The ‘Obama Doctrine’ – Vision for Change?

Abstract

The chapter explores how as President of the United States, Barack Obama was in a constant exchange with both political opponents and diverging voices within his own administration over defining America’s world political role and the purpose behind American power. The chapter describes how Obama’s strategic vision not only informed the political debate and determined policy, but also represented the central hub in an intertextual network of grand strategy discourses, providing the focus for the policy advice and criticism of Washington think tanks, the reporting and commentary of the media, and the intellectual attention of academic researchers interested in the study of US foreign and security policy. The chapter examines how Obama reconfirmed a national and bipartisan consensus, -the ideational dimension of American exceptionalism, liberal hegemony, and military supremacy-, while linking this identity to a pragmatic policy course of cooperative engagement and military restraint that large segments of the Washington establishment rejected for challenging the elite consensus on liberal hegemony.