The Obama Doctrine

The Atlantic analyses President Obama's foreign policy, and attempts to distill the ever elusive Obama doctrine from it, in this very long article (CSIS summarises the major points here):

“I had come into office with the strong belief that the scope of executive power in national-security issues is very broad, but not limitless,” Obama tells The Atlantic. “Where am I controversial? When it comes to the use of military power. That is the source of the controversy. There’s a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow. And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses. Where America is directly threatened, the playbook works. But the playbook can also be a trap that can lead to bad decisions. In the midst of an international challenge like Syria, you get judged harshly if you don’t follow the playbook, even if there are good reasons why it does not apply.”

[...]

Having said that,” he continued, “I also believe that the world is a tough, complicated, messy, mean place, and full of hardship and tragedy. And in order to advance both our security interests and those ideals and values that we care about, we’ve got to be hardheaded at the same time as we’re bighearted, and pick and choose our spots, and recognize that there are going to be times where the best that we can do is to shine a spotlight on something that’s terrible, but not believe that we can automatically solve it. There are going to be times where our security interests conflict with our concerns about human rights. There are going to be times where we can do something about innocent people being killed, but there are going to be times where we can’t.” 

The Atlantic: "The Obama Doctrine": The Atlantic's Exclusive Report on the U.S. President's Hardest Foreign Policy Decisions, March 10, 2016