Barack Obama's foreign policy doctrine takes shape

First-term presidents dislike the idea of a foreign policy doctrine, fearing that it will limit their choices and force them to answer hypothetical questions. But with political mortality beckoning, Barack Obama has begun to flirt with the once-banned D-word.

"You asked about an Obama doctrine," he said in a revealing interview with the New York Times this week. "The doctrine is: we will engage, but we preserve all our capabilities."

With his presidency well into its fourth quarter, Mr Obama is finally starting to flesh out his own foreign policy legacy. Fresh from last week's potentially historic nuclear breakthrough with Iran, the president will reach out to another one-time enemy this weekend when he meets his Cuban counterpart Raul Castro at a regional summit.

"I believe that engagement is a more powerful force than isolation," Mr Obama said on Thursday about his attempts to normalise relations with Cuba after more than 50 years of estrangement. "We have to move past some of the old debates."

The Cuba and Iran talks are emerging as a template for how Mr Obama believes US power should be applied - a willingness to use personal diplomacy to address the most intractable foreign policy problems. Or, as he put it in his 2009 inauguration speech: "We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist."

In a first term where the demands of re-election were ever-present, Mr Obama's interest in engagement was dwarfed by his decision to pour troops into Afghanistan and his extensive use of drones to kill suspected terrorists. Until recently, the second term had been a defensive slog marked by his hesitant responses to crises in Syria, Ukraine and Iraq that have been widely criticised.

Only in recent weeks has he started to compile elements of a record he can shout about. The "framework" nuclear agreement announced last week has left Mr Obama close to a final deal with Iran that he hopes will forestall another war in the Middle East, even if difficult gaps remain to be bridged in the negotiations.

On Cuba, Mr Obama said on Thursday that he was close to taking Havana off the list of state sponsors of terrorism, an important step in normalising relations between the two countries. The president is due to talk with Mr Castro on the margins of a summit in Panama on Saturday, their first meeting apart from an awkward handshake at Nelson Mandela's funeral in 2013.

"We are beginning to see what the president always hoped to be the signature of his administration, the return of diplomacy as a cornerstone of US foreign policy," said Vali Nasr, dean of Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, and author of a highly critical book about his experiences as an official in the Obama first term.

Where the Iran and Cuba cases differ, however, is in the political risks involved. The striking aspect of the Cuba talks is how uncontroversial they have been. Beyond a small group of vocal politicians connected to the Florida Cuban community - which does includes two Republican presidential candidates - the opening has been largely welcomed. If the outreach were to collapse, little would have been lost.

The Iran negotiations, however, are fraught with legacy-defining dangers. Beyond the technical questions about whether Iranian cheating would ever be caught in time, the biggest risk for Mr Obama is the impact a final deal might have on the rest of the region.

Some observers hope that a deal could take the edge off Iran's revolutionary hostility towards the US and allow Washington to act as a balancing power in the Middle East that could stand aside from some of its sectarian conflicts.

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In his New York Times interview, Mr Obama sounded at times almost dismissive of the concerns of Washington's Arab allies about a resurgent Iran, saying that the biggest threat was not an Iranian invasion but "dissatisfaction inside their own countries".

But if not handled well, the nuclear talks could deepen rather than resolve the region's instability. If sanctions are unwound, it could result in new funding for Iranian military units and their proxies that are already highly influential in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.

Fearing encirclement by a resurgent Tehran, Saudi Arabia might eventually seek its own nuclear deterrent - sparking the very regional arms race that the Iran talks were designed to avoid.

"For the Saudis, this is adding insult to injury and feeds into the security vulnerability that they and the other Arab allies feel," said Mr Nasr about the president's comments on their vulnerability. "They see us talk about their regimes at a time when they are not certain about the assurances that we are willing to give them."

Even if his outreach to Cuba fails, Mr Obama will still get good marks for having tried to end five decades of hostility. But if his Iran talks backfire, history will not be so forgiving of the president's diplomacy.

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