Obama's Approach Research Articles

Denial and Rejection: International Law and Donald Trump’s Foreign Policy Agenda

Since Trump’s Administration took office, this elusory question has haunted most issues in the international law. So far, the Trump Administration has been in office for a little over forty-four months, a tumultuous period that has disrupted international law and international politics. Another looming question is whether the Trump Administration’s many initiatives will permanently change the nature of America’s foreign policy? In particular, this paper will discuss Trump’s foreign policy, since his emerging philosophy seems to be a general rejection of the Obama approach: not “engage-translate-leverage,” but rather, “disengage black hole-hard power.” Wherever possible, the Trump instinct seems to be to disengage-unilateralism or, as he calls it, “America First.” The United States of America and Trump are sturdy actors in the making and unmaking of international law. But the basic idea underlying international law is that international law is no longer just for nation-states or national governments. What Jeremy Bentham once called “inter-national law”, the law between and among sovereign nations, has evolved into a hybrid body of international and domestic law developed by a large number of public and private transnational actors.

Using Force Against Terrorists ‘Outside Areas of Active Hostilities’—The Obama Approach and the Bin Laden Raid Revisited

More than 13 years after the launch of Operation Enduring Freedom, the focus of US counterterrorism operations has gradually shifted from Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Arabian Peninsula, Somalia and Northern Africa. The use of drones and Special Forces in these regions causes difficult problems under interna- tional law. In particular, it is often far from clear whether a specific attack or raid triggers application of the law of armed conflict. The White House, therefore, issued a policy guideline in 2013, which states that lethal force will be used 'outside areas of active hostilities' only against targets that pose a 'continuing, imminent threat' to US persons. This policy reflects a conception of the right to self-defence according to which a state may target particularly dangerous persons irrespective of their status under international humanitarian law or human rights law ('self-defence targeting'). It is a characteristic feature of the Obama administration's approach to pick and choose from the legal concepts of self-defence and armed conflict in order to design a flexible normative framework for its operations against Al Qaeda and other extremist groups abroad. The present article focuses on different facets of this approach and shows how both concepts are utilized to justify such operations. The killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011 was a particularly instruct- ive case since it raised a variety of issues under jus ad bellum and jus in bello.

Obama's America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity. By IanReifowitz. Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2012. 251 pp.

Obama's America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity. By Ian Reifowitz. Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2012. 251 pp. Ian Reifowitz's Obama's America is a thorough and carefully expounded study of President Barack Obama, inclusiveness, and national identity. The author effectively portrays the long-standing tension between liberals' embrace of multiculturalism and conservatives' defense of a unified nationalism. Decades of thinking and debate have gone into reconciling a nation that prizes both diversity and unity as much as the United States, and Obama's America explains well that political and intellectual history. Fittingly, the author positions Obama squarely in the middle of that debate. Drawing on speeches, books, newspaper columns, and media interviews from throughout the president's career, Reifowitz demonstrates great knowledge and understanding of his subject. He details how Obama emerged at the start of a new national narrative about an America guided by a unifying dedication to inclusiveness. That narrative necessarily includes both the nation's successes and its failures in protecting the interests of the diverse citizenry. Within this context, the book painstakingly documents Obama's personal journey from racial confusion to black nationalism to a liberal nationalism that embraced inclusiveness. The author makes a convincing argument that, as Obama entered state and national politics, his rhetoric and thinking on race drew inspiration from Martin Luther King, Jr. As with King, Obama emphasized economic issues and universal values to build appeal with whites and other minorities, knowing full well that those issues disproportionately affected African Americans. To his credit, Reifowitz acknowledges some of the strategic excesses of his subject's race rhetoric, dubbing Obama's exaggerated take on 1960s liberalism as a straw man and one-sided caricature (p. 81). Still, Obama's approach, which seeks to unify by addressing racial issues in nonracial terms and universal principles, generally supports the author's thesis about the president's contribution to negotiating the tension between national identity and inclusiveness in the United States. Although Obama eventually benefitted politically from this way of thinking, Reifowitz persuasively argues that his subject carried these ideas with him years before achieving national prominence. Given the author's overall argument, it would have been convenient for him to ignore or downplay those occasions that required Obama to address race head on. Reifowitz smartly resists that trap. In fact, he devotes an entire chapter to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the Henry Louis Gates controversies. …

Barack Obama's post-American foreign policy: the limits of engagement

After one of the most controversial and divisive periods in the history of American foreign policy under President George W. Bush, the Obama administration was expected to make changes for the better in US relations with the wider world. Now, international problems confronting Obama appear more intractable, and there seems to be a marked continuity in policies between Obama and his predecessor. Robert Singh argues that Obama's approach of 'strategic engagement' was appropriate for a new era of constrained internationalism, but it has yielded modest results. Obama's search for the pragmatic middle has cost him political support at home and abroad, whilst failing to make decisive gains. Singh suggests by calibrating his foreign policies to the emergence of a 'post-American'world, the president has yet to preside over a renaissance of US global leadership. Ironically,Obama's policies have instead hastened the arrival of a post-American world.

The costs and consequences of drone warfare

One of the distinctive elements of President Barack Obama's approach to counterterrorism has been his embrace of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or drones, to target terrorist operatives abroad. The Obama administration has used drones in active theatres of war, such as Afghanistan, but it has also dramatically increased the number of drone attacks launched by the CIA in other countries, such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. The conventional wisdom on drone warfare holds that these weapons are highly effective in killing terrorist operatives and disabling terrorist organizations, while killing fewer civilians than other means of attack. This article argues that much of the existing debate on drones operates with an attenuated notion of effectiveness that discounts the political and strategic dynamics—such as the corrosion of the perceptions of competence and legitimacy of governments where drone strikes take place, growing anti-Americanism and fresh recruitment of militant networks—that reveal the costs of drone warfare. Focusing particularly on drone use in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, the article suggests that the Obama administration's counterterrorism policy operates at cross-purposes because it provides a steady flow of arms and financial resources to build up governments whose legitimacy it systematically undermines by conducting unilateral strikes on their territory. It concludes that the US embrace of drone technology is a losing proposition over the long term as it will usher in a new arms race and lay the foundations for an international system that is increasingly violent, destabilized and polarized between those who have drones and those who are victims of them.

Obama and the Middle East: the end of America's moment?

During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised to distance the United States from the neoconservative foreign policy legacy of his predecessor, George W. Bush, and usher in a new era of a global, interconnected world. More than two years have passed since his inauguration, and the reality of President Obama's approach is in stark contrast to the ebullient and optimistic image that he originally built up. In fact, Obama is not committed to redefining U.S. foreign policy in a transformational way, but calibrating and correcting the Bush policies, and reclaiming the neorealist approach that defined America's foreign policy since WWII. Taking stock of Obama's first two and a half years in the White House, this book places his engagement in the Middle East within the broader context of U.S. foreign policy since 9/11 and examines key areas that have posed a challenge to his administration: negotiation with Israel and Palestine, troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan, engagement with the Arab Spring, intervention in Libya, and the death of Osama bin Laden.

Race as freedom: how Cedric Dover and Barack Obama became black

Born across racial lines, Cedric Dover and Barack Obama both came to identify with the African American community. By contrasting the lives and ideas of two mixed-race individuals, one born in Calcutta and the other in Hawaii, this article examines cosmopolitanism, racial formation and the promise of the ‘post-racial’. A ‘Eurasian’ intellectual born in Calcutta in 1904, Dover developed a coloured cosmopolitanism that mirrors in revealing ways Obama's approach to race. Both men embraced blackness while transcending the boundaries of race and nation. Dover and Obama developed a conception of race as freedom – not freedom from race or of a particular race, but the freedom to embrace race without sacrificing other affiliations.

Behavioral Pragmatism: President Obama's Approach to Unemployment

However wide the ideological distance between positive and negative prognosticators of employment growth, the pragmatic center is where the White House preferences are likely to fall. Obama's pragmatic center may be far from the ideological center between public-private program alternatives. Instead, it is closer to the pressure center of partisan and interest-group forces that normally participate in fiscal policy-making. As a behavioral pragmatist the moderate position for Obama is found at the center of ideologically separated political competitors whatever the content of their beliefs, since content is relatively uncritical in this perspective. Pressure groups’ numbers and organizational strength define the value of their diversity more than the substance of their beliefs. For the strong believers on both political left and right the outcomes will rarely look pragmatic because they will rarely fit the traditional standards for moderation

“A Legitimate Function”: Reconsidering Presidential Signing Statements

This article is a reconsideration and reassessment of presidential signing statements. Although many scholars and commentators have weighed in on the practice since 2006—when Charlie Savage's Boston Globe stories ignited a firestorm of criticism and debate on the issue—signing statements are still frequently misunderstood. Thus, one of the key purposes of the article is to delineate what signing statement is, from what it is not. Furthermore, the article examines the transition from the George W. Bush administration to that of Barack Obama. In particular, President Obama's views on, and use of, signing statements are elaborated and discussed. Although not a vigorous defender of the practice, President Obama's approach to signing statements is notable for its moderation and restraint, if sometimes more in theory than in practice. The article ends with an extended consideration of the utility and benefits of signing statements, while still acknowledging their potential ill effects.

Strategic Engagement's Track Record

The word often used to describe President Barack Obama's approach to foreign policy is “engagement.” Obama has expressed his instinctive willingness to talk to the enemies of the United States, pro...