A man waits for the arrival of President Obama in Nairobi, Kenya. Noor Khamis / ReutersTeaching U.S. foreign policy at Stanford, I had been waiting for a piece like “The Obama Doctrine” for seven long years. Missing among reams of adulation and vituperation directed at the president was an intimate, yet dispassionate look like Jeffrey Goldberg’s that would help my students penetrate the most puzzling presidency since America’s entry into the great-power system, circa 1917.
Who is this Barack Obama, where does he fit into the traditional matrix of American thought on foreign policy: realism vs. idealism, isolation vs. intervention, power …read more
Source: The Atlantic
