The Obama Doctrine: Article Analysis

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Recommended: Realist and idealist theory of international relations

The article the Obama Doctrine (Goldberg April 2016) was able to answer many questions that the author had about president Obama’s choices and problems he has had to face. The article revealed how the president felt and dealt with the hardest decisions he has had to make while carrying out America’s role in the world. Many key concepts were represented in the article such as realism, humanitarian intervention and the responsibility to protect. Realism can be described as a theoretical approach used to analyze all international relations as the relation of states engaged in power (Baylis, Owens, Smith, 100). Although realism cannot accommodate non-state actors within its analysis. There are three types of realism which include classical (human …show more content…

Humanitarian intervention can be defined as the right or duty of the international community to intervene in states with certain causes. The causes can be that the state has suffered a large scale loss of life or genocide due to intentional actions by its government or even because of the collapse of governance (Baylis, Owens, Smith 480). One of the main arguments in the article was president Obamas decision not to bomb Syria after many of his Allies and people believed he would’ve after making so many plans and decision to carry out the bombing. Obamas decision can be expressing in some of the key objections to humanitarian intervention. For example, the first key is that states do not intervene for primarily humanitarian reasons. This means that humanitarian intervention would be unwise if it does not serve the states national interests. President Obama did not want to risk taking a shot while there were United Nations inspectors on the ground completing work (Goldberg …show more content…

The responsibility to protect is a states responsibly to protect their own citizens, but when they become unwilling to do so, the responsibility is transferred to the society of states (Baylis, Smith, Owens 480). In the article Samantha Power, the current U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, urged Obama to endorse in the doctrine responsibility to protect. She believed power to be a partisan of the doctrine responsibility to protect (Goldberg 3). Obama announced that we recognize the killing of one thousand people which included innocent children through the use of a weapon. His statement mentioned the killings were through the use of a weapon that shouldn’t be used in war in which 98 or 99 percent of humanity says so also. If no action is taken, he stated that we would only be sending a signal that international norm doesn’t mean much and acknowledged this as a danger to our national society (Goldberg 9). Related to the doctrine responsibility to protect are human right norms in which president Obama pointed out were

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