The Biden Doctrine has yet to emerge. Beware those who claim

ANDREI GROMYKO, the Soviet Union’s pre-eminent America-watcher, remarked that the object of his study had so “many doctrines and concepts proclaimed at different times” that it was unable to pursue “a solid, coherent and consistent policy”. And that was during the cold war, a period of relatively cool-headed American policy analysis. How much more applicable does Gromyko’s observation seem to the first eight months of Joe Biden’s presidency. Half a dozen different versions of the Biden Doctrine had been outlined by foreign-policy commentators before the president had even given a major foreign-policy speech.

Parsing the president’s campaign statements, some suggested the alleged doctrine was a return to the pre-Trump status quo, with a warm embrace of allies and the international order. Other prognosticators, focusing on Mr Biden’s scepticism of military intervention and his party’s protectionism, foresaw a more diplomatic version of Donald Trump’s scattergun nativism. Some pinpointed the president’s interest in shoring up democracy; or his rhetoric about prioritising policies beneficial to American workers. How to make sense of all this? “Biden’s everything doctrine” was the verdict of an essay in Foreign Affairs.

An alternative response might be to question the utility, as Gromyko did, of the competitive scramble to codify foreign policy in this way. Airing that sceptical view around Washington, DC, this week has been awkward at times; several of the foreign-policy experts Lexington consulted turned out to have written at least one Biden Doctrine column, if not three. Yet much of what they have described will not only inevitably turn out to be wrong; it is not really doctrine at all.

Experts in strategy, a rare species in the Washington menagerie, set a high bar for the word. To them it describes a statement of national interests so fundamental that it is liable to survive multiple administrations and events. Only three foreign-policy doctrines are considered to have risen to that level. The first was the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, a declaration of American primacy in the western hemisphere that arguably still pertains. The second was the Truman Doctrine, whereby America shouldered responsibility for containing the Soviet Union. The third, less boldly articulated, was the post-cold-war belief in American hegemony that underpinned the foreign policies of the 1990s and 2000s.

This has not deterred rampant doctrine inflation over many decades. Most presidents since Truman have been credited with a unique doctrine, including all the recent ones. Though what the doctrines of Barack Obama and Donald Trump amounted to is still in dispute. (A proponent of the alleged Trump Doctrine, Michael Anton, suggests it is encapsulated by a line from the Wizard of Oz: “There’s no place like home.”) Most of…