Saturday 29 May 2010

You say I say.

I just spent an hour or so trying to figure out whether any other news-outlet apart from the Austrian newspaper Standard had used the term "Obama doctrine" today, and somehow, weirdly, it looks like none have. The corner-stones of the strategy the article mentions seem to be identical to the Foreign Affairs essay published before the Presidential elections.
"President Obama’s first formal national security strategy describes a coming era in which the United States will have to learn to live within its limits — a world in which two wars cannot be sustained for much longer and the rising powers inevitably begin to erode some elements of American influence around the globe.
Mr. Obama argues that the United States is confident enough to live with that reality and that after nearly a decade of organizing its national security policy around counterterrorism, it must return to a broader agenda."

The document that contains the now semi-officially dubbed "Obama-doctrine" is the "National Security Strategy" and required by Congress. You can read the full text here. Nobody talks about it because BP still hasn't figured out how to fix the leak and the oil spill is now more than twice the size of the Exxon-Valdez-catastrophe in 1989.

Foreign-policy-wise, the German President is drawing more attention: 
"Köhler hatte am Samstag in einem Interview mit dem Deutschlandfunk gesagt, ein Land mit einer Außenhandelsorientierung wie Deutschland müsse wissen, "dass im Zweifel, im Notfall auch militärischer Einsatz notwendig ist, um unsere Interessen zu wahren, zum Beispiel freie Handelswege, zum Beispiel regionale Instabilitäten zu verhindern."

Apparently, the reference to "protecting trade routes" was aimed at piracy (not the p2p-kind), not the mission in Afghanistan.

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