There are two iron laws of American presidential politics. We owe both of them to a Roosevelt. The first is that every administration needs a foreign policy doctrine named after the President. After President Monroe, the tradition took a hundred year break – Lincoln had more important things to do, and no one remembers any of the post-Civil War presidents – but it was revived by Teddy Roosevelt, who offered his “Corollary” to Monroe’s doctrine.

The second is that every administration is evaluated at the hundred day mark. This tradition began as a way to sum up FDR’s burst of legislative activity in early 1933, but as no administration since then has matched FDR’s hyperactive pace, it has became the prescribed moment to describe and explain the new administration’s doctrine.

This endeavor comes with an obvious danger: there were, for instance, several Bush Doctrines, and none of the better-known ones were in evidence before 9/11. It may not be entirely true that, as Lincoln claimed, events control the president, but they certainly shape his doctrine. Both Harold Macmillan (“events, dear boy, events”) and Margaret Thatcher warned that the iron law of government is that no one can stop the unexpected from happening.

One way to assess the Obama’s administration’s doctrine is to look at its appointees and to try to discern a pattern. This is not a terribly useful approach, partly because many of the posts requiring confirmation remain unfilled, and – more fundamentally – because there is not much of a pattern to discern.

As its Ambassador to the U.N., Obama picked Susan Rice, a standard-issue international institutionalist. To balance Rice’s seemingly unmitigated faith in the U.N. there is Samantha Power, who made her name in the early 2000s by calling for more assertive U.S. interventions to stop genocide – and in 2008 by calling Hillary Clinton a “monster.” Power has now taken a place on the National Security Council.

To Iraq, the administration seeks to dispatch Christopher Hill, who was previously responsible for managing George W. Bush’s not entirely successful approach to North Korean nuclear disarmament. To assess intelligence, the administration selected a believer in the conspiratorial power of the Jewish lobby and a vehement opponent of Israel (fortunately, he withdrew). And of course Hillary Clinton herself, a supporter of Israel who voted in favor of the Iraq War, has landed at the State Department. A friendly observer might call this a balanced collection of appointees; a less favorably inclined one could just as easily call it incoherent.

If the appointees do not offer much of a clue, how about actions? The friendly observer would say that the new administration marks a refreshing break from George W. Bush; the less friendly one would observe that many of Obama’s more substantive actions (drawing down slowing in Iraq and surging in Afghanistan, for instance) have paralleled Bush’s policies, while his style (smiling at while being mocked by Hugo Chavez, for instance) is reminiscent of John F. Kennedy’s early humiliation by Nikita Khrushchev. In other words, actions bear about as little weight as appointees: the problem is not too little evidence, but too much, and all pointing in different directions.

The administration does not have a doctrine. It has three, all in search of a president who has yet to decide – if he ever will – which one to back. The first is simple to name, if less easy for conservatives to fathom: liberal naiveté. The fallacy of liberalism in the realm of foreign policy since the late 1960s is simply that it has not been serious. Theirs has been the diplomacy of solipsism, the belief that you are the only thing that exists in the world.

Liberals want to believe that what happens in the world is a reflection of American misdeeds, or a manifestation of an American failure to act. Thus, the reason why Putin’s Russia, for instance, has been so nasty is that George W. Bush provoked it, or that the reason why Iran wants a nuclear weapon is because the U.S. has failed to be sufficiently nice to it. From this point of view, what the U.S. needs to do is to apologize a lot more. Obama has done a good deal of that – to audiences in Europe, Iran, and Latin America – in his first 100 days.

Or, to take the case of American inaction, the U.S. – as Power has argued – bears part of the blame for genocides in Africa because it does not do enough to stop them, and is at fault – as Senator Boxer (D-CA) has implied – for the Taliban’s oppression of women because it has not ratified the appropriate treaties. All this is self-absorbed nonsense that stems from the basic alienation of post-1968 liberals from mainstream America. The alienation creates the ‘blame America first’ mentality and provides a built-in explanation for the misbehavior of others: it’s all our fault.

The best one can say about this doctrine is that, in its own way, it does reflect a sincere interest in foreign policy. It is ignorant and naïve, but it does at least care about the broader world. And, in time, it is likely to be corrected by experience: Clinton, pushed by Tony Blair, finally summoned up the nerve to stop apologizing for Rwanda and act in Kosovo, and Carter eventually got tired of being fooled by the Soviets and abused by the Iranians, even if he never quite figured out what to do about it. So if this is where Obama’s headed, he and we are in for a rough ride.

But it may be that the administration is more than inexperienced, liberal, and muddled-headed. It may have a plan. The second doctrine is less easy to sum up. In a word, you could call it realism, though I prefer to call it ‘Metternich without the genius,’ after the mid-nineteenth century Austrian conservative statesman who dominated Europe in the thirty years after the Congress of Vienna.

This was the era of the Concert of Europe: a (supposedly) well-balanced system, in which each of the five great European powers controlled a sphere of interest that was respected by the others, and who cooperated to control threats that would destabilize the system and lead to another French Revolution and a new Napoleon.

The essence of the problem, as Metternich saw it, was to control the rise of middle class liberalism, which threatened the old order across Europe. In the end, in 1848, he lost that battle, but his defeat only proved that – from his aristocratic point of view – he had understood the nature of the threat all too clearly, even if he had not provided effectively against it. Given that his goal was to preserve the existing European order indefinitely, it is hard to see how he could have succeeded.

Metternich’s system was premised on the cooperation and mutual respect of the great imperial powers, and on the creation of well-understood spheres of interest. Obama might claim the same. He has been far more deferential to the European Union than any previous president, so the E.U. will have a sphere. His attempted rapprochement with Russia (and his neglect of Georgia) implies that Putin will be allowed to win back effective control of the ‘Near Abroad.’ In the Middle East, he has been solicitous of the “Islamic Republic of Iran,” implying that he recognizes its legitimacy and has no complaints about Iran’s incursions into Iraq and Afghanistan. And he has said nothing about promoting liberty abroad: if Metternich’s policy had a keynote, it was that ideas about democracy were profoundly destabilizing and had at all costs to be repressed.

This is a coherent policy, based – like the first doctrine – on a serious interest in foreign affairs. It has something in common – like Obama’s out of control domestic spending – with the presidency of Richard Nixon and the diplomacy of Henry Kissinger, in that it pays far more attention to power than it does to human rights. But it also has three serious flaws.

First, it is far from clear, as Kissinger discovered, that the American people will tolerate foreign policy conducted on the basis of amoral realism for very long. Second, this is a policy that tends to defer to the kinds of autocracies and dictatorships that are strong enough to claim a sphere of interest – but these places tend to be America’s enemies. By contrast, it neglects America’s closest partners, like Great Britain and America’s friends in Eastern Europe, because it views these allies as obstacles to better relations with the imperial spheres. And third, the spheres themselves are not likely to cooperate: the E.U., for instance, has no desire to see Russian control expand westward. This is not, therefore, a policy that will commend itself to the moral sense or the material interests of the American people, or for that matter, to the peace of the world.

The final doctrine is, frankly, at once the most discreditable and the most plausible. It is that this administration – or rather, this president – simply does not care all that much about foreign affairs. Obama came to the White House as with a background in law and ‘community organization.’ He beat the Republicans in part because of the financial crisis, but more fundamentally because of the unpopularity of George W. Bush’s foreign policy. There is nothing in his personal background or his rise to power that would encourage any observer to conclude that he is genuinely interested in, or encourage him to believe he has much to gain from, any sustained focus on foreign policy.

So perhaps Obama’s desire is, simply, to do as much as he can as rapidly as he can to clear the decks – with the goal of spending as much time as possible on domestic affairs, where he clearly has big plans – while allowing his subordinates to chase whatever policies they prefer as long as they cause no problems.

In other words, the explanation for the incoherence of the administration’s appointments is simple: they reflect the fact that there is no one hand on the tiller. Similarly, Obama’s mix of Bushian policies and liberal apologias may reflect nothing more than a belief that this mix is the best way to pacify as many problems as possible at once. From this perspective, the appointment of Hillary Clinton assumes a Machiavellian significance: Obama has given his bitter rival responsibility for issues about which he cares little, but she will be the one to go if the policies carried out in his name turn out to be failures. For Clinton, State is not a stepping stone: it is a deadweight.

The only problem with this strategy is that it neglects the insight of Macmillan and Thatcher: the world is not going to go away. It will not be possible to clear the decks, and the effort to do so will create problems of its own. This strategy relies for success on two things: being lucky and other people cooperating with you. But no strategy – as Carter discovered to his cost – can guarantee luck, and attempting to induce adversaries to cooperate by being agreeable will simply embolden them to take advantage of you.

Indeed, the Obama administration is already relying on luck, and the goodwill of others, to a startling extent. Having extended the hand of friendship to Iran, Obama will have no excuse available if Iran takes some obvious step that is blatantly against American interests. It is amazing that the administration has not shown more awareness of this dilemma.

Of course, it may be that none of these doctrines captures the reality. The first may be too sweeping; the second too conceptual; and the third based on insufficient evidence. Nor is it obviously a bad thing that there is not, yet, a clear Obama doctrine: given how badly Bush suffered from being tagged (however misleadingly) with his own doctrine, Obama might well feel that he will do better to tack from event to event. But that will not work for long. Like it or not, the world will find an Obama doctrine, and if he does not want to be defined, he will soon have to stop relying on his smile, the unpopularity of his predecessor, and the pliancy of the media, and start defining himself.

Ted R. Bromund is the Senior Research Fellow at the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom and a frequent contributor to Commentary.