Obama's Foreign Policy

Michelle Bentley, Jack Holland, Michelle Bentley, Jack Holland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134548545
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This edited volume is an innovative analysis of President Barack Obama's foreign policy, security and counter-terrorism policy, specifically within the context of ending the now infamous War on Terror. The book adopts a comparative approach, analysing change and continuity in US foreign policy during Obama's first term in office vis-à-vis the foreign policy of the War on Terror, initiated by George W. Bush following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Despite being heralded as an agent of change, since his election in 2008 Obama has faced criticism that his foreign policy is effectively the same as what went before and that the War on Terror is still alive and well. Far from delivering wholesale change, Obama has been accused of replicating and even reinforcing the approach, language and policies that many anticipated he would reject. With contributions from a range of US foreign policy experts, this volume analyses the extent to which these criticisms of continuity are correct, identifying how the failure to end the War on Terror is manifest and explaining the reasons that have made enacting change in foreign policy so difficult. In addressing these issues, contributions to this volume will discuss continuity and change from a range of perspectives in International Relations and Foreign Policy Analysis.

This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of US foreign policy, security studies and American politics.

1 Obama's war on terrorism in rhetoric and practice¹

Trevor McCrisken

DOI: 10.4324/9781315888545-2

Introduction

During his Second Inaugural Address, on 21 January 2013, US President Barack Obama insisted that he and all Americans understand that ‘enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war’. He confidently declared that a ‘decade of war is now ending’ (Obama 2013). Almost a dozen years, however, after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC on 11 September 2001, the United States remains embroiled in a long-term struggle with what George W. Bush (2001) called the existential threat of international terrorism. On the campaign trail in 2008, his successor as US President, Barack Obama, promised to reboot the ‘War on Terror’. He claimed that his new administration would step back from the rhetoric and much of the policy of the Bush administration, conducting a counter-terrorism campaign that would be more morally acceptable, more focused and more effective – smarter, better, nimbler, stronger (‘Obama’s Remarks on Iraq and Afghanistan’ 2008). Those expecting wholesale changes to US counter-terrorism policy, however, misread Obama’s intentions. Obama always intended to deepen Bush’s commitment to counter-terrorism, while at the same time ending the ‘distraction’ of the Iraq War. Rather than being trapped by Bush’s institutionalised construction of a global war on terror (see Section 2 of this book and, in particular, Jackson’s and Bentley’s chapters), the continuities in counter-terrorism can be explained by Obama’s shared conception of the imperative of reducing the terrorist threat to the US, as demonstrated by his pursuit and elimination of the al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden. This chapter focuses on the difficulties Obama has had in distinguishing his counter-terrorism policy from that of his predecessor and explores how his rhetoric has been reconstituted as the actions of his policy have unfolded. In particular, attention is focused on the problems of fulfilling his promise to continue combating terrorism, while adhering to core moral values and principles. By addressing his policies toward Afghanistan and Pakistan, Guantanamo Bay and torture, and the use of unmanned drone attacks, it will be argued that Obama’s ‘war’ against terrorism is not only in keeping with the assumptions and priorities of the last decade but also that, despite some successes, it is just as problematic as that of his predecessor.

While running for president in 2008, Obama portrayed himself as an antidote to the excesses of the Bush administration. He rejected and condemned the extremes of Bush’s foreign policy, in particular the conduct of the ‘War on Terror’, and vowed to return the US to a moral, benign and cooperative foreign policy based on foundational values and principles: ‘We must adhere to our values as diligently as we protect our safety with no exceptions’ (Associated Press 2009). Upon taking office, Obama immediately confronted what he considered the most objectionable aspects of Bush’s prosecution of the ‘War on Terror’. In one of his earliest actions, President Obama signed Executive Orders ordering the closure of the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay and forbidding the use of torture by the United States. In doing so, Obama claimed to ‘restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great’, standards that he argued could be maintained ‘even in the midst of war, even in dealing with terrorism’. The message to the rest of the world was clear, Obama (2009a) argued, that the US can prosecute the war against terrorism in ‘a manner consistent with our values and our ideals’.

Obama also claimed he would effect ideological change. This meant reconstructing the narrative of the ‘War on Terror’ by ceasing to use the same language as the Bush administration. Indeed, in March 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced, ‘The administration has stopped using the phrase and I think that speaks for itself’ (in Solomon 2009). Accordingly, the administration not only sought to avoid particular phrases, but also attempted to reframe the ‘War on Terror’ by giving it a lower profile alongside a wide range of other foreign policy priorities, such as nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation. Obama has actively sought to prevent counter-terrorism from dominating his presidency or indeed even his foreign policy. In doing so he has followed in the tradition of many presidents, including Reagan and Clinton, who recognised counter-terrorism as a zone of unpredictable political risk (Naftali 2005). However, while the message has changed – denoted by an important speech in Cairo to the Islamic world in June 2010 – the policies have shifted less. Announcing the closure of Guantanamo Bay was an important symbolic move, but revising the substance of American counter-terrorism has proven problematic, as the continued presence of detainees at the US base on Cuba demonstrate. As this chapter will emphasise, political realities have had a habit of complicating or undermining Obama’s attempts to change both the substance and tone of the struggle with terrorism.

Obama was certainly keen to make strategic changes. He was determined to refocus the fight against terrorism by gradually extracting the US from Iraq, while deepening the commitment to the campaign in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which he effectively characterised as the ‘real war on terror’. Once again the twin claims of better and cleaner were present. Obama asserted that he would do this in ways that were not only more effective than his predecessor, but also more transparent, more cooperative with allies and more responsive to the democratic ideals of the American people and the US Congress (‘Obama’s Remarks on Iraq and Afghanistan’ 2008). The degree to which Obama has lived up to the expectations of this renewal of US counter-terrorism policy in terms of both ideas and action is a matter of much debate.

The texture of Obama’s counter-terrorism strategy is highly contested. During his first term, Obama was subjected to fierce criticism by the right for reversing the Bush years and simultaneously savaged by liberals for concretising the Bush strategy (Wilson 2010; Bolton 2010; Ali 2010). The debate has been fuelled by moments of apparent indecision and hesitation in the Obama White House, most obviously in the prolonged debate over whether to commit more troops to Afghanistan. Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward’s fly-on-the wall account of the deliberations, and the media furore that followed its publication, mostly emphasised the conflicts and suggested that indecision and hostility were rife within the administration (Woodward 2010; Baker 2010a Tracy 2010). A closer reading, however, suggests that Obama is a highly deliberative and careful president who contrasts favourably not only with Bush, but also with other predecessors who were caught in difficult wars, such as Lyndon Johnson during Vietnam. As James T. Kloppenberg (2011: xii) has observed, Obama exhibits a philosophical pragmatism that ‘embraces uncertainty, provisionality, and the continuous testing of hypotheses through experimentation’. Obama’s style might frustrate those who seek quick decisions, but it appeals to others who consider him willing to listen to alternative viewpoints before then acting decisively once he has considered all options.

There have certainly been successes, none more so than the tracking down and killing of Osama Bin Laden on 2 May 2011. Obama has, therefore, been able to claim the greatest victory yet in Washington’s ‘War on Terror’, and one that had constantly eluded and frustrated his predecessor George W. Bush. By taking out the head of the terror network responsible for the ‘9/11’ attacks, and the individual in whom the threat of international terrorism was so greatly personified, Obama may appear to have successfully insulated himself from any further criticism over his counter-terrorism policies. Yet while the killing of Bin Laden drew substantial praise from across the political spectrum, the fault-lines over US counter-terrorism policy run much deeper and Obama’s problems in the face of the intractable problem of international terrorism remain great.

Despite the elimination of Bin Laden, overall the story of Obama’s first term was one of faltering change. Bush loyalists have been reluctant to praise Obama for continuing Bush policies for fear that it will make it harder for Obama to persevere. However, in private, they are shaking their heads with amazement at how little substantial change there has been (Baker 2010b). How can we explain the distance between the apparent rhetoric of change in 2008 and what has followed? There are at least three explanations. First, and most important, is the rhetoric of counter-terrorism. Obama foreshadowed much of his programme in his pre-election speeches. Yet audiences were selective in what they heard – displaying a strange kind of psychological dissonance. Obama repeatedly promised to get tougher on America’s ‘real’ enemies in locations such as Pakistan, to deepen the war in Afghanistan and to improve intelligence – but the audience was not listening, seeming to believe instead that Obama would draw back significantly from Bush’s ‘war on terror’ once in office.²

Second, few have appreciated how much the Bush strategy was quietly modified in the last three years before Obama’s accession. Partly under pressure from European allies and partly as a result of internal squabbles, there was a step change in strategic thinking during 2006 and 2007. In other words, Obama has adopted a counter-terrorism strategy that is late-Bush rather than early-Bush. He has introduced some significant changes of his own, but even these were in the spirit of the adaptations that were already ongoing. Many of the things that Obama promised to fix were already being fixed in the last year of the Bush presidency.

Finally, government is different to opposition. Even as Obama prepared to take office in January 2009, he faced a terrorist plot directed at his inauguration (Baker 2010b). At the end of the same year, the so-called ‘Christmas Day Plot’ underlined the vulnerability of the presidency to charges of weakness in the context of terrorism. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old from Nigeria, was able to board a plane for Detroit with explosives, despite his father visiting the US Embassy in Lagos to denounce his son to the authorities. The day after the failed Detroit attack, Obama’s rhetoric became more openly martial. ‘We are at War’, he declared (in Zeleny and Cooper 2010). As Obama begins his second term in the White House, the administration’s dedication to combating the threat of terrorism in ways not overly different from its predecessor shows no signs of abating and, consequently, questions about the moral underpinnings of US counter-terrorism remain.

Obama's rhetoric and the ‘War on Terror'

When Barack Obama was campaigning for the presidency in 2008 he made ‘Change’ the main theme that he was offering the American electorate. Although for the vast majority of voters the economy was the most important factor affecting their decision of who to vote into the White House, there was nonetheless a strong sense among those who threw their weight behind Obama that he would lead the US away from the deeply unpopular foreign policy of President Bush, not least that he would withdraw the US from the war in Iraq and renew good relations with America’s allies. Candidate Obama emphasised both these priorities in his campaign speeches and writings, seemingly to great advantage. Of the 41 per cent of voters in the 2008 presidential election who ‘strongly disapproved’ of the Iraq War, for example, an overwhelming 87 per cent voted for Obama. The Democratic challenger also won the votes of 55 per cent of the further fifth of voters who ‘somewhat disapproved’ of the war. Only just over a third of the voters approved of the Iraq War in November 2008, and these leaned heavily to his Republican opponent John McCain (‘President – National Exit Poll’ 2008). As he prepared to take the oath of office in January 2009, two-thirds of Americans believed Obama would handle the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq ‘about right’. The expectations extended well beyond a withdrawal from the unpopular war in Iraq, however. There was a chorus of analysts and observers either expecting or calling for Obama to significantly shift the foreign policy emphasis away from terrorism. Roger Cohen (2009) in the New York Times asserted that ‘Obama has to lay out a vision that goes beyond the war on terror and draws the partners of a re-imagined United States, less powerful but still indispensable, into a shared push for greater prosperity and security’. High-profile academics, such as Andrew Bacevich (2010), hoped that Obama’s election would ‘signal a clear repudiation of his predecessor’s reckless and ill-advised approach to national security policy’. Observers confidently declared, in inauguration week, that change had come to Washington. As the New York Times put it in its editorial on Obama’s inaugural address:

In about 20 minutes, he swept away eight years of President George Bush’s false choices and failed policies and promised to recommit to America’s most cherished ideals.

(‘President Obama’ 2009)

Such high expectations soon gave way to a great deal of disappointment during the first term of Obama’s presidency. As Bacevich put it in January 2010, his hopes that Obama’s election would bring ‘a clear break from the past’ that would allow a full debate on US foreign policy priorities, strategy and tactics turned out to be a ‘great illusion’. He concluded that ‘The candidate who promised to “change the way Washington works” has become Washington’s captive’. Richard Jackson (2011) has shown convincingly how the Bush administration constructed a deeply resonating narrative of terrorism as an existential threat to the US that must be confronted in a perhaps unending conflict. Jackson argues that the Bush administration ‘institutionalised and normalised’ the war on terrorism not only as the centrepiece of its foreign policy, but also through the reorientation of the national security structure, and an embedding of the ideas and assumptions about the terrorist threat within American culture. He concludes that it has ‘become a powerful social structure (a hegemonic discourse or “regime of truth”) that both expresses and simultaneously co-constructs US interests and identity’.

If the war against terrorism has become institutionalised as common sense within US society, it is extremely difficult for any policy maker or opinion shaper in the US, even a new president apparently dedicated to ‘change’, to seriously challenge the underlying assumptions of the ‘War on Terror’ and move policy significantly toward a ne...