Abstract
Barack Obama’s mandate began with an effort to distance him-self from the excesses of his predecessor. The Bush administration itself had all but admitted the conclusion of the Bush revolution, due foremost to the multiplying costs of the unanticipated insurgency in Iraq, which ended up producing ten times the casualties of the war to oust Saddam.1 The wider Bush agenda in the Middle East was abandoned; the United States involved its NATO allies in operations in Afghanistan; opened up a multilateral dialogue to convince North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program; and mended relations with Russia, China, France, and Germany. Furthermore, the fall of 2008 produced the most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression, which diminished the resources available for an assertive US foreign policy.2
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Notes
Philip Gordon, “The End of the Bush Revolution,” Foreign Affairs 85 (July/August 2006): 75–86; G. John Ikenberry, “The End of the Neo-Conservatism Movement,” Survival (Spring 2004): 7–22. On the occupation of Iraq, see
Bob Woodward, State of Denial (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006);
Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and the Occupation of Iraq (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006);
Thomas Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin Books, 2006);
Thomas Ricks, The Gamble: General Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin Books, 2009).
Christopher Layne, “America’s Middle East Strategy after Iraq,” Review of International Studies 35 (January 2009): 5–25.
Kary Lydersen, “War Costing $720 Million Each Day, Group Says,” Washington Post, September 22, 2007; Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq War (New York: Norton, 2008).
Several commentators noticed the inability of the Obama administration to articulate a grand strategy to replace the Bush revolution. Walter Russell Mead, “The Carter Syndrome,” Foreign Policy 89 (January/ February 2010): 58–64;
Daniel Drezner, “Does Obama Have a Grand Strategy?” Foreign Affairs 90 (July/August 2011): 57–68; Leslie Gelb, “The Elusive Obama Doctrine,” National Interest (September 2012), available at http://nationalinterest.org/article/the-elusive-obamadoctrine-7340.
James Mann, The Obamians: The Struggle Inside the White House to Redefine American Power (New York: Viking, 2012), pp. 11, 164–7; David Brooks, “Obama Admires Bush,” New York Times, May 16, 2008; Ryan Lizza, “The Consequentialist: How the Arab Spring Remade Obama’s Foreign Policy,” New Yorker, May 2, 2011.
David Sanger, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret War and Surprising Use of American Power (New York: Crown, 2012), p. 156; Helen Cooper and David Sanger, “Obama’s Message to Iran Is Opening Bid in Diplomatic Drive,” New York Times, March 20, 2009.
Sanger, Confront and Conceal, pp. 383–6; Victor Cha, The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future (New York: Ecco, 2012), pp. 295–6.
Ahmed Rashid, Pakistan on the Brink: The Future of America, Pakistan, and Afghanistan (New York: Viking Books, 2012), pp. 73–4.
The insurgents active in Afghanistan are the so-called Afghan Taliban, comprising the Quetta Shura headed by Mullah Omar, and located in the province of Baluchistan in Pakistan; the Haqqani network, which pledges allegiance to Mullah Omar, but acts independently and is located in Pakistan’s Federal Administered Tribal Areas (FATA); and the Islamic militant group Hezb e Islami Gulbuddin led by warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and located in Northern Pakistan. Ibid; Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The US and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (New York: Penguin Books, 2009);
Seth Jones, In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), esp. chaps. 10–11.
Bob Woodward, Obama’s Wars (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), pp. 186–7, 126–7.
On Iran, see Sanger, Confront and Conceal, pp. 149–87; Lynn Davis, Jeffrey Martini, Alireza Nader, Dalia Dassa Kaye, James Quinlivan, and Paul Steinberg, Iran’s Nuclear Future: Critical US Policy Choices (Santa Monica: Rand, 2011);
Dana Allin and Steven Simon, Sixth Crisis: Iran, Israel, America, and Rumors of War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). On North Korea, see Cha, Impossible State, pp. 263–314;
Jonathan Pollack, No Exit: North Korea, Nuclear Weapons and International Security (New York: Routledge, 2011).
Khan has never been charged for smuggling, to which he confessed to in 2004. Job Warrick, “Nuclear Scientist Is Freed from House Arrest,” Washington Post, February 7, 2009. On the network and connections with the Pakistani military and intelligence establishment, see Gordon Corera, Shopping for Bombs: Nuclear Proliferation, Global Insecurity, and the Fall of the A. Q Khan Network (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Rashid, Descent into Chaos, pp. 287–9; Rashid, Pakistan on the Brink, pp. 63–4.
Bruce Riedel, Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America, and the Future of Global Jihad (Washington: Brookings Institution, 2011), p. 125.
For the G2 argument, see Robert Zoellick and Justin Yifu Lin, “Recovery: A Job for China and the US,” Washington Post, March 6, 2009; Fred Bergsten, “A Partnership of Equals: How Washington Should Respond to China’s Economic Challenge,” Foreign Affairs 87 (July/August 2008): 57–69; for Chimerica, see Niall Ferguson, “What Chimerica Hath Wrought,” American Interest (January/February 2009);
Aaron Friedberg, A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in East Asia (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), pp. 46, 112–3, 256–7. For the G2 rebuke, see “Clinton’s Speech on US-China Relations in the 21st Century, January 14, 2011,” accessible at http://www.cfr.org/china/clintons-speech-us-china-relations-21st-century-january-2011/p23 813.
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© 2013 Tudor A. Onea
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Onea, T.A. (2013). The Future of US Foreign Policy: Reset Game. In: US Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137359353_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137359353_7
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