BARACK OBAMA's art of war is not a phrase that rolls easily off the tongue. The 44th president leaves office with many believing that he is a coolly, even cold-bloodedly passive observer of a chaotic world, with little zeal for his job of commander-in-chief. Certainly that is a notion enthusiastically advanced by his Republican successor, Donald Trump, who scoffs that a soft and squeamish Obama administration has stupidly—and he has even hinted, treasonously—refused to take the fight to the fanatics of Islamic State (IS).
It is certainly true that, compared to his modern predecessors, Mr Obama proved unusually likely to wonder about unintended consequences and slippery slopes, and to pepper his generals and foreign policy aides with questions about whether an American intervention might make a crisis worse. But in these dying days of his presidency something close to an Obama doctrine of war-fighting can be described. It involves an intense focus on domestic politics, leading to a horror of deploying large numbers of American boots on the ground and a strong focus (at least in principle) on avoiding civilian casualties. It is not pacifism. Mr Obama is quite willing to order...Continue reading
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