Obama Doctrine?

I'm teaching American Foreign Policy in spring 2009 and have been thinking about how to discuss the transformation in policy from the Bush years. It's still early in the Obama term and not much academic writing has evaluated Obama's foreign policy. Katrina Vanden Heuvel recently provided a useful course:

The president's quartet of major speeches abroad--in Cairo, Prague, Moscow and Accra--began to lay out an Obama Doctrine in international affairs: support for diplomacy and the UN; commitment to a nuclear-free world; a belief that democracy is strengthened not through US intervention but when people win for themselves their rights and liberties; and engagement and cooperation with, rather than antagonism toward, the Muslim world.

Students will read these four speeches, plus the Af-Pak speech the President delivered last night.

I may well add the Nobel speech, but I want to read it first.


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