James Joyner explains how the Obama administration’s foreign policy has remained pretty much in-line with Bush’s second term:
Through some combination of political calculation and genuine misunderstanding, Obama campaigned against a caricature of Bush’s foreign policy. Early in Bush’s second term, he began quietly shifting away from the so-called neoconservatives, and the realists resumed their dominance. Paul Wolfowitz went off to the World Bank in 2005. Doug Feith left that same year. After the November 2006 midterm debacle, Don Rumsfeld was allowed to ride off into the sunset, too. Pragmatic realists Condoleezza Rice and Bob Gates came into ascendency and quietly changed the administration’s focus. Obama has surrounded himself with pragmatic realists, too, so it’s not all that surprising that he’s carrying on the same basic strategy.
More importantly, however, despite the frenzy over personalities that we frequently find ourselves caught up in, the fact of the matter is that, like Bush before him, Obama is the American president. While different occupants of the Oval Office naturally have different instincts and emphases, their country has the same interests regardless of who’s filling the big chair. Likewise, we seem to constantly forget, the countries with whom we deal have continuing interests.
I think this is pretty much exactly true. You should read the whole thing, though, as Joyner takes us region-by-region to illustrate his point.
It seems like I should have a problem with this, but I don’t. Bush II was not too bad, all things considered. I think that Obama has been able to accomplish more by just not being Bush, and being able to press the reset button in that way.
I think that Obama has been very successful on foreign policy in his first six months. No Israel-Palestine breakthrough or anything, but the initial steps toward leaving Iraq have been accomplished reasonably well, Pakistan and Afghanistan have stabilized a bit, he’s done a great job with the Iranian protesters. North Korea remains an issue, obviously, and I’m not sure what to think about Honduras. At the very least, he’s siding with the consensus within the region, if nothing else.Report
No surprise really. Foreign policy is usually the thing that changes the least form administration to administration. I’ve long imagined a moment in each presidential transition where the outgoing President watches the new President receiving his first CIA briefing and then bursts into laughter as the new guy’s eyes get wider and wider and his jaw eventually hits the floor.Report
It’s a short film from Dallas in 1963…Report
Assessing changes in foreign policy take a long time. Can anyone picture bush even remotely suggesting to push the Israelis the way The Big O seems to have. And there does seem to have been a sharp decrease in the constant saber rattling. And some of these foreign policy problems don’t actually have much of a solution, it is more about managing the situation: NK for example.Report
The test of this will be what our presence in Iraq amounts to in 2015 or so.Report