After President Obama delivered his Nobel Peace Prize speech last week, Politico noted it was “drawing praise from some unlikely quarters – conservative Republicans – who likened Obama’s defense of “just wars” to the worldview of his predecessor, Republican George W. Bush.” They added:
It’s already being called the “Obama Doctrine” – a notion that foreign policy is a struggle of good and evil, that American exceptionalism has blunted the force of tyranny in the world, and that U.S. military can be a force for good and even harnessed to humanitarian ends.
Some people, however, are not so surprised. They claim (or at least soon will) that the genesis of the Obama Doctrine originated from an unlikely source: First Things.
If you haven’t heard the latest rumor/conspiracy theory—and you probably haven’t since I’m just now putting this out there in order to debunk it before anyone else connects the dots—it goes something like this: A First Things article which revived interest in theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and connected his views with the Global War on Terror influenced David Brooks, who in turn influenced Barack Obama, who used the idea (mixed with progressive elements) as the basis for the Obama Doctrine.
There is obviously nothing to this conjecture and I provide this timeline—from FT to Brooks to Oslo—solely for informational purposes and not, as it might appear, to shore up speculation about whether this magazine is inadvertently influencing the President’s foreign policy:
February 2002: Wilfred M. McClay—a member of First Things‘ editorial board—publishes an article on Niebuhr titled, “The Continuing Irony of American History,” that connects Niebuhrian realism to the war in Afghanistan.
September 2002: David Brooks writes a feature on Niebuhr for The Atlantic in which he links to and references McClay’s article. Brooks ends the piece by saying: “If there is going to be a hawkish left in America again, a left suspicious of power but willing to use it to defend freedom, it will have to be revived by a modern-day Reinhold Niebuhr.”
October 2006: Brooks, now a New York Times columnist, writes “Run, Barack, Run” in which he urges Senator Barack Obama to run for the presidency.
April 2007: Two months after taking the advice of columnist and announcing his candidacy, Obama meets with Brooks. In his column the next day Brooks writes:
Yesterday evening I was interviewing Barack Obama and we were talking about effective foreign aid programs in Africa. His voice was measured and fatigued, and he was taking those little pauses candidates take when they’re afraid of saying something that might hurt them later on.
Out of the blue I asked, “Have you ever read Reinhold Niebuhr?”
Obama’s tone changed. “I love him. He’s one of my favorite philosophers.”
So I asked, What do you take away from him?
“I take away,” Obama answered in a rush of words, “the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away . . . the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism.”
Later in the column Brooks asks, “[H]as Obama thought through a practical foreign policy doctrine of his own — a way to apply his Niebuhrian instincts?”
(Key Speculation: Did Obama give that answer because he had read Brook’s article in The Atlantic? Did Brooks influence—perhaps through his writings—Obama’s approach to foreign policy?)
December 10, 2009: President Obama gives his Nobel Peace Prize speech in which (with echos of McClay’s article) he connects “Niebuhrian realism” with the war in Afghanistan. Ben Smith of Politico writes, “Somewhere, David Brooks is writing another column about Reinhold Niebuhr.”
December 14, 2009: David Brooks writes another column about Reinhold Niebuhr—and Obama (“Obama’s Christian Realism“).
December 15, 2009: First Thoughts blog connects the dots in order to dispel this soon-to-be rampant rumor that we are responsible for influencing Brooks who in turn influenced Obama to view Niebuhr as a GWOT hawk.
Whether such a connection can be made between this magazine and the President’s foriegn policy—and again I bring this up only to express my own doubts about the veracity of this claim—I assure you that it is unintentional. First Things does not want to take either credit or blame for the Obama Doctrine. Whether Mr. Brooks secretly passes along old copies of this magazine to the President (another rumor you might have heard) or whether Obama is (as some might suggest) a closet theocon, we have no knowledge. Any resemblance of his views to those that we have expressed in the past are (we are almost certain) completely coincidental.
Update: Uh-oh. Senior editor-at-large James Nuechterlein makes a confession that adds a new twist and reduces my ability to quash this rumor:
Mr. Carter doesn’t know the half of it. In September 1996 David Brooks and I were among the speakers at a conference at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, PA. I was then editor of First Things and Mr. Brooks was senior editor of The Weekly Standard. (The papers from that conference were later published by the Center for Economic and Policy Education at Saint Vincent’s under the title Public Life and the Renewal of Culture.) My essay was entitled “Religion and Politics: The Legacy of Reinhold Niebuhr.” Afterwards, Mr. Brooks told me that he was not very familiar with Niebuhr but that my lecture had convinced him that he should be. We spoke further of Niebuhr’s work, and, as I recall, I suggested some of Niebuhr’s writings that he might find of use. So you can see that the Brooks-Niebuhr-First Things-Obama nexus (conspiracy?) is deeper than even Mr. Carter suggests.
December 15th, 2009 | 6:23 pm
“the “Obama Doctrine” – a notion that foreign policy is a struggle of good and evil, that American exceptionalism has blunted the force of tyranny in the world, and that U.S. military can be a force for good and even harnessed to humanitarian ends.”
Anyone who thinks that Barack Obama came up with any of these ideas (heck, I don’t think he believes a single one of them, but let’s not go there right now) and created a new “doctrine” is automatically disqualified from being able to claim authority on any subject at all. You have to be completely and totally mind-bogglingly ignorant about history and pretty much every other subject as well to do so. I’m amazed that anyone who has the courage to publish his thoughts in public is so unaware of his own ignorance.
December 15th, 2009 | 7:33 pm
OK Joe, you deny there is a conspiracy. But what would we expect a conspirator to do when questioned about it? Deny it of course. And an even more clever conspirator would deny the conspiracy before he was even questioned about it, thereby covering his denials with a mantle of candor and forthrightness. You have done all of the things we would expect a clever conspirator to do. Therefore, we can safely conclude that your preemptive denials are false and Obama is an avid FT reader and [now-not-so] closet war mongering theocon.
Rereading the above, I am reminded of Wesley’s rejoinder to Vizzini: “Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.”
December 15th, 2009 | 7:40 pm
Mr. Carter doesn’t know the half of it. In September 1996 David Brooks and I were among the speakers at a conference at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, PA. I was then editor of First Things and Mr. Brooks was senior editor of the Weekly Standard. (The papers from that conference were later published by the Center for Economic and Policy Education at Saint Vincent’s under the title Public Life and the Renewal of Culture.) My essay was entitled “Religion and Politics: The Legacy of Reinhold Niebuhr.” Afterwards, Mr. Brooks told me that he was not very familiar with Niebuhr but that my lecture had convinced him that he should be. We spoke further of Niebuhr’s work, and, as I recall, I suggested some of Niebuhr’s writings that he might find of use. So you can see that the Brooks-Niebuhr-First Things-Obama nexus (conspiracy?) is deeper than even Mr. Carter suggests.
December 15th, 2009 | 8:12 pm
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December 15th, 2009 | 9:51 pm
Gary Dorrien says it best: “There are liberal, radical, moderate, and conservative Niebuhrians; there are even neoconservative Niebuhrians, though that group is mostly kidding itself about having much in common with Niebuhr. If the neocons had absorbed even half of Niebuhr’s realism, we might have been spared the very bad idea of invading Iraq.”
“These things are old”: Niebuhrian in the White House
December 15th, 2009 | 11:18 pm
Why am I somehow positive that President Obama has never ever heard of First Things?
December 16th, 2009 | 2:19 am
Social comments and analytics for this post…
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December 16th, 2009 | 8:06 am
May I suggest that in the desire to demonstrate that FT is influential in high places, you have abandoned your critical powers?
We learn from Mr Brooks that the Brooks-Obama doctrine of ‘Christian realism’ is grounded on ‘core struggles within human nature’ or paradoxes of the human condition, namely ‘humanity’s noble but sinful nature’, ‘prophetic Christianity and the human tendency towards corruption’. So far, so good. It sounds Pauline, even evangelical.
But place these memes and paradoxes together with the tactical message of President Obama’s speech at Notre Dame in which he indicated that there are two seemingly irreconcilable positions on abortion: a woman’s right and the right to life. Now what do we have? A perfect argument for the Christian Realist to take up the mantel of Arbiter-in-Chief in the culture wars, the umpire in the new American multi-faith, multi-cult society in which everyone has his or her own truth and there is no health in us.
Brooks-Obama presents a new, appeal-to-the-evangelicals, twist on the old story of American pragmatism. It is not the Unifying One who is being put forward as Presidential Persona by Brooks, but the Christian Realist One who will constitutionalize (forgive the barbarism) relativism as the new American civil religion.
Questions of war and peace and much else (gay marriage, abortion, stem cell manipulation, freedom of conscience and general cultural mayhem) can, thanks to the paradoxes of human nature and the human condition, be rendered perfectly harmless by being translated into pragmatic considerations because they are undecidable. You see, Brooks-Obama is even a tad post-modern
None of this is new but it took Mr Brooks to spell it out theologically and politically.
The anticipated result: a big knock down to Evangelicals of the conservative persuasion, Catholic Bishops, idiots in trailer camps, signers of the Manhatten Declaration, Neocons, American exceptionalists, grumpy old men and women and, of course, Mrs Palin who doesn’t know a relativist from a fundamentalist except that she does know that certain things are wrong. I’m not carrying a brief for Palin but I can’t resist pointing out how un-Realistic she is.
I would like to ask a pragmatic question. Is Brooks-Obama confecting a winner in the cultural wars? By contenting moderately the moderates and shunting aside what will now appear to be the fanatical fringes (Palin to Dolan), it might be possible to acquire both majority and legitimacy. Brooks suggests that Obama’s Christian Realism can offer both success and the moral rearmament of liberalism.
The price is that we must agree that there is no truth, even if truth is something we strive to find and understand rather than possess. We will be offered an analysis of multiple and conflicting problems, rights, needs, paradoxes, perspectives, positions, values and truths, held together by the numbing tragedy and limitations of the human condition. And, oh yes, there is a bright side: we will have a President who is the constitutional guarantor of relativism as the alternative to civil war.
The choice Brooks-Obama offer, and which they want us to accept, is false and demeaning.
December 16th, 2009 | 10:25 am
Dunno, Joe. Some of the criticisms are overly harsh but I have to come down on the side of the disbelievers. I am particularly skeptical that any “doctrine” was announced. Mr. Obama is a master of the sound and fury that signify nothing. Finding a doctrine in there is akin to finding omens in entrails and probably a good deal less reliable.
December 17th, 2009 | 9:31 am
I think Obama is an expert at jiving the elite media. I seem to remember that Bill Clinton used a literary ploy to get what he wanted from Monica Lewinsky. Was it “Leaves of Grass”?
December 17th, 2009 | 11:11 am
I’m going to paraphrase my own motto for writing meeting minutes or doing any other reporting of history:
If First Things did not influence any world leaders, they should have.
December 17th, 2009 | 11:14 am
Seems that some folks here and elsewhere (let’s see, let’s say The Weekly Standard) are not so tickled pink at their assumed influence that they cease too observe Obama’s words and deeds post Oslo; they their facility to look closely and critically is a bit numbed by the opium of Oslo.
What if the Oslo speech was a ruse?
Frankly, how can one be embarrassed by the awarding of the Prize but enthralled by the speech? Are we now those who come of late, joining those who compare how much their legs are tickled. Please.
The man is who he is, as he has shown himself to be since his mentoring days with Frank Marshall Davis in Honolulu. Obama, unlike most presidents, is a product of his counselors. For the sake of politics he may throw this or that one under the bus, but he has yet to renounce and excommunicate those who had (and have) a hold on his mind.
(When I see Rashid Khalidi or Susan Rice squashed as roadkill I may – just may – change my mind. When I hear him expound seriously on his red-diaper baby upbringing, yanking those roots to the drying winds of truth, then maybe I’ll reconsider – just maybe. When I read that Barak H. Obama has faced the intoxicating absolutism of his islamist inclinations, then maybe I’ll take a second look – just maybe.)
As the folks here need to understand, as they now begin to pen their tomes on the Obama Doctrine, is that President Obama is one whole cloth. They must never forge, especially when it comes to Obama, that a thread on first observation appears different is, in truth, tucked and hooked in tight with the weave of his whole life and mind.
The question to be always asked, as a loop, is What is this man’s whole life?
Please, guys, don’t be so dazzled that what Pressdent Obama will now say today and tomorrow becomes blinded by the brittle brightness you thought you saw in Oslo.
What if the Oslo speech was a ruse?
December 17th, 2009 | 2:42 pm
Prior post written in too much haste. Replace with this one:
_____________________________________
Seems that some folks here and elsewhere (let’s see, let’s say The Weekly Standard) may be so tickled pink with their assumed influence with the President’s evolving thought that they will freeze their critical judgment and ease too observe Obama once he jetted out of Norway; that they will be deaf and blind to Obama’s words and deeds post Oslo.
What if the Oslo speech was a ruse?
Frankly, many of you were embarrassed by the awarding of the Prize so how can you be enthralled by the speech? Are you now, though late in coming, joining those who compare how much their legs are tickled. Please.
The man is who he is. He is as he has shown himself to be since those days Frank Marshall Davis mentored him in Honolulu. Obama, unlike most presidents, is a product of his counselors.
For the sake of politics he may throw this or that one under the bus, but he has yet to renounce and excommunicate those who had (and have) the strongest hold on his mind.
(When I see Rashid Khalidi or Susan Rice squashed as road-kill I may – just may – change my mind. When I hear him expound seriously on his red-diaper baby upbringing, yanking those roots to the drying winds of truth, then maybe I’ll reconsider – just maybe. When I read that Barak H. Obama has faced the intoxicating absolutism of his islamist inclinations, then maybe I’ll take a second look – just maybe.)
The folks here need to understand, now that they are penning their tomes on the Obama Doctrine, that President Obama is of one cloth. They must never forget that a loose thread, on first observation, may appear different, but, in truth, is tucked, hooked, and is tightly woven into the weave of his whole life and mind.
There is a question that must be constantly looping within our heads when we think about Obama: What is this man’s whole life; what garment cloaks his mind and heart; what are the threads that weaved the whole of him?
Please, guys, don’t be so dazzled by President Obama’s royal performance, that you will become blind, to what he will say today and tomorrow, by the brittle brightness you thought you saw in Oslo.
What if the Oslo speech was a ruse?
December 18th, 2009 | 1:38 pm
Hmm, well, I’m not convinced that First Things influenced Obama, but I’m now convinced that it might have unintentionally planted the seed that turned Brooks into obnoxious formerly-conservative squish with a man-crush on Obama that we are all forced to deal with today.
December 18th, 2009 | 3:29 pm
Obama’s “pragmatism” is first and foremost a rhetorical strategy, which he applies over and over again. Thank you, Katrina, for relating this to his Notre Dame commencement speech, a prime example of the strategy. The pattern of argument goes like this: “We are all tired of the old divisions and arguments, and we need to respect each other, be modest about our ability to adjudicate these questions, and look for any solution that will work in the real world,” but by the end of these speeches all that has happened is that Obama has defined certain people out of the discussion. (In the case of the ND speech, he had also defined certain people out of Catholicism, all without sounding extreme or prescriptive at all – quite the achievement in terms of rhetorical tone.) He brands some objection “tired,” “extreme,” or “divisive,” and everybody gets so hypnotized by the uncontroversial and reasonable-sounding bromides that they lose sight of the ball being moved. The call to pragmatism and humility just re-defines the argumentative space, so that Obama’s own position – whatever it happens to be – now shows up as a humble and pragmatic compromise.
I’m not suggesting that Obama is really a pure socialist or despot deep down, or any such nonsense. But the significance of his “pragmatism,” professions of epistemic humility, and references to Niebuhr has much more to do with his political-rhetorical tactics and much less to do with the substance of any of his positions.
In general, Niebuhr-ism is an intellectual tag Obama has attached to this political and rhetorical strategy.
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