A United States presidential doctrine comprises the key goals, attitudes, or stances for United States foreign affairs outlined by a president. [1] Most presidential doctrines are related to the Cold War. Though many U.S. presidents had themes related to their handling of foreign policy, the term doctrine generally applies to presidents such as James Monroe, Harry S. Truman, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, all of whom had doctrines which more completely characterized their foreign policy.
The Monroe Doctrine, expressed in 1823, proclaimed the United States' opinion that European powers should no longer colonize the Americas or interfere with the affairs of sovereign nations located in the Americas, such as the United States, Mexico, Gran Colombia and others. [2] In return, the United States planned to stay neutral in wars between European powers and in wars between a European power and its colonies. However, if these latter type of wars were to occur in the Americas, the U.S. would view such action as hostile toward itself.
The doctrine was issued by President James Monroe during this seventh annual State of the Union address to Congress. [3] The doctrine was originally declared by its authors, including John Quincy Adams, to be a proclamation by the United States of its opposition to colonialism. However, since 1923, the doctrine has been re-interpreted in a variety of ways, including by President Theodore Roosevelt as justification U.S. to practice its own form of colonialism in South America, which is known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. [4]
The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine was a substantial alteration (called an "amendment") of the Monroe Doctrine by U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt in 1904. [5] In its altered state, the Monroe Doctrine would now consider Latin America as an agency for expanding U.S. commercial interests in the region, along with its original stated purpose of keeping European hegemony from the hemisphere. [6]
In essence, Roosevelt's Monroe Doctrine would be the basis for a use of economic and military hegemony to make the U.S. the dominant power in the Western Hemisphere. The new doctrine was a frank statement that the U.S. was willing to seek leverage over Latin American governments by acting as an international police power in the region. [7] This announcement has been described as the policy of "speaking softly but carrying a big stick", and consequently launched a period of "big stick" diplomacy, in contrast with later Dollar Diplomacy. [8] Roosevelt's approach was more controversial among isolationist-pacifists in the U.S.
The 1947 Truman Doctrine was part of the United States' political response to perceived aggression by the Soviet Union in Europe and the Middle East, illustrated through the communist movements in Iran, Turkey and Greece. [9] As a result, American foreign policy towards the USSR shifted, as George F. Kennan phrased it, to that of containment . [9] Under the Truman Doctrine, the United States was prepared to send any money, equipment, or military force to countries that were threatened by the communist government, thereby offering assistance to those countries resisting communism. In U.S. president Harry S Truman's words, it became "the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures". [10]
President Truman made the proclamation in an address to the U.S. Congress on March 12, 1947 amid the crisis of the Greek Civil War (1946–1949). [11] Truman insisted that if Greece and Turkey did not receive the aid that they needed, they would inevitably fall to communism with consequences throughout the region.
Truman signed the act into law on May 22, 1947 which granted $400 million in military and economic aid to Turkey and Greece. [12] However, this American aid was in many ways a replacement for British aid which the British were no longer financially in a position to give. The policy of containment and opposition to communists in Greece for example was carried out by the British before 1947 in many of the same ways it was carried out afterward by the Americans. [12]
The doctrine also had consequences elsewhere in Europe. Governments in Western Europe with powerful communist movements, such as Italy and France, were given a variety of assistance and encouraged to keep communist groups out of government. In some respects, these moves were in response to moves by the Soviet Union to purge opposition groups in Eastern Europe out of existence. [12]
The Eisenhower Doctrine was announced by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in a message to the United States Congress on January 5, 1957. [13] Under the Eisenhower Doctrine, a country could request American economic assistance and/or aid from U.S. military forces if it was being threatened by armed aggression from another state. [14] Eisenhower singled out the Soviet threat in his doctrine by authorizing the commitment of U.S. forces "to secure and protect the territorial integrity and political independence of such nations, requesting such aid against overt armed aggression from any nation controlled by international communism". [15] The doctrine was motivated in part by an increase in Arab hostility toward the West, and growing Soviet influence in Egypt and Syria following the Suez Crisis of 1956. [16]
In the global political context, the Doctrine was made in response to the possibility of a generalized war, threatened as a result of the Soviet Union's attempt to use the Suez War as a pretext to enter Egypt. [17] Coupled with the power vacuum left by the decline of Great British and French power in the region after their failure in that same war, Eisenhower felt that a strong position needed to better the situation was further complicated by the positions taken by Egypt's Gamal Abdul Nasser, who was rapidly building a power base and using it to play the Soviets and Americans against each other, taking a position of "positive neutrality" and accepting aid from the Soviets. [18]
The military action provisions of the Doctrine were applied in the Lebanon Crisis the following year, when America intervened in response to a request by that country's president. [19]
The Kennedy Doctrine refers to foreign policy initiatives of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, towards Latin America during his term in office. Kennedy voiced support for the containment of Communism and the reversal of Communist progress in the Western Hemisphere.[ citation needed ]
In his Inaugural address on January 20, 1961, President Kennedy presented the American public with a blueprint upon which the future foreign policy initiatives of his administration would later follow and come to represent. [20] In this address, Kennedy warned "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty." [21] He also called upon the public to assist in "a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself". [22] It is in this address that one begins to see the Cold War, us-versus-them mentality that came to dominate the Kennedy administration. [20]
The Johnson Doctrine, enunciated by U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson after the United States' intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1965, declared that domestic revolution in the Western Hemisphere would no longer be a local matter when "the object is the establishment of a Communist dictatorship". [23]
The Nixon Doctrine was put forth in a press conference in Guam on July 25, 1969 by Richard Nixon. He stated that the United States henceforth expected its allies to assume primary responsibility for their own military defense. [24] This was the start of the "Vietnamization" of the Vietnam War. The Doctrine argued for the pursuit of peace through a partnership with American allies.
In Nixon's own words (Address to the Nation on the War in Vietnam November 3, 1969) [25]
The doctrine was also applied by the Nixon administration in the Persian Gulf region, with military aid to Iran and Saudi Arabia, so that these U.S. allies could undertake the responsibility of ensuring peace and stability in the region. [26] According to Michael Klare, author of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Petroleum Dependency (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), application of the Nixon Doctrine "opened the floodgates" of U.S. military aid to allies in the Persian Gulf, and helped set the stage for the Carter Doctrine and for the subsequent direct U.S. military involvement of the Gulf War and the Iraq War.
The Carter Doctrine was a policy proclaimed by President Jimmy Carter in his State of the Union Address on January 23, 1980, which stated that the United States would use military force if necessary to defend its national interests in the Persian Gulf region. [27] The doctrine was a response to the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union, and was intended to deter the Soviet Union—the Cold War adversary of the United States—from seeking hegemony in the Persian Gulf. [28] After stating that Soviet troops in Afghanistan posed "a grave threat to the free movement of Middle East oil", Carter proclaimed:
This, the key sentence of the Carter Doctrine, was written by Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's National Security Adviser. Brzezinski modeled the wording of the Carter Doctrine on the Truman Doctrine, and insisted that the sentence be included in the speech "to make it very clear that the Soviets should stay away from the Persian Gulf". [29]
In The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power , author Daniel Yergin notes that the Carter Doctrine "bore striking similarities" to a 1903 British declaration, in which British Foreign Secretary Lord Landsdowne warned Russia and Germany that the British would "regard the establishment of a naval base or of a fortified port in the Persian Gulf by any other power as a very grave menace to British interests, and we should certainly resist it with all the means at our disposal". [30]
The Reagan Doctrine was an important Cold War strategy by the United States to oppose the influence of the Soviet Union by backing anti-communist guerrillas against the communist governments of Soviet-backed client states. [31] It was created partially in response to the Brezhnev Doctrine and was a centerpiece of American foreign policy from the mid-1980s until the end of the Cold War in 1991.
Reagan first explained the doctrine in his 1985 State of the Union Address: "We must not break faith with those who are risking their lives...on every continent, from Afghanistan to Nicaragua ... to defy Soviet aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth. Support for freedom fighters is self-defense." [32]
The Reagan doctrine called for American support of the Contras in Nicaragua, [33] the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and Jonas Savimbi's UNITA movement in Angola, among other anti-communist groups.
The Clinton Doctrine is not a clear statement in the way that many other doctrines were. [34] However, in a February 26, 1999, speech, President Bill Clinton said the following, which was considered the Clinton Doctrine:
Later statements "genocide is in and of itself a national interest where we should act," and "we can say to the people of the world, whether you live in Africa, or Central Europe, or any other place, if somebody comes after innocent civilians and tries to kill them en masse because of their race, their ethnic background or their religion, and it's within our power to stop it, we will stop it," augmented the doctrine of interventionism. However, a lack of leadership within the Clinton Administration led to the United States failure to properly intervene in the Rwandan genocide, despite this ideology. [36]
The Bush Doctrine is the set of foreign policies adopted by the president of the United States George W. Bush in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks. [37] In an address to the United States Congress after the attacks, President Bush declared that the U.S. would "make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them", a statement that was followed by the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. [38] Subsequently, the Bush Doctrine has come to be identified with a policy that permits preventive war against potential aggressors before they are capable of mounting attacks against the United States, a view that has been used in part as a rationale for the 2003 Iraq War. [39] The Bush Doctrine is a marked departure from the policies of deterrence that generally characterized American foreign policy during the Cold War and brief period between the collapse of the Soviet Union and 9/11, and can also be contrasted with the Kirkpatrick Doctrine of supporting stable right-wing dictatorships that was influential during the Administration of Ronald Reagan.
The Obama Doctrine is yet to be fully defined, and President Obama himself has expressed a dislike for an overly "doctrinaire" approach to foreign policy. [40] When asked about his doctrine, Obama has replied that the United States would have to "view our security in terms of a common security and a common prosperity with other peoples and other countries". [40] On April 16, 2009, E. J. Dionne wrote a column for The Washington Post defining the doctrine as "a form of realism unafraid to deploy American power but mindful that its use must be tempered by practical limits and a dose of self-awareness". [41] The Obama Doctrine has been praised by some as a welcome change from the dogmatic and aggressive Bush Doctrine. [42] Others, such as Bush appointee and former United States Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, have criticized it as overly idealistic and naïve, promoting appeasement with the country's enemies. [43]
The Trump Doctrine is defined as the Trump administration's foreign policy, based upon the slogan of "America first." [44] It leverages America's economic and military power to increase and decrease tensions favorably for America. [45] President Trump was especially critical of so-called "free riders," or countries which the United States uses resources to protect without receiving benefits in return. Through his foreign policy, Trump criticized the use of United States military forces in situations where national interests were uninvolved. [46]
Although the Biden Doctrine is not explicitly defined, President Biden's foreign policy has been characterized by an avoidance of aggressive tactics that involve personnel in foreign nations. [47] As a means of moving away from the Trump Doctrine's policy of "America first," Biden stated that, "The transatlantic alliance is back. The US is determined to consult with you." [48] The Biden Doctrine is a shift away from foreign conflicts in an effort to focus resources on domestic issues. Following the United States' withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, Biden defended the decision as furthering the administration's efforts to reduce risk to American lives and resources in foreign affairs. [49]
A foreign policy doctrine is a general statement of foreign policy and belief system through a doctrine. In some cases, the statement is made by a political leader, typically a nation’s chief executive or chief diplomat, and comes to be named after that leader. Richard Nixon’s justification for the phased withdrawal of the United States from the Vietnam War, for example, came to be called the Nixon Doctrine. This pattern of naming is not universal, however; Chinese doctrines, for example, are often referred to by number.
The Truman Doctrine is an American foreign policy that pledges American "support for democracies against authoritarian threats." The doctrine originated with the primary goal of countering the growth of the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. It was announced to Congress by President Harry S. Truman on March 12, 1947, and further developed on July 4, 1948, when he pledged to oppose the communist rebellions in Greece and Soviet demands from Turkey. More generally, the Truman Doctrine implied American support for other nations threatened by Moscow. It led to the formation of NATO in 1949. Historians often use Truman's speech to Congress on March 12, 1947 to date the start of the Cold War.
The Carter Doctrine was a policy proclaimed by President of the United States Jimmy Carter in his State of the Union Address on January 23, 1980, which stated that the United States would use military force, if necessary, to defend its national interests in the Persian Gulf. It was a response to the Soviet Union's intervention in Afghanistan in 1979, and it was intended to deter the Soviet Union, the United States' Cold War adversary, from seeking hegemony in the Persian Gulf region.
The Reagan Doctrine was stated by United States President Ronald Reagan in his State of the Union address on February 6, 1985: "We must not break faith with those who are risking their lives—on every continent from Afghanistan to Nicaragua—to defy Soviet-supported aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth." It was a strategy implemented by the Reagan Administration to overwhelm the global influence of the Soviet Union in the late Cold War. The doctrine was a centerpiece of United States foreign policy from the early 1980s until the end of the Cold War in 1991.
In the history of United States foreign policy, the Roosevelt Corollary was an addition to the Monroe Doctrine articulated by President Theodore Roosevelt in his State of the Union address in 1904, largely as a consequence of the Venezuelan crisis of 1902–1903. The corollary states that the United States could intervene in the internal affairs of Latin American countries if they committed flagrant wrongdoings that "loosened the ties of civilized society".
The Good Neighbor policy was the foreign policy of the administration of United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt towards Latin America. Although the policy was implemented by the Roosevelt administration, President Woodrow Wilson had previously used the term, but subsequently went on to justify U.S. involvement in the Mexican Revolution and occupation of Haiti. Senator Henry Clay had coined the term Good Neighbor in the previous century. President Herbert Hoover turned against interventionism and developed policies that Roosevelt perfected.
Containment was a geopolitical strategic foreign policy pursued by the United States during the Cold War to prevent the spread of communism after the end of World War II. The name was loosely related to the term cordon sanitaire, which was containment of the Soviet Union in the interwar period.
In political science, rollback is the strategy of forcing a change in the major policies of a state, usually by replacing its ruling regime. It contrasts with containment, which means preventing the expansion of that state; and with détente, which means developing a working relationship with that state. Most of the discussions of rollback in the scholarly literature deal with United States foreign policy toward communist countries during the Cold War. The rollback strategy was tried and was not successful in Korea in 1950 and in Cuba in 1961, but it was successful in Grenada in 1983. The United States discussed the use of rollback during the East German uprising of 1953 and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, which were ultimately crushed by the Soviet Army, but decided against it to avoid the risk of a major war.
The Special Relationship is a term that is often used to describe the political, social, diplomatic, cultural, economic, legal, environmental, religious, military and historic relations between the United Kingdom and the United States or its political leaders. The term first came into popular usage after it was used in a 1946 speech by former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Both nations have been close allies during many conflicts in the 20th and the 21st centuries, including World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War, the Gulf War and the war on terror.
The Johnson Doctrine, enunciated by U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson after the United States' intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1965, declared that domestic revolution in the Western Hemisphere would no longer be a local matter when the object is the establishment of a "Communist dictatorship". During Johnson's presidency, the United States again began interfering in the affairs of sovereign nations, particularly Latin America. The Johnson Doctrine is the formal declaration of the intention of the United States to intervene in such affairs. It is an extension of the Eisenhower and Kennedy Doctrines.
In political studies, surveys have been conducted in order to construct historical rankings of the success of the presidents of the United States. Ranking systems are usually based on surveys of academic historians and political scientists or popular opinion. The scholarly rankings focus on presidential achievements, leadership qualities, failures and faults. Popular-opinion polls typically focus on recent or well-known presidents.
The space policy of the United States includes both the making of space policy through the legislative process, and the implementation of that policy in the United States' civilian and military space programs through regulatory agencies. The early history of United States space policy is linked to the US–Soviet Space Race of the 1960s, which gave way to the Space Shuttle program. At the moment, the US space policy is aimed at the exploration of the Moon and the subsequent colonization of Mars.
Gallup was the first polling organization to conduct accurate opinion polling for United States presidential elections. Gallup polling has often been accurate in predicting the outcome of presidential elections and the margin of victory for the winner. However, it missed some close elections: 1948, 1976 and 2004, the popular vote in 2000, and the likely-voter numbers in 2012. The month section in the tables represents the month in which the opinion poll was conducted. D represents the Democratic Party, and R represents the Republican Party. Third parties, such as the Dixiecrats and the Reform Party, were included in some polls.
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