Introduction: Why is change so hard? Understanding continuity in Barack Obama’s foreign policy

Abstract

This book addresses a pressing, contemporary puzzle, which reflects enduring debates in the discipline of International Relations and the social sciences more generally. Why has a president elected on a platform of change pursued such a high degree of continuity in his foreign and security policy? The answer is neither simple nor clear-cut. To understand continuity in American foreign policy after 2008, it is necessary to consider Obama’s role as a strategic agent and the challenging nature of the strategically selective context in which he operates. How should we conceptualise this context? Does it include relative American decline within the international system, an institutionalised ‘War on Terror’, and culturally deep-rooted discourses, established in the aftermath of 11 September 2001? How should we conceptualise Obama’s ability to act within such a context, however understood? Has Obama, at times, actually opted for continuity, of his own volition? This book grapples directly with fundamental questions of change and continuity such as these, in its exploration of US foreign policy during Barack Obama’s first term in office, from January 2009 to January 2013. For a President elected upon an apparent platform of change, the foreignpolicy of the forty-fourth president has demonstrated a surprising degree of continuity with that of his predecessor, George W. Bush. While many commentators will applaud this continuity (see, for example, Lynch and Singh 2008), with some going so far as to label Obama’s foreign policy ‘neoconservative’ (Podhoretz 2010; Richman 2011), such continuity has been troubling and unexpected for many of Obama’s supporters and less partisan, independent observers. Why then might Obama, elected on an apparent platform of change, have implemented a foreign policy that continued significant elements of his predecessor’s? This book weighs up the possibilities that Obama: declined to implement greater change because he was ideologically opposed to it from the outset; failed to appreciate the demands ofholding office whilst campaigning and adjusted accordingly once elected; and was structurally limited in the change that was possible. While the contributors to this volume find evidence for all of these explanations, the bulk of their arguments coalesce around the last. This book then, in large part, is an exploration of the structural limits to change for American foreign policy generally and associated political, social and economic disincentives to end the War on Terror specifically. There is certainly truth in the notion that Obama spoke of far less extensivechange than his supporters frequently and mistakenly heard (McCrisken 2011), and that on taking office, like all presidents, he quickly adapted from campaigning in poetry to governing in prose. However, his worldview and accounting for the realities of the Oval Office tell only a small part of the story. Obama has been unable to institute greater change because of the enduring structures of the international system, War on Terror and domestic cultural and political landscape within which he is located. These structures take a variety of forms, the most significant of which decrease in scale from: the relative material declining of American power; the institutionalised nature of the ‘War on Terror’; and the hegemonic discourses of Terror that were established shortly after 9/11 and continue to be defended today (e.g. Boyle 2011; Croft 2006; Jackson 2011; Krebs 2005; Krebs and Jackson 2007; Krebs and Lobasz 2007; Holland 2012, 2013; Holland and Jarvis In press; Quinn 2011). This book brings some of these arguments together in order to highlight their competing understandings and explanations of continuity, as well as to reveal their significant and underappreciated areas of agreement. In order to introduce contemporary debates on change and continuityin American foreign policy, including the contributions that follow, this introduction is structured in two principal parts. First, drawing on recent literature and the chapters that follow, the introduction asks a theoretical question – ‘how can continuity in American foreign policy be understood?’ – exploring the ways in which, in both international and domestic arenas, assessments of continuity and its drivers are contested. It is argued that Obama’s mixed record of reorienting US foreign policy presents important implications for two enduring debates at the heart of the philosophy of social science: the relationship between structure and agency; and conceptualisations of time and temporality. Second, the chapter asks an empirical question – ‘to what extent has there been change in American foreign policy under Obama?’. Here, we consider Obama’s foreign policy and counter-terrorism strategy substantively, in the areas of war, intervention and nuclear weapons. In bringing together theoretical and empirical explorations of volition and temporality in US foreign policy, the introduction and the book as a whole consider how we might think about and conceptualise change, both in the broadest sense, with implications for the social sciences and International Relations (IR), as well as within Obama’s foreign policy specifically.