Barack Obama, time and US foreign policy

Abstract

The chapters in this book ably demonstrate the extent to which the distinctiveness and trajectory of US foreign policy under President Obama remain open to contest. In part, this is itself a product of timing. With the president just beginning his second term at the writing of this chapter, much of the documentation that will inform later historians and analysts remains, for now, inaccessible (Pious 2011: 283). At the same time, this contestability connects also to a widespread, and continuing, impression that an overarching framework or narrative simply does not yet exist for this administration. As Adam Quinn (2011: 813) notes, ‘At one point or other the President has variously been characterized as a realist, a liberal internationalist, an isolationist, a neoconservative and an imperialist’. Thus, while the ideological and doctrinal commitments of his predecessor’s war on terror were, perhaps, less straightforward than is often supposed (see, for example, Mazarr 2003: 305), Obama’s first term, at least, has made for a particularly amorphous presidency. And, as McCrisken (2011: 783) suggests, this brings with it its own attendant challenges: ‘Obama has been subjected to fierce criticism by the right for reversing the policies of the Bush years and simultaneously savaged by liberals for consolidating the Bush strategy’ (McCrisken 2011: 783). The difficulty of delimiting the meaning and direction of Obama’s foreignpolicy is important, for us, because it necessarily complicates any effort to situate his decision-making in relation to what came before. If the present itself is contestable, then so will be its connection to particular pasts. This is part of the reason, I think, that the diversity of perspectives included in the preceding chapters is even possible. A more significant factor still, however, concerns the inherently narrative character of any effort to posit continuity or change over time. As argued below, events do not organise themselves into patterns of progress, decline, cyclicity, discontinuity and so forth. These patterns emerge from the interpretive labour of their observer (or, better, producer). Continuities and changes, in other words, are not given to us fully formed. They are, instead, produced in the attempts that we make to understand the world around us and its ‘raw’, ontological, material (if such a thing even exists). This is as true, I will argue, of the stories academics and otherstell about foreign policy, as it is of any other effort to make sense of the events and processes that take place in time. To develop this argument, the chapter proceeds in two parts. It begins witha brief overview of social scientific debates on the nature of time, pointing, in particular, to contemporary investigations of time’s inherently social and narrative character. A second section then applies insights from these discussions to the competing understandings of Obama’s foreign policy evident in this book and elsewhere. In so doing, it seeks not to discover the accuracy of these interpretations, nor does it attempt to recover any motivation beneath these distinct narratives (see Jarvis 2009: 19-22). Instead, it offers a rather more modest attempt to explore how these interpretations have themselves been constructed, and what assumptions they rely upon, presuppose and reproduce. A reading of this sort, I will argue, helps us to identify that arguments (or constructions) about continuity and change within Barack Obama’s foreign policy do far more than simply locate the decisions and actions of his administration within the passage of time. They are integral, in addition, to efforts to understand and evaluate these very decisions and actions, their utility and legitimacy.