Obama's World

That doesn't mean that Muslim leaders will automatically act on the American agenda if it's contrary to what they perceive to be their self-interests. But at least there's, I think, an added element of trust.

You've said before that having family overseas and having lived overseas helped inform your decision to oppose the Iraq War in 2002. Can you flesh that out?
I'll give you a very concrete example. Both as a consequence of living in Indonesia and traveling in Pakistan, having friends in college who were Muslim, I was very clear about the history of Shia-Sunni antagonism. And so this notion that somehow we were going to be able to create a functioning democracy and reconcile century-old conflicts, I always thought was a bunch of happy talk from this administration.

Is there an "Obama doctrine"?
I think that I am the anti-doctrinaire candidate. I don't believe in abstractions when it comes to foreign policy. I think that decisions have to be made based on an understanding of our power and our limits and an understanding of history, a detailed understanding of how the world sees us and that peoples around the world have a whole series of conflicts, grudges, hopes that are in some ways universal but are also very culturally specific ... We have to make decisions based on a very clear-eyed view of what we can do at any given time.

Now, I think that I am driven by a set of core values and principles. So at the top of that pyramid would be … a willingness to do whatever is required to keep the American people safe. But it also includes a belief that America can be a force [for] good in the world, as long as we are sufficiently modest about how much we can do at any given time, and as long as we are mindful of the law of unintended consequences.

We want to be constantly looking for opportunities to expand freedom, expand the rule of law, expand transparency, expand bottom-up economic growth, expand education, expand access to public health and technology. But we have to understand that nations around the world and peoples around the world are going to move in fits and starts, and progress is going to be at their own pace. And that if we think that we can simply engineer outcomes based on ideology, then we're going to be in for rude awakenings, as we have been in Iraq.

On Iraq, what conditions would stop you from moving ahead with your withdrawal plan? What I've said from the start is that I'd be in a constant process of evaluating conditions on the ground … To do otherwise would be irresponsible. What I've said, though, is that it's my strategic belief that we need to set a timetable … The people of Iraq and the leaders of Iraq need to understand that we're not going to maintain permanent bases there. Once that principle is enshrined in our foreign policy, then of course we're going to end up having to make adjustments based on conditions on the ground. But that is very different from what I believe to be George Bush's foreign policy, which is that we are going to be there as long as it takes for us to have exactly what we want in Iraq, which is a strong U.S. ally and a functioning democracy without a trace of anti-American sentiment and without significant Iranian influence.