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Barack Obama's Post-American Foreign Policy: the Limits of Engagement

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Barack Obama's Post-American Foreign Policy: the Limits of Engagement Singh, Robert. "Preface and Acknowledgments." Barack Obama's Post-American Foreign Policy: The Limits of Engagement. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012. xi–xvi. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 2 Oct. 2021. <>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 2 October 2021, 09:27 UTC. Copyright © Robert Singh 2012. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. Preface and Acknowledgments s part of his State Visit to the United Kingdom, Barack Obama delivered the Afi rst ever speech by an American president in Westminster Hall to Members of both Houses of Parliament on May 25, 2011. I was fortunate enough to be part of the audience, as a guest of the United States Embassy in London. The great state occasion was also a rather curious one, with a mixture of Members of the House of Commons and the House of Lords, former prime ministers and the great and the good of British public life assembled together (not to mention assorted UK academics, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Tom Hanks). After a tour of the Palace of Westminster, President Obama was unfashionably late in arriving – prompting certain former PMs unused to such treatment to look askance at their watches – and provided a curiously unengaged speech, his gaze only rarely wavering from the teleprompter and his words only once interrupted by a spontaneous round of applause. Nonetheless, the president was received in a by now familiar combination of reverence and awe, entering and exiting to standing ovations and numerous attempts by star-struck Brits to gain a presidential handshake or a have a brief word with the world’s most powerful leader and hottest celebrity. In the presence of this particular American president, the normally unemotional, stoic and sceptical British exhibited tingles of which MSNBC’s Chris Matthews would have been deeply envious. At the time, what was striking to me about the speech was less its predictably enthusiastic reception than its rather formulaic content. If one closed one’s eyes and listened intently, the kinds of themes that the president articulated were ones not so different from those of his much-unloved predecessor in the White House: the crucial partnership between America and Britain, through history and down to today; the set of shared values that underpinned this, and their export through the wider world; the necessity of opposing tyranny, if necessary with military force; and the importance of market democracies. An academic colleague commented to me at its conclusion that it “sounded quite neo-con in places” and, certainly, George W. Bush would surely have been excoriated for delivering the same speech for which Obama was loudly applauded. That seemed to me to confi rm the peculiar state of fl ux affecting transatlantic relations in 2011–12 and the profound confusions that continue to surround Washington’s approach to international affairs. It also encouraged me to try to complete an assessment of Obama’s foreign policy, even if his term was not yet complete; one that sought to reconcile the aspirations for transformative change that had so strongly informed the 2008 presidential campaign with the more prosaic and conventional features that appeared to characterize his grand strategy in offi ce. xi xii PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Long before his speech to Westminster Hall, the original genesis of this book occurred during a year of very high – and in retrospect, as some of us argued at the time, far too high – expectations, back in 2008. In June of that year, shortly after then Senator Barack Obama of Illinois had secured the Democratic Party’s nomination after a protracted and fractious campaign against the initial frontrunner, Hillary Clinton, but prior to the two major party conventions and the political and economic upheaval brought about by that fall’s devastating fi nancial crisis, I spent some three weeks in Washington, D.C. Promoting a book that I had co-written with my then University of London friend and colleague, Timothy Lynch, entitled After Bush: The Case for Continuity in American Foreign Policy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), the historic 2008 campaign partly framed our mixed reception in the nation’s capital. Our book’s central argument was that, despite the very serious and costly errors in its execution, the key principles and policies that had informed what had come to be known variously as the “Bush Doctrine” and the “war on terror” would, and should, continue to shape US foreign policy after January 2009 – regardless of who won the 2008 election. That was, at the time, a highly controversial thesis, as we were well aware when we wrote the book, and as we were regularly reminded on both sides of the Atlantic – with varying degrees of doubt, disdain and indignation – after its publication. Especially coming from two Brits, the highly contentious notion that, after seven years of an extraordinarily controversial and divisive presidency, key elements of Bush’s foreign policy were essentially correct, and therefore should continue, was a claim that few Americans other than Republican partisans, stalwart conservatives and immediate members of the extended Bush family could entertain (never mind Europeans, for whom Bush was marginally less popular than the bubonic plague and avian bird fl u combined). What was perhaps more surprising than the normative and prescriptive disagreements about the Bush Doctrine, the war on terror and other foreign policies, however, was the more predictive aspect: that regardless of its merits and demerits, Bush’s successor in the White House would likely continue much of the foreign policy that the forty-third president had initiated. In touting our contrarian speculative wares around various of the many think tanks and research councils that make Washington such an intellectual powerhouse as well as an unmatched political hotbed – the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Hudson Institute, the World Affairs Council and so on – what became strikingly apparent was how hostile all sides of the pronounced partisan and ideological divide were to the very idea of continuity in US foreign policy after Bush. Although moderate conservatives such as David Brooks, Christopher Buckley and Colin Powell ended up supporting him as the better choice for president, for many conservatives Barack Obama represented one of the most radical and disturbing national fi gures to have arisen in recent American politics, PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii whose recent national emergence and potential control of the White House – particularly with supportive congressional Democratic majorities – promised extensive and fundamental discontinuity with his predecessor. Indeed, to many on the right, an Obama presidency promised a clear break not simply with George W. Bush, but also with all of his modern-era predecessors, along with the broad bipartisan commitment to maintaining and enhancing American primacy that had guided presidents of both parties from Harry S. Truman onwards. For many conservatives, Obama was not only so radical in his political views but also so self-consciously “cosmopolitan” in his background and demeanour that he represented something of a “post-American” – or even “un-American” – quantity. On this conception, much as he pledged to spread some of the wealth around domestically, so an Obama foreign policy seemed likely to spread some of the power around globally – to America’s lasting damage and international stability’s long-term detriment. For progressives, by contrast, while Obama was as all-American as any other candidate – perhaps more so, in personally symbolizing the changing demographic dynamics and mixed heritage of the quintessential immigrant nation – the notion of Obama maintaining continuity in foreign policy was equally as distasteful as to those on the right, owing to the strategic shambles that Bush had presided over as Commander-in-Chief. After years of seemingly irreparable damage that the Toxic Texan had wrought upon Washington’s international relations, Obama would effect the decisive “change” that he relentlessly campaigned on and fi nally restore rationality, realism and pragmatism – not to mention “hope” alongside humility – to US foreign policy, in place of ideology, dogma and hubris. If American relations with the wider world were indeed about to take a decisive break from the status quo, then for those on what Howard Dean liked to refer to as the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party,” this was to be warmly welcomed. For both Obama’s critics and his supporters, then, the one commodity that would not be distinctive of his administration was essential continuity. Perhaps I was naive to experience some surprise at the strongly bifurcated reactions to our case. But even for an experienced scholar, it is one thing to read in dry, abstract and regression-equation-heavy academic books and political science journal articles of the intense polarization of recent American politics. It is another entirely to experience this at fi rst hand. What struck me forcefully during the summer of 2008 was not that the thesis of essential continuity in US foreign policy could be doubted; conservatives and progressives alike advanced a lot of carefully reasoned and well-made points that showed up important weaknesses in our central argument and that undeniably held a lot of critical weight. At
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