military action for a negotiated solution indicates that he prioritized the removal of chemical weapons from Syrian territory, that is, a material outcome on the ground, over projecting a reputation for resolve. Despite the vocal criticism his administration faced for the decision to abstain from airstrikes, he later stated he was ‘very proud of this moment [his decision]’. ¹⁴¹ Military strikes, in Obama’s assessment, were inferior to a diplomatic solution because ‘he foresaw that a night or two of bombing might not change Assad’s calculus’. ¹⁴² Likely to survive a limited strike, military action ‘would have potentially strengthened his [Assad’s] hand’, ¹⁴³ even encouraging a repeated use of chemical weapons. More importantly, Obama argued that while military strikes ‘could inflict some damage on Assad, we [the United States] could not, through a missile strike, eliminate the chemical weapons themselves’. ¹⁴⁴ To be sure, there were additional considerations that led to Obama’s abstention from military action, most importantly the lack of a solid legal basis for the use of force and concerns about sliding into an unwanted military escalation in the Middle East. ¹⁴⁵ Yet, had Obama been primarily concerned with upholding an image of resolve, cruise missile strikes would have been a more probable US response in line with the ‘Washington playbook’.

Conclusion

Is there a pattern in Obama’s relationship to the use of force that deserves the label of a doctrine? During his eight years in office, the US engaged in a diverse set of military operations, ranging from a covert drone program and the killing of Osama bin Laden to a military intervention resulting in regime change in Libya. Perhaps surprisingly, Obama used the military tools at his disposal to varying extent, from limited to expansive. Humanitarian rationales, for example in the case of Libya and airstrikes in Iraq against ISIS, were as prominently pursued as was the defense of more narrowly defined national interests. This diversity of tools has led to a contentious debate among scholars about the existence and real nature of the Obama doctrine. Focusing on the extent of military force, the debate on the Obama doctrine has remained inconclusive.

This article has argued that turning attention to the purpose of military force rather than its extent is a promising avenue for identifying recurrent patterns in Obama’s attitude toward the use of force. More specifically, the article shows that there is a discernible regularity in Obama’s foreign policy approach, that is, Obama’s disinclination to use force to project a reputation for resolve. Three key decisions – the 2009 surge in Afghanistan, the 2011 intervention in Libya, and Obama’s refusal to respond militarily to Assad’s 2013 use of chemical weapons in Syria – demonstrate that Obama’s refusal to fight for face did not amount to a general reluctance to use force. Regardless of the varying extent of military force that Obama employed in these cases, ranging from abstention in Syria to regime change in Libya, however, his decision-making was largely unconcerned with a desire to project a reputation for resolve through military means. Both in private exchanges with advisers and in public announcements and interviews, Obama revealed his disdain for putting the US military to use solely for the purpose of projecting military firmness. If the Obama doctrine were to be summarized on a bumper sticker, ‘No fighting for face’ would therefore be an apt description of Obama’s attitude toward the purpose of military force.