Predictably, there was an explosion of criticism on the right, which branded “leading from behind” as “the Obama doctrine” and used it to cast him as weak, indecisive, and un-American. The more mainstream response concerned why Obama had chosen “leading from behind” as a doctrine, even though he hadn’t. It was all nonsense—Obama had never uttered the phrase, and he wouldn’t have used it to describe his own foreign policy; it was a show, designed to distill complicated international issues into a debate that could take place on cable news.
