Foreign and Security Policy John Dumbrell All incoming American presidents, as they contemplate the achievement of a successfulrecord in foreign and security policy face, at least in outline terms, a similar array of challenges. They have to deal with problems, structures and policy assumptions inherited from the previous administration. They must attempt to establish a purposeful, appropriate and consensual sense of direction for the United States under its new leadership. They must prepare to meet unexpected crises and unforeseen international developments. In the case of Barack Obama, the inheritance from President George B. Bush was extremely problematic. As Obama himself asserted: ‘When I entered into office, we had two wars taking place. So once you’re in, what you’re trying to do is to impose clarity on the chaos’ (Woodward 2010: 376). Unanticipated events – most obviously the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings which began in 2011 – certainly put the first term Obama administration on the back foot. However, by the beginning of the second term in 2013, the world had become familiar with a number of concepts – including the ‘Russian re-set’; the ‘Asian pivot’; ‘low-cost’ or ‘soft power leadership’; ‘leading from behind’; and the ‘indispensable catalyst’ – which (for good or ill) seemed to underpin a new direction for the United States. The key developments of the first Obama term included: the American exit from Iraq; an expanded force commitment in Afghanistan, combined with the setting of a timetable for withdrawal; some dismantling of the rhetorical commitment to the War on Terror, along with accelerated reliance on umanned ‘drone’ aircraft to kill terrorist suspects, most notably in Pakistan; new avowed commitments to multilateralism in foreign policy, including international economic and environmental policy arenas; the achievement of a Senate-ratified arms control deal with Russia; the placing of multilateral sanctions in the cause of halting Iran’s race to nuclear weapon capability; evolving defence postures, many of them associated with a newly prioritised concern for East Asian security, linked to an apparently wider concern that the US should not be seen as the automatic and default provider of global security; and a much publicised internal administration debate between proponents of liberal, democracy- and rights-promoting interventionism on the one hand, and more cautious interests-oriented realism on the other. The purpose of this chapter is to interrogate the Obama record in foreign and security policy, seeking to evaluate the performance of the Obama administration and to ascertain the degree to which the 44th president of the United States has indeed set his country on a new international path. In order to set the stage for such a discussion, we begin with a series of threshold or ‘framing’ issues. Framing At least four overarching considerations affect, and are likely to continue to affect, judgement and understanding of Obama’s foreign and security policy. The most President George W. was soon making fun of ‘that hopey-changey stuff’. The literature. On both right and left. must be suited to shifting international conditions (Renshon and Larsen. Dumbrell 2009: 6-10. Bush – the theme of ‘change’ and of the limits of change are bound to dog perceptions of the Obama administration performance. by the constraints of domestic politics. A third framing point relates to the reappearance of the discourse of American international decline. while Paul Krugman introduced his liberal critique of Obama’s economic strategy thus: ‘What happened to the inspirational figure his supporters thought they elected? Who is this bland guy who doesn’t seem to stand for anything in particular?’ (Maddox 2011). In very broad terms.. and of the formidable problems of structure and agency which shape any leader’s attempt to recast the direction of American international policy. and its associated policies. Good leaders are generally held to be able clearly to recognise limits imposed by history and inheritance. to follow’ (Rich 2010: Alter 2010). from cognitive and psychological to managerialist and bureaucracy-oriented. By 2006. Reviewing Jonathan Alter’s book. Successful presidents encourage multiple advocacy among advisers. Frank Rich wrote: ‘The Obama of Hope and Change was too tough an act for Obama.fundamental consideration relates to the question of how exactly we should evaluate presidential performance in these policy areas. by the complexities of international power relations. a central coherence. The development of anything approaching ‘objective’ standards in such policy evaluation has been very problematic. however. They will be able to ‘sell’ this purpose to appropriate domestic and international constituencies. It embraces numerous approaches. yields some significant general points. while related debates overlap also with the concept of ‘presidential greatness’ and the historical ranking of American Chief Executives (Rudalevidge 2010). 2003. They aspire to procedural rationality. beyond a generalised commitment to advancing American interests and security. eds. yet are able clearly to adjudicate intra-administration disputes. The post-2005 decline . Bush was widely perceived almost as a post-imperial American Ozymandias – a leader laid low by militarised overstretch. evaluation here involves close understanding both of one president’s inheritance from his predecessor. are not paralysed into nervous inaction by such recognition of limits and complexity. The purpose itself. Secondly. a mere chief executive. They will have an integrating purpose. 165). which do illuminate the search for ways to judge and understand post-2008 US foreign and security policy. Successful leaders. Sarah Palin. and by the dynamics and rivalries within and across the foreign and security policy bureaucracy. McCain’s running mate from 2008. while retaining a keen awareness of the obstacles to optimal rationality. given the defining theme of the 2008 presidential election campaign against Republican John McCain – and especially against the background of the exceptionally controversial nature of the foreign policy pursued by the administration of George W. however. critics of Obama have tended to preface their remarks with faux naïf references to the hopes and heightened expectations of 2008. The relevant literature is vast and complex. The Promise. not America. but also with the ‘rise of the rest’. For some critics. we will consider various charges levied at Obama from both right and left. apologetic. went so far as to recall in 2012 that ‘the extreme polarization that marked domestic politics in the Obama years was absent from foreign policy’ (Bader 2012: 141). 2010. to be the world’s leading economic power (Drezner 2011: 62).have been unreflective and almost absurdly partisan (D’Souza 2010). and unmindful of traditional allies. ed. Observers of the pre-2012 election televised foreign policy debate between Obama and Republican candidate Mitt Romney could have been forgiven for concluding that there was actually an awful lot on which the candidates agreed. Niblett. Mandelbaum 2010. noting the complex and cross-cutting nature of both rightist and leftist critiques. it is worth emphasising that this partisan intensity is more apparent in domestic than in foreign and security policy. dismissive of international law. Ikenberry 2012). yet they do set the context for Obama’s effort s to construct a ‘post-partisan’. Extreme partisanship. Mann and Ornstein 2012). imperialist. the ‘new’ decline actually does seem quite apocalyptic. with the possibility of a world without American leadership (Zakaria 2008. especially in relation to China’s rise and to America’s post-2007 economic woes. Some attacks from the right – typically on Obama as the ideological friend of appeasement. not to mention the emotional intensity associated with Republican Tea Party conservative radicalism. Our final framing point concerns what Senator Evan Bayh (Democrat of Indiana) called ‘brain-dead partisanship’ in Washington (Bayh 2010. Obama has been the president who accepted the . polarization and personalised attack-oriented politics are hardly new phenomena in American political history. An important strand in the contemporary ‘discourse of decline’ involves the extent to which American-sponsored ideas and ideals (from free trade to political democracy) may continue to remain embedded in international institutions even if US economic and military power is fading (Quinn 2011b: 810. It is concerned not only with America’s need to adjust to the rise of China. consensual order in foreign and security policy. Lines of Criticism By turns. leading foreign policy (especially after the Republican gains in the 2010 midterm elections) has proved a little easier than taking initiatives in domestic policy. Attacks on Obama’s foreign policy leadership have frequently reflected the fevered politics of budgetary clashes on Capitol Hill. East Asian officer on Obama’s national security council between 2009 and 2011. the Obama foreign and security policy has been attacked from various quarters as timid. national apology and American decline .debate has been less apocalyptic than its post-Vietnam War precursor. with a possible new age of complex multipolarity. As will be seen below. Jeffrey Bader. foreign policy positions on Capitol Hill have involved significant intra-party cleavages. Kupchan 2012). In that respect. Pew Center polling in 2010 indicated that a plurality of Americans considered China. LSE 2011. To many Americans. Dumbrell 2010. Nevertheless. Following on from the previous section. Adopting a style learned in his days as a community organiser in Chicago. ineffectual leader who made the despised Jimmy Carter ‘look like a Rambo tough guy’ and the president who led America into the dangerous 2011 air-based intervention in Libya where: ‘We were not threatened with attack. notably Israel.inevitability of American decline and sought merely to manage it (Bolton 2009. Thus Dianne Feinstein. if apparent adversaries can learn to listen to and accommodate one another’. Influential neo-conservative commentators sometimes credited Obama with keeping America globally engaged in difficult economic times when siren calls for a neo-isolationist foreign policy were making themselves heard. For Bob Casey. Neo-isolationist forces on the Republican right were to some degree crystallised in Congressman Ron Paul’s campaign for the 2012 nomination. you get involved in Bahrain. There was no vital interest’ (Lindsay 2011a. If you get involved in Libya. Obama’s 2011 commitment to Libya was neither a belated rediscovery of ‘principle’ nor an imperialist adventure too far. Democratic Senator from California. Thus. Rather. In the case of Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann. Dueck cited Obama’s concession-driven approach to the climate change negotiations in the Copenhagen conference of December 2009 as an example of the president’s failure to appreciate the underpinning dynamics of foreign policy. Many American conservatives argue that Obama’s ‘return’ to multilateralism was part a betrayal of national purpose. especially in the Arab world. as almost inevitably leading to the kind of intractable miseries associated with the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In the case of North Korea. Elements of Republican neo-isolationism were echoed by those Democrats who saw foreign military commitments. opposed action in Libya as she surveyed the administration response to the Arab Spring in March 2011: ‘These are essentially civil wars. see also Kagan 2012). part a failure to pay respect to valued allies. Democratic chair of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on the Near East. Obama thus is seen as trying to lead by example – something which Dueck sees as ‘essentially taking the lead in making concessions’. The Tea Party movement became divided between a neo-isolationism. believing ‘that genuine and overarching international cooperation is possible. ‘We can’t . it was a betrayal of Obama’s commitment to what might be called cost-conscious realism. contradiction followed contradiction. According to Dueck. and the kind of assertive militarism with which Mitt Romney briefly flirted before retreating to the political centre during the final stages of the 2012 campaign (Mead 2011). An influential and thoughtful conservative analysis was provided by Colin Dueck in his depiction of Obama as ‘the accommodator’. which harked back to the pre-Cold War era. Obama was both the soft. Cuba and Iran – governments defined ‘at a fundamental level by violent hostility to America’ – Obama’s approach was ‘simply naive’ (Dueck 2011: 2). Yet there were other. sometime candidate for the 2012 Republican nomination. then it’s big trouble’ (Feinstein 2011). Obama is a domesticoriented leader. you get involved in Saudi Arabia. Lindsay 2011b). somewhat contradictory Republican perspectives on Obama. Robert Kagan in June 2010 applauded Obama‘s commitment to Afghanistan and his strengthening of the US-Japanese alliance (Kagan 2010). Coherence. Obama has been chided from several points on the political spectrum for his apparent reluctance to involve himself energetically in the Middle East peace process. especially in failing to close the Guantanamo detention camp on Cuba and in pursuing the drone attacks. Obama is a ‘progressive pragmatist’: ‘There was inevitable tension between his soaring rhetoric and desire to depart fundamentally from the policies of the Bush administration on the one hand. as we have noted.On the other hand. The ‘wikileaked’ State Department material of 2010 -11 seemed to confirm left-liberal fears of Bush-Obama continuity. The sheer variety and cross-cutting nature of the criticisms. Lieberthal and O’Hanlon 2012: 6. Gerges 2012). Kenneth Lieberthal and Michael O’Hanlon. in relation to the dialectic of principles and pragmatism. and the security crisis . The point is often made that Washington changed Obama more than Obama changed Washington (Brenner 2010. liberal interventionist Democrats joined democracy-promoting Republicans in criticising Obama’s muted support in 2009 for ‘green movement’ oppositionists in Iran and his apparent reluctance to raise concerns about China’s human rights record (Feller and Pace 2011). Like moderate Democratic leaders before him.afford a war in Libya. The resulting policy of ‘pragmatic engagement’ or ‘principled pragmatism’ was encapsulated by Hillary Clinton before her first visit to China as Secretary of State in 2009. however. We focus on policy coherence and purpose: initially. 4). As cables definitely not intended for public airing. and then regarding the integrity and efficiency of Obama’s foreign policy process. declared Casey. During the 2008 campaign. From the left more generally. do these complex attacks on Obama point to a foreign and security policy which is itself confused and contradictory? We will devote the remainder of this chapter to answering that question. To what extent. Obama has been assaulted from many points of the political compass. made it somewhat easier for the administration in its pursuit of coherent international engagement to dodge the super-partisan context in which Obama had to develop his domestic initiatives. Parmar 2011. We then consider the theme of ‘change’. Obama was attacked for not breaking more decisively with the Bush approach. Asked about the US attitude to human rights issues. before offering an academically-informed evaluation of the first term Obama record. and his instinct for governing pragmatically on the other’. ‘it’s as simple as that’ (Broder 2011). the leaked material appeared to strengthen the case for seeing Obama’s administration as more cynically pragmatic than crusading and idealistic: for example. Secretary Clinton indicated that ‘we know what they’re going to say’ on issues such as Tibetan autonomy ‘and they know what we’re going to say’: ‘We don’t know yet how we’re going to engage on the global economic crisis. Principle and Pragmatism According to Martin Indyk. the global climate change crisis. Obama announced that ‘the lesson of the Bush years is that not talking does not work’ (Indyk. in respect of Chinese human rights and Saudi support for terror groups. Obama was understandably less willing to acknowledge parallels between his strategy for leaving Afghanistan and Richard Nixon’s efforts to use ‘Vietnamization’ – the handing over of security responsibilities to South Vietnam itself – as cover for the American retreat from South East Asia in the early 1970s. However. the president ‘wants to be buddies with Brent Scowcroft. Despite Obama’s retention of ‘idealist’ rhetorical themes. He thinks he can do both at the same time. the White House speechwriter whom commentators came to identify as a guardian of the ‘change we can believe in’ themes of 2008 (Mann 2012: 166-9). my main point is that Obama has tended to lean towards pragmatism and that such a stance is not without its problems. and he also wants to go out and give speeches about democracy. Thus cost-conscious realism and the careful weighing of options in terms of national interest calculation tended constantly to rub up against concerns for human rights and even democracy-promotion: all in the context of an underpinning commitment. The first term Obama foreign policy can indeed be interpreted in terms of attempting to hold a balance between opposing approaches. is generally seen as favouring cautious realist analysis. Obama. inconsistent and even cynical. for example. the president was subsequently attacked in some quarters for withdrawing the olive branch to Iran too quickly when Brazil and Turkey entered the diplomacy of nuclear proliferation (Parsi 2012). In the case of the Arab Spring. even if its exponents do sometimes risk ending up on the wrong side of history. nonetheless.… So if we talk more about those. to leaving a light international footprint. Robert Singh. even as he remained very cautious about revolutionary change in countries like Bahrain and Syria.’ The job of ‘selling’ Obama’s foreign and security policy in the language of idealism often fell to Ben Rhodes. Brent Scowcroft (Lizza 2011: 19). 186). He famously proclaimed himself an admirer of the pragmatic realist approach of President George H. this balancing act continually ran the risk of appearing simultaneously timid. the one-time champion of the ‘audacity of change’. rooted in a reaction to the perceived over-extensions of the Bush years. W. As we have seen. Obama did quite quickly switch to supporting regime change in Egypt in 2011. it’s in large measure because that’s where the opportunity for engagement is’ (Clinton 2009). it is striking how often both administration insiders and outside commentators on Obama’s foreign policy have invoked memories of the Republican pragmatic tradition. Obama arguably learned from the BushScowcroft handling of the diplomacy surrounding the end of the Cold War that cautious realism is often the best path. According to an anonymous Obama adviser interviewed by James Mann. are interesting. Bush and his national security adviser. The parallels with Eisenhower. Where Obama was criticised for his naivety in offering to open a dialogue with Tehran in 2009. Reasons for such caution – from Saudi pressure to the sheer intrinsic difficulty of any credible intervention against the Syrian regime – are not difficult to find. notes the deliberate echoing of President Eisenhower’s ‘calls for budgetary prudence and balance between competing national priorities’ in Obama’s December 2009 West Point address on policy in Afghanistan (Singh 2012: 74. particularly in regard to Ike’s ... Nevertheless. he sermonizes’ (Lizza 2011: 31). so it appeared. In fact. both in terms of the ‘outstretched hand’ to the Muslim world and policy towards China. including the toughening of sanctions. as more than simple. It needs to unite particularised pragmatism with general principle in a coherent and ‘sellable’ way. The ‘pivot’ to the Pacific in the later months of 2011 and in early 2012 caused a degree of consternation in Europe. led logically to new policy emphases. Heisbourg et al 2012). Denial of the need for a foreign policy compass is no more good politics than it is good policy. The failure of Muslim ‘outreach’. American ‘soft power’. Obama’s own willingness to invoke links with Republican presidents also underlined his desire to appear ‘non-ideological’. as in the case of the 2010 Russian spy exchanges. For Fareed Zakaria. a credible and successful presidential foreign policy (at least in the terms outlined earlier in this chapter) needs to embrace more than deft particularised calculation. while not being entirely neglectful of human rights. though not to the extent of compromising his own understanding of the claims of principled pragmatism. Obama. Here. Admirers of the Obama administration’s deft reactiveness can point to his frequently quick-witted and effective handling of difficult and unanticipated problems. was a leader returning to bipartisan ways of international cooperation and strategic restraint. containing nuclear proliferation – became clear in 2009. There may have been a degree of cheap rhetoric in the 2008 campaign. Such a case would proceed as follows: The Obama priorities – exiting as swiftly as possible from Iraq. a reasonable case can be made for seeing the Obama foreign policy as coherent. For Zbigniew Brzezinski. it can be argued that . The Obama ‘answer’ to the over-extension of the Bush years was the policy of pragmatic engagement. The Obama approach involved the sensible realisation that success abroad must stem from economic recovery at home. some defenders of Obama have concentrated precisely upon his pragmatism. but the Obama White House has consciously seen and cleverly exploited the contribution which the presidential eloquence can make to inexpensive. especially towards Iran. the central Obama doctrine is that of strategic restraint. Obama is sometimes seen as a president who tries to substitute soaring rhetoric for coherent policy. whether in Libya or in the case of anti-terror action. but was announced with an unusual degree of clarity (Clinton 2011. national security adviser to President Carter and sometime adviser to the 2008 Obama campaign. Obama ‘doesn’t strategise. Bader 2012: 140-42. showed that he was prepared to take military action.concern with economic constraints on American power-projection. pragmatism bolstered by empty rhetoric. In further pleading the case for attributing coherence to Obama’s foreign policy. even cynical. achieving some kind of ‘good enough’ solution in Afghanistan. ‘operationalised by a careful calculation of costs and benefits’ (Zakaria 2011). for example. and at least sometimes effective. Ignoring charges that the administration has somehow compromised the hopes of 2008. The policy of pragmatic engagement was broadly in line with the demands of cost-conscious realism. attempting to reconcile impossibly contradictory aspirations in speech when they cannot be reconciled in actual policy. Far from seeking to undermine her former rival for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. as well as on divisions within NATO. However. loyal and extraordinarily energetic Secretary of State. in her role as first lady.policy development was not mere random reactiveness. but led a concerted administration effort to achieve a negotiated exit. Mann 2012: 250-1). with the former favouring a much swifter US drawdown. Vice President Joe Biden emerged as an effective leader of diplomacy designed to extricate the US from Iraq. Especially as he neared retirement. his second national security adviser) ranged against idealist/liberal interventionist positions. while White House chiefs Rahm Emanuel. and to some extent over the Afghan drawbacks announced in mid-2011. tensions between major foreign policy principals within the Obama ‘team of’ (potential) ‘rivals’ were kept in check. Peter . The two parted company over Libya. Biden and Clinton found themselves on opposite sides in the Afghan ‘surge’ debate. even if her commitment to American global leadership sometimes seemed to out-run that of her boss (The Economist 2012b. However. Yet. Gates represented effective Republican asbestos for Obama’s potentially tricky relationship with the US military. United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice and (until her resignation from the State Department in February 2010) Anne-Marie Slaughter. Early Obama intra-administration policy debates tended to be much more open than their equivalents under George W. According to James Mann (2012: 211). Hillary Clinton sided with Robert Gates over the Afghan ‘surge and drawdown’ decision of 2009. The debate. Obama’s first Secretary of Defence. control of policymaking tended to flow to Obama’s foreign policy inner circle and away from the ‘team of rivals’ Cabinet officers. just as Gates sided with Clinton over the administration’s commitment to ‘soft power’ diplomacy. associated with White House personnel such as Samantha Power and Michael McFaul. Secretaries Clinton and Gates’ mutual cooperation in the administration’s first two years was a major high -spot for Obama. Bush. and Tom Donilon. there was arguably less personal tension between Biden and Clinton in this period than there had been between Hillary. and Vice President Al Gore in the 1990s. Hillary Clinton developed into an effective. as time elapsed and with a certain sense of inevitability. Process The nomination of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State and the retention of Robert Gates at the Pentagon were high-risk gambles that succeeded. saw postBush cost-conscious realist approaches to world order (exemplified by figures as diverse as Robert Gates. contrasting vividly with Pentagon-State Department tensions in the early years of George W. but the product of a conscious and measured debate within the Obama team. in very schematic terms. this inner circle embraced Tom Donilon. with Secretary Gates urging greater caution. Dennis McDonough. He did not succeed in obtaining Baghdad’s support for a residual American presence beyond 2011. John Brennan and Ben Rhodes from the national security council staff. However. Gates became very outspoken on imbalances in US defence budgeting. Bush. Apparently unable to connect with the White House inner circle. but also ‘special envoy’ George Mitchell in the Middle East . Differences of approach among key personnel were clear and indeed often openly acknowledged. At times. Efforts to blame Frank Wisner (former Ambassador to Egypt and the administration’s main conduit to the Cairo government in February 2011) could not disguise the policy contradictions which attended the outbreak of revolution in Egypt. Tom Donilon and Karl Eikenberry (US Ambassador to Afghanistan) were clearly at odds with one another. should also be acknowledged as a major policy process failure. The subsequent resignation of David Petraeus as head of the Central Intelligence Agency. between the White House staff. Susan Rice and national security council global development director Gayle Smith (Mann 2012: 291-2. Jones was an early casualty of the administration’s procedural dynamics. and with Obama’s second Defence Secretary. . especially in relation to Israeli settlements on the West Bank. Leon Panetta (Mann 2012: 215 -16). was certainly not a return to the model of decisionmaking under President Nixon. however. Anne-Marie Slaughter was arguably another. With Holbrooke’s relationship with the Kabul government at the point of almost complete breakdown. Policy towards Israel. not to mention Hillary Clinton’s restructuring of senior positions at State. Blair. and director of national Intelligence Dennis Blair. the Marine General whose appointment was designed to reassure the military. intelligence adviser within the White House. who was effectively sacked in May 2010. Jame s Mann points out that this analysis was less than convincing – not least in view of the senior position occupied in the Pentagon by Michele Flournoy. Key intra-administration rifts identified by Bob Woodward (2010) included those between Donilon and Gates. It is also worth recalling that the decision to intervene in Libya was also widely linked to the liberal interventionist advocacy of Samantha Power. The assassination of US diplomatic personnel in Libya during the 2012 re-election campaign raised difficult problems for Obama – problems which were exacerbated by clumsy and contradictory administration press statements. Robert Gates. even with his own chief of staff Dennis McDonough. Richard Holbrooke (‘special representative’ for ‘Afpak’. Obama’s White House-centric policy process. where State had been subjected to extreme marginalisation. Hillary Clinton.Rouse and Bill Daley were also included as political contributors to key foreign and security policy decisions. There were some significant procedural confusions during Obama’s first term. especially in view of her departing remarks about the shoving of women in the administration to ‘soft’ jobs in areas like human rights and development. the embodiment of the administration’s commitment to bring together policy for Afghanistan and Pakistan). also clashed with John Brennan. particularly Emanuel. The role of ‘special representative’ – not just Holbrooke. The unhappy White House career of James Jones. following exposure of an extra-marital affair. added to a degree of procedural confusion in the immediate post-election period. Dowd 2011). Richard Holbrooke’s dismissal was averted only by the direct intervention of Secretary Clinton. was often confused.was not adequately defined within the administration power structure. of course. Against the image of Obama as a ditherer. however. Only George H. see also Congressional Research Service 2011). His 2010 sacking of General Stanley McChrystal was well handled.The perception of Obama as a decisional ditherer was also not always entirely wide of the mark. The presidential opinion of July 2011 regarding the inapplicability of the 1973 War Powers Resolution to the Libyan engagement involved the White House counsel (Robert F. The presidential attitude towards legislative war powers did. culminating in the terrorist leader’s surgically operationalised killing in Pakistan (Bowden 2012). Here Obama was able to exploit the cross-cutting legislative positions on controversial military action indicated above.versus Richard Holbrooke and Vice President Biden). sending smaller numbers than requested by Petraeus. did proclaim a measure of continuity with the preceding . Obama proved himself more than able to stand up to criticism from his own military. as well as to doubts both its precise intent and its constitutionality. give ammunition to those critics who saw Obama as simply ‘Bush lite’. W. Bush may plausibly be seen as having a undeniably superior record in terms of procedural coherence. It rested on a controversial. it is important to record his clear-sighted direction of the hunt for Osama bin Laden. decisive and generally respected by the community of the US military (Mann 2012: 222). Bauer) effectively pre-empting the judgement of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (Ackerman 2011. Obama – scarcely the favoured choice for the US military in the 2008 contest against Senator John McCain – did not experience the degree of hostility and contempt from the military which caused such problems for President Bill Clinton. Change and Obama’s Record While aspects of the Obama record. Defenders of the administration could point. though not unprecedented. Johnson. The Afghan ‘surge and drawdown’ decision of late 2009 was the product of a peculiarly public and protracted contest between rival views (broadly Secretary Gates and General David Petraeus – then acting as US military chief in Afghanistan . Despite some procedural inconsistencies and even occasional periods when Obama seemed to be paralysed by foreign policy complexity. what was less defensible than the general working together of the top personnel was Obama’s sidelining of congressional war powers. In terms of policy process. However. it can just as easily be seen as illustrating Obama’s tendency to plump for ‘middle way’ solutions – in this case. The emergence of the decision can be interpreted as indicating Obama’s sensible concern for rational calculation of options. consensus-building and collegial due process (Pfiffner 2011). It is not reassuring to reflect that the previous American president most identified with ‘middle way’ foreign policy solutions was Lyndon B. such as the cavalier presidential attitude towards legislative war powers. the first term policy process did bear positive comparison with the record of most recent presidents. while also setting the exit door clock ticking. to the marginalisation of the War Powers Resolution in recent history. definition of ‘hostilities’ under war powers legislation. however. Moreover. less confrontational direction as the overreach associated with the War on Terror asserted itself. but nevertheless followed the approach embodied in the 2002 strategic offence reductions. By early 2012. technically now conceived in terms of ‘phased adaptation’. compared to about 50 in the Bush years (Indyk. including the development of advanced conventional weapons as a replacement for nuclear ones. it did not amount to anything approaching cancellation of ballistic missile defence. Bush administration (2005-09) had already moved in a more multilateralist. Obama’s decision to halt Eastern European ballistic missile installations appeared on the surface to be a significant part of his ‘change’ agenda. eds. usually externallygenerated. Lieberthal and O’Hanlon 2012: 103). Withdrawal from Iraq proceeded along the track laid by Bush. Jeffrey Bader’s account of East Asian policy under Obama stressed the continuity of pragmatically conceived national interest under both presidents. . though Bader also argued that prioritisation of the region rose significantly under Obama (Bader 2012: xvii. as well as the simple fact (revealed graphically in the ‘wikileaked’ documents) of bureaucratic continuity. Such defence. New Start pledged some $80 billion for nuclear modernisation. 142).. Viewed from remote enough a distance. 2012). Perception of ‘change’ is. The drone strikes were the most prominent and controversial aspect of the redefined ‘Afpak’ strategy for Pakistan. Perceptions of Obama as apologist-in-chief also distort the record of the 44th president willingness to use force. Naturally. American foreign policy since 1945 (if not before) is a story of continuity with only a few.administration. Obama formally committed himself to nuclear ‘global zero’ and hosted a vast Washington conference later in 2010 on nuclear weapons reduction. However. as well as of wider antiterror commitments in Somalia and Yemen. with little in the way of formal verification. The 2010 Nuclear Posture Review included invitations to other countries to work with the US on strategic issues. Partly as the price for some Republican support for the ratification. as presidential leadership and domestic debates over foreign policy interact with shifting international dynamics. Such a view severely underplays the extent to ehich the second George W. More realistically. The New Start Treaty ratification (December 2010) was a major administration success. largely a matter of perspective. in fact. the conservative notion of a timid appeaser in January 2009 replacing a defender of freedom is unconvincing. there were significant layers of Bush-Obama continuity. there had been over 200 drone strikes in Pakistan under Obama. not least in Pakistan. the Bush team after 2004 had itself begun to rediscover the virtues of the pragmatic Republican tradition represented by Bush senior and Brent Scowcroft. which also embraced nuclear weapons and tactical deterrence (The Economist 2012a. In a sense. the substance of the posture review effectively continued the Bush line on nuclear strategy. breaks. Blank and Jordan. remained at the centre of the new NATO security concept (promulgated in late 2010). Issues of change and continuity in foreign policy raise complex questions of structure and agency in international relations. However. change is constant and continuous. and declared that strategic deterrence was not assisted by excessive reliance on nuclear weapons. and certainly pointed to a less grandiose role for the US in terms of global security provision. along with differing perspectives on the Arab Spring (and especially with regard to Syria). To point out the absence of catastrophe is not simply to damn with faint praise. in the politics of nations. as the second term began. The rise of authoritarianism in Russia. an unpredictable Israel. Despite the initial outreach. especially in his first two years in office. and actualised commitment to multilateralism greatly outweighed that of even second term George W. Military spending .as ‘discretionary’ spending (rather than part of the ‘entitlement’ budget represented by programmes such as Social Security) – was vulnerable in the political and economic conditions prevailing under Obama. not least in terms of gaining a degree of cooperation from Moscow in regard to US policy in Afghanistan. Reviewing the Obama record. There was no Bay of Pigs. it is worth noting that the first term involved no clear and obvious errors on the scale of some earlier presidencies. Moreover. often with unpredictable and long-term consequences. Major defence cuts – some $10 billion over ten years – were the product both of economic stringency and of the winding down of inherited wars. Obama’s defence budgets saw significant shifts. Computer-based sabotage – the ‘stuxnet’ virus – seemed by 2011 at least to have delayed Iran’s nuclear programme. Barack Obama. In 2012. the possibility of further major ‘automatic’ cuts emerged from the failure in 2011 of congressional Republicans and Democrats to agree a prioritised schedule of budget deficit reduction. no Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. the administration undertook to shift 60% of naval assets to the Asia-Pacific within eight years (Quinn 2011a). policy towards Iran became trapped between the stick of sanctions and the carrot of incentives.Despite important elements of continuity with his predecessor. Obama transformed policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan – not necessarily in line with the hopes of some of his supporters in 2008. The 2010 National Security Strategy made it clear that terrorism should not be allowed to define America’s role in the world. which hardly anyone could ever imagine coming from the mouth of a George W. and the unattractiveness of a US military option. Bush (Slaughter 2012). the early Russian ‘reset’ may be judged a success. Leading foreign policy without actively courting disaster is at least a minimum qualification for being judged a successful foreign policy president Looking briefly at the geographical range of Obama’s foreign policy. indeed. Much American foreign policy is declaratory. This is not merely a matter of style and rhetoric – ‘sermonizing’ over ‘strategizing’. Obama’s stated. unquestionably uttered many thousands of words. especially in view of . Yet. Bush or indeed a putative President John McCain. but transformed it none the less. notably in terms of outreach to Muslim countries. no Iraq invasion. Washington found itself boxed in between a nuclear-weaponising Iran. with American hopes being increasingly pinned on the former. posed problems for the second term. Key features of Obama’s security posture included commitments to unmanned attack aircraft and to balancing (alongside other regional powers) China’s perceived long-term strategy of ‘anti-access/area denial’ in the Pacific. Presidential words matter: they constitute interventions. Such cuts raised the question of balance between capability and commitment. Obama announced that ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and multilateral action on climate change would be prominent second term concerns. Prospects in Afghanistan veered during the first term between the hopeful and the desperately pessimistic. Obama vainly urged eurozone countries to act decisively to stem their economic crisis. it was being argued that George W. Obama urged eurozone countries to act decisively to stem their fiscal and economic crisis. But even though the US is less hated. David Ignatius offered something which might be seen as coming close to a consensual verdict on the whole first term: ‘Obama’s achievement is that he has reconnected America to the world. US support was forthcoming for the G-20 group of countries (which by now had largely superseded the narrower G-8) not only as a forum which reflected international change. By this time. president for Africa than Obama had thus far been. in regard to one of most common predictions from 2008. From one perspective. Obama appeared to have concluded that any serious drive for an Israel-Palestine peace process would have to await a second term. While remaining feared and hated on the Arab street. A carbon emissions deal of sorts was achieved at Copenhagen in 2009. Tensions within NATO over European defence spending levels. designed to eradicate senior terrorist personnel . some progress had been made on the ‘visionary’ themes of 2008. became intense (Michta 2011). Proponents of this interpretation could point to the retention of Robert Gates at the Pentagon and to the generally cautious choice of Obama’s senior foreign policy ‘team of rivals’. By 2013. Two or so years into his administration. the administration had also succeeded in alienating Israeli public opinion (Indyk. though it lacked binding force. Conclusion: Change We Can Believe In? As Obama began his second term. Policy towards Latin America broadly continued in the mould inherited from Bush. 17 October 2010). In late 2012. Bush had been as good. Rather than sponsoring grand initiatives. pure and simple’ (Haass 2011. Lieberthal and O’Hanlon 2012: 112-40). The first term record was patchy. but also as a body capable of tackling humanitarian agendas. if not a better. as well as over the Europeans’ military performance in Afghanistan. Afghanistan had become under Obama’s direction ‘a strategic distraction. president of the Council on Foreign Relations. Bush administration. the Obama foreign policy grew rather naturally from the second George W. see also O’Hanlon and Sherjan 2010). The security outlook for Pakistan remained dire. with Obama signing a free trade deal with Colombia and becoming preoccupied with Mexican drug-related security. In October 2010. The proliferation of drone attacks can be seen as constituting a new stage in what was still a strategy-defining War on Terror. it may also be taken less seriously by other nations’ (The Washington Post. For Haass. two opposing narratives of the first term foreign policy approach and sense of direction presented themselves. with little prospect of more than what Richard Haas called in May 2011 ‘a messy stalemate’ following America’s exit.the latter’s likely impact on oil prices (Hurst 2012). the strategic post-Cold War debates about the appropriate international posture for the United States had properly resumed. administration officials were able explicitly to look forward to an era when direction of the battle against global terrorism could be handed over to international agencies. though at least the need for a ‘multi-partner’ approach was clearly recognised in both cases. Thus Obama. In a sense. following their hyper-violent interruption on September 11. inadvertently contributed to a global undermining of American power by failing to make clear strategic choices (Mearsheimer. remained excessively unwilling to accept the governmental legitimacy of political Islam. Obama succeeded in finding a way out of both . the Afghan ‘surge’ decision revealed the administration’s unwillingness clearly to break with its inheritance from Bush. even though he has sensibly sought to accommodate America to global transitions. A second interpretation would take the announced shifts of the Obama first term much more seriously.often trumped. President Obama in his first term had no reason to feel embarrassed about the need to step back a little from foreign engagement in order to make space for domestic renewal. even as the second inauguration beckoned. securing both the ratification of the New Start Treaty and workable legislative support for the Libyan air intervention of 2011. while essentially missing the chance to redraw priorities as the US withdrew from Iraq and planned to withdraw from Afghanistan. it might be argued that the Obama approach was in some measure to recognise the blindingly obvious fact of China’s rise. In this perspective. the US (in this line of argument) remained globally over-committed. In this perspective. it might be argued. Obama. to a ‘post -American’) world of economic constraint and continued strategic uncertainty. The Libyan intervention. The US under Obama thus sought to return to strategic restraint and multilateral cooperative liberalism. and even as economic constraints on Pentagon spending became increasingly evident. without the War on Terror being allowed to determine America’s strategic outlook. 2011. Under Obama. even if the Obama administration (like the Bill Clinton administration) remained torn between the perceived need to assert ‘values’ and the need to engage enemies in dialogue. Obama managed to thread a route around extreme domestic partisanship. From a slightly different perspective. Thus. for which Washington was concerned to recruit Arab League support and (eventually) to underpin NATO allied action. Obama in his first term failed to make much progress in respect of either Iran or North Korea. Obama quietly dropped his objections to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance and Patriot Acts. but did not entirely extinguish. if the term is not too loaded.even as it cut the ground from under Republican critics of the administration’s putative timidity. At home. indeed can be seen as a model for the future. while retaining a high-handed attitude towards legislative war powers. 2001. Obama had a clear purpose: to adapt US foreign policy to a post-unipolar (indeed. Real progress (it might be argued) was made in degrading terrorist capabilities. the visionary themes of the 2008 campaign. Obama’s cost-conscious realism – so a sympathetic account of recent presidential diplomacy might proceed . Singh 2012). pragmatic engagement superseded the ‘freedom agenda’. By late 2012. during his first term. Some elements of the first line of interpretation are persuasive. while preserving both a considerable degree of multiple advocacy and a constructive role for big foreign policy players outside the White House. On the international stage. even if the exit from the latter was excessively delayed by the retention of unrealistic hopes. quite feasible that the contemporary ‘discourse of American decline’ – the discourse which. Obama. Obama had succeeded by 2012 in establishing a degree of national consensus over America’s international direction. Illegal War’. this chapter inclines to the second more positive evaluation of Obama’s foreign policy. Whatever the fate of the ‘rise of the rest’. Yet policy direction was at least situated firmly in the White House. quite contrary to the situation in regard to domestic policy. the first term Obama administration did not always maintain a viable balance between retreating from over-extension and recognising that the alternative to American global leadership is often no leadership at all. however. Obama’s decisional processes demonstrated commitments to procedural rationality. Recalling our earlier points about how to evaluate presidential foreign policy. Alter. Jonathan (2010) The Promise: President Obama. it may convincingly be argued that Obama managed to convert a potentially disastrous legacy from Bush into a foreign policy which pointed away from the over-extensions of the War on Terror. 20 June. New York Times. Yet strategic choices do need to be made to keep pace with international change. Obama appreciated in 2009 that domestic reform must be given priority. at least began the necessary process of making strategic choices. Indeed. but a sensible adjustment to international change. Simon and Schuster. . it might be argued that. in national electoral terms. can never quite speak its name . New York. Obama’s LBJ-like preference for the ‘middle way’ was not always reassuring. partisan attacks on Obama’s foreign policy have been far less concerted and united than conservative onslaughts on his domestic agenda. It is. America has now long since said goodbye to its post-Cold War ‘unipolar moment’. As we have seen. the ‘pivot’ to Asia represented a deliberate and defensible strategic choice – not an abandonment of Europe. of course. Above all. 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