Gareth Porter — Obama’s Break with the Establishment

President Obama, with his characteristic diffidence, has announced his “liberation” from the Washington foreign-policy “playbook,” but the national security elite is already striking back, writes Gareth Porter.

Barack Obama defies the deep state instead of deifying it. Dueling thunderbolts ensue.

But before you get all excited about Obama as the man on the white horse taking the reins, he has only balked at the most egregious policy and followed the establishment policymakers on everything else.

HRC was at the center of the pushback against the president.

The fact that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were both supporting the military was central to his calculation of the political cost he anticipated if he rejected the escalation.

So  mixed bag.

The new revelations of Obama’s disenchantment with foreign policy orthodoxy on the use of force illuminate an enduring structural problem of presidents perceiving their national security officials as having the power to impose high political costs on them if their demands for war were rejected. On the other hand, Obama’s public break-up with the national security elite appears to represents a new stage in the politics of national security in which broader resistance to those powerful interests may possibly be feasible. 

Consortiums News
Obama’s Break with the Establishment
Gareth Porter

An establishment view of the Obama Doctrine (Don't do stupid stuff.)

The National Interest
The Obama Doctrine: Made for the '90s, Disastrous Today

James F. Jeffrey, the Solondz Fellow at The Washington Institute, is a former Deputy National Security Advisor and Ambassador to Iraq and Turkey