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Notes
1 Barack Obama, ‘Renewing American Leadership’, Foreign Affairs 86/4 (July/August) (2007).
2 For example, Joshua Muravchik, ‘The Abandonment of Democracy’, Commentary 127/7 (July 2009), 21–26; Henry R. Nau, ‘Obama’s Foreign Policy’, Policy Review 160 (April–May 2010), 27–47; Daniel Drezner, ‘Does Obama Have a Grand Strategy? Why We Need Doctrines in Uncertain Times’, Foreign Affairs 90/4 (July/August 2011), 57–68; and Stephen Walt, ‘Is Barack Obama More of a Realist Than I Am?’, Foreign Policy, 19 August 2014, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/08/19/is_barack_obama_more_of_a_realist_than_i_am_stephen_m_walt_iraq_russia_gaza
3 Adam Quinn, ‘The art of declining politely: Obama’s prudent presidency and the waning of American power’, International Affairs 87/4 (2011), 803–824.
4 Hal Brands, What Good is Grand Strategy? Power and Purpose in American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2014), 3.
5 Ibid.
6 Seymour Martin Lipsett, American Exceptionalism: A Double-edged Sword, (Boston: Norton & Co 1996), 31.
7 See for instance, Walter McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1997); Colin Dueck, ‘Realism, Culture and Grand Strategy: Explaining America’s Peculiar Path to World Power’, Security Studies 14/2 (2005), 195–231; Jonathan Monten, ‘The Roots of the Bush Doctrine: Power, Nationalism, and Democracy Promotion in U.S. Strategy’, International Security 29/4 (2005), 112–156; and Hilde Eliassen Restad, ‘Old Paradigms in History Die Hard in Political Science: US Foreign Policy and American Exceptionalism’, American Political Thought 1 (2012), 53–76.
8 Stephen G. Brooks, John G. Ikenberry, and William C. Wohlforth, ‘Don’t Come Home, America: The Case against Retrenchment’, International Security 37/3 (2012), 10.
9 John G. Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis and Transformation of the American World Order, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2011).
10 Melvyn C. Leffler, ‘The American Conception of National Security and the Beginnings of the Cold War 1945–48’, The American Historical Review 89/2 (1984), 346–381.
11 John G. Ikenberry, ‘America’s Imperial Ambition’, Foreign Affairs (September/October), 81/5 49.
12 See, for example, Charles Krauthammer, ‘The Unipolar Moment’, Foreign Affairs 70/1 (1990), 23–33; Christopher Layne, ‘The Unipolar Illusion: Why New Great Powers Will Rise’, International Security 17/4 (1993), 5–51; and Eric Nordlinger, Isolationism Reconfigured: American Foreign Policy for a New Century Princeton, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1995).
13 Walter Lippmann, US Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic, (Boston: Little, Brown 1943), 9.
14 Robert Jervis, ‘International Primacy: Is the Game Worth the Candle?’, International Security 17/4 (1993), 52–53.
15 Colin Dueck, ‘Ideas and Alternatives in American Grand Strategy, 2000–2004’, Review of International Studies 30/4 (2004), 515–516.
16 Samuel Huntington, ‘Why International Primacy Matters’, International Security 17/4 (1993), 53–54.
17 William C. Wohlforth, ‘The Stability of a Unipolar World’, International Security 24/1 (1999), 7–8.
18 Hal Brands & Peter Feaver, ‘Stress-Testing American Grand Strategy’, Survival 58/6 (2016), 95.
19 See, for example, Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World: And the Rise of the Rest, (London: Penguin Books 2008); Christopher Layne, ‘The Unipolar Illusion Revisited: The Coming End of the United States’ Unipolar Moment’, International Security 31/2 (2006), 7–41; and Stephen M. Walt, ‘The End of the American Era’, The National Interest 116 (November/December 2011), 6–16.
20 S.433 – Iraq War De-Escalation Act of 2007. Congress.gov 30 January 2007, https://www.congress.gov/bill/110th-congress/senate-bill/433
21 Ibid, Sections 3–7.
22 Barack Obama, ‘Renewing American Leadership’, Foreign Affairs 86/4 (2007), 4.
23 Ibid, 6.
24 ‘The First Presidential Debate’, New York Times, 26 September 2008, http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/president/debates/transcripts/first-presidential-debate.html.
25 Ibid.
26 Obama, ‘Renewing American Leadership’, 9.
27 Ibid, 10.
28 ‘The Second Presidential Debate’, New York Times, 7 October 2008, http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/president/debates/transcripts/second-presidential-debate.html
29 Obama, ‘Renewing American Leadership’, 11–12.
30 Ibid, 8.
31 Ibid, 9.
32 Ibid, 2.
33 Timothy Lynch, ‘Obama, Liberalism and US Foreign Policy’, in Inderjeet Parmar, Linda B. Miller, and Mark Ledwidge (eds.), Obama and the World: New Directions in US Foreign Policy, 2nd edition, (London: Routledge 2014), 41.
34 See, for example, J. Freedland, ‘After a Flurry of Early Activity, the Obama Doctrine is Taking Shape’, The Guardian, 11 March 2009, Michael Tomasky, ‘Obama the Un-Bush Woos the UN’, The Guardian, 23 September 2009, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/sep/23/barack-obama-un-general-assembly-speech; and ‘Remarks President Barack Obama in Prague’, White House Press Office, 5 April 2009, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-barack-obama-prague-delivered.
35 See, for instance, Nicholas Kitchen, ‘The Obama Doctrine – Détente or Decline?’, European Political Science 10 (2011), 32–33; and Daniel Drezner, ‘Does Obama have a Grand Strategy?’, Foreign Affairs (July/August 2011); and James M. Lindsay, ‘George W. Bush, Barack Obama and the Future of US Global Leadership’, International Affairs 87/4 (2011), 765–779.
36 James Mann, The Obamians: The Struggle Inside the White House to Redefine American Power, (New York: Penguin Books 2012), 71.
37 Ibid, 72.
38 Ibid.
39 David E. Sanger, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, (New York: Random House2012).
40 See, for example, Bob Woodward, Obama’s Wars, (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster 2011); Brian Glyn Williams, ‘The CIA’s Covert Predator Drone War in Pakistan, 2004–2010: The History of an Assassination Campaign’, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 33/10 (2010), 871–892; Trevor McCrisken and Mark Phythian, ‘The Offensive Turn: US Intelligence and the “War on Terror”’, in Inderjeet Parmar, Linda B. Miller and Mark Ledwidge (eds.), Obama and the World: New Directions in US Foreign Policy, 2nd Edition, (London: Routledge 2014), 188–193; and Donna Starr-Deelen, Presidential Policies on Terrorism: From Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan 2014), 159–192.
41 Sanger, Confront and Conceal, 68–74 and 188–200. See also Jay Solomon, The Iran Wars: Spy Games, Bank Battles, and the Secret Deals That Reshaped the Middle East, (New York, NY: Random House 2016), 168–174; David Crist, The Twilight War: The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year War with Iran, (NY: Penguin Books 2012), 538–355; and Kamuda Simpson, US Nuclear Diplomacy with Iran: From the War on Terror to the Obama Administration, (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield 2015), 94–102.
42 Sanger, Confront and Conceal, xvi.
43 Michael Hirsh, ‘Obama has No Doctrine’, The Atlantic, 29 March 2011, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/03/obama-has-no-doctrine/73171/
44 Jackson Diehl, ‘Obama’s foreign policy needs an update’, The Washington Post, 22 November 2010 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/21/AR2010112102263.html
45 See, for instance, Peter Baker, ‘Obama Puts His Own Mark on Foreign Policy Issues’, New York Times, 13 April 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/14/world/14prexy.html; Joseph Cirincione, ‘The New Defense Realism’, Foreign Policy, 17 September 2009, http://foreignpolicy.com/2009/09/17/the-new-defense-realism/; and Ryan Lizza, ‘The Consequentialist’, The New Yorker, 2 May 2011, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/02/the-consequentialist.
46 Quoted in Tim Shipman, ‘Barack Obama Told: Help Pakistan or Risk a Repeat of 9/11’, The Telegraph, 14 March 2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/4991675/Barack-Obama-told-help-Pakistan-or-risk-a-repeat-of-911-in-America-or-Britain.html.
47 Barack Obama, ‘Remarks of the President on a New Strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan’, 27 March 2009, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-a-new-strategy-afghanistan-and-pakistan.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid. See also, Ishtiaq Ahmad, ‘The US Af-Pak Strategy: Challenges and Opportunities for Pakistan’, Asian Affairs: An American Review 37/1 (2010), 191–209; and M. W. Aslam, ‘Understanding the “Pak” in “AfPak”: The Obama Administration’s security policy for Pakistan at the mid-term’, Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism 7/1 (2012), 2–21.
51 Peter Baker, ‘How Obama Came to Plan for “Surge” in Afghanistan’, New York Times, 5 December 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/world/asia/06reconstruct.html.
52 James Pfiffiner, ‘Decision Making in the Obama White House’, Presidential Studies Quarterly 41/2 (2011), 256–258.
53 Stephen Wayne, ‘Presidential Character and Judgment: Obama’s Afghanistan and Health Care Decisions’, Presidential Studies Quarterly 41/2 (2011), 296–298.
54 Kevin Marsh, ‘Obama’s Surge: A Bureaucratic Politics Analysis of the Decision to Order a Troop Surge in the Afghanistan War’, Foreign Policy Analysis 10/3 (2014), 284–285.
55 Daniel Drezner, ‘Does Obama have a Grand Strategy?’ Foreign Affairs (July/August 2011).
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid, 67.
58 Ibid.
59 See Colin Dueck, ‘Hybrid Strategies: The American Experience’, Orbis 55/1 (2011), 30–52. Dueck subsequently expanded this argument in Colin Dueck, The Obama Doctrine: American Grand Strategy Today (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015).
60 Dueck, ‘Hybrid Strategies’, 44–45.
61 Dueck, The Obama Doctrine, 100–101.
62 ‘Remarks by the President on the Way Forward in Afghanistan’, White House Office of the Press Secretary, 22 June 2011, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/06/22/remarks-president-way-forward-afghanistan.
63 Mikael Blomdahl, ‘Bureaucratic Roles and Positions: Explaining the United States Libya Decision’, Diplomacy and Statecraft 27/1 (2016), 142–161.
64 See Kevin Marsh, ‘Leading from Behind’: Neoclassical Realism and Operation Odyssey Dawn’, Defense and Security Analysis 30/2 (2014), 120 – 132; and Donnette Murray, ‘Military Action but Not as We Know It: Libya, Syria and the Making of an Obama Doctrine’, Contemporary Politics 19/2 (2013), 146–166.
65 Chris Edelson and Donna G. Starr-Deelen, ‘The Law: Libya, Syria, ISIS, and the Case Against the Energetic Executive’, Presidential Studies Quarterly 45/3 (2015).
66 Anne Marie Slaughter, ‘Interests vs. Values? Misunderstanding Obama’s Libya Strategy’, New York Review of Books, 30 March 2011, http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2011/03/30/interests-values-obamas-libya-strategy/.
67 Jon Hilsenrath, ‘Gates Says Libya Not Vital National Interest’, The Wall Street Journal, 27 March 2011, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704308904576226704261420430
68 Jeffrey Michaels, ‘NATO after Libya’, The RUSI Journal 156/6 (2011), 57.
69 Ben Barry, ‘Libya’s Lessons’, Survival 53/5 (2011), 11.
70 Jessica Stern, ‘Obama and terrorism: Like it or Not, the War Goes On’, Foreign Affairs 94/5 (2015), 62
71 Daniel Byman, ‘Beyond Counterterrorism: Washington Needs a Real Middle East Policy’, Foreign Affairs 94/6 (2015), 11.
72 Asim Qurshi, ‘The Obama Doctrine: Kill, Don’t Detain’, The Guardian, 12 April 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/apr/11/obama-national-security-drone-guantanamo.
73 Jo Becker & Scott Shane, ‘Secret “Kill List” Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Wills’, New York Times, 29 May 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?_r=0.
74 Daniel Byman, ‘Why Drones Works. The Case for Washington’s Weapon of Choice’, Foreign Affairs 92/4 (2013), 32.
75 Kaye, Chip, Freston, Tom, and Hassan, Fred. Drone Wars Pakistan: Pakistan Drone Strikes – Obama vs Bush, (Washington, DC: New America Foundation June 2016), http://securitydata.newamerica.net/drones/pakistan-analysis.html.
76 Nicholas Schmidle, ‘Getting bin Laden: What Happened that Night in Abbottabad’, The New Yorker. 8 August 2011, http://www.thomasweibel.ch/artikel/110808_new_yorker_getting_bin_laden.pdf; and Jacob Heilbrunn, ‘Bin Laden’s Demise: Death of a Salesman’, World Affairs 174/2 (2011), 7.
77 Andreas Krieg, ‘Externalizing the Burden of War: The Obama Doctrine and US Foreign Policy in the Middle East’, International Affairs 92/1 (2016), 104.
78 Ibid, xvi–xvii.
79 Ezra Klein, ‘The Unexpected and Ingenious strategy of Obama’s Second term’, Vox, 21 July 2015 http://www.vox.com/2015/7/21/9007733/obama-second-term.
80 Nicolas Bouchet, ‘Hard Choices in Democracy Promotion’, in Michelle Bentley and Jack Holland (ed.), The Obama Doctrine: A Legacy of Continuity in U.S. Foreign Policy (Oxford: Routledge 2017), 152.
81 Eugenio Lilli, New Beginnings in US-Muslim Relations: President Obama and the Arab Awakening (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2016), 240.
82 Peter Beinart, ‘Actually, Obama does have a strategy in the Middle East’, The Atlantic, 29 August 2014 http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/actually-obama-does-have-a-strategy-in-the-middle-east/379368/.
83 Niall Ferguson, ‘Barack ‘Obama’s Revolution in Foreign Policy’, The Atlantic, 13 March 2016 https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/03/obama-doctrine-revolution/473481/.
84 Elliott Abrams, ‘The Citizen of the World Presidency’, Commentary 1 September 2013, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-citizen-of-the-world-presidency-1/.
85 Roger Cohen, ‘Obama’s Flawed Realism’, The New York Times, 18 March 2016 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/19/opinion/obamas-flawed-realism.html.
86 Martin Indyk, ‘The end of the U.S. dominated order in the Middle East’, The Atlantic, 13 March 2016 https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/03/obama-middle-east-policy/473529/.
87 Robert G. Kaufman, Dangerous Doctrine: How Obama’s Grand Strategy Weakened America, (Lexington: Kentucky University Press 2016).
88 Ibid, 3–4.
89 Ibid, 10–26.
90 Ibid, 7–10.
91 Ibid, 40–45.
92 Ibid, 10–11.
93 Ibid, 198.
94 Jack Holland, ‘Obama as modern Jeffersonian’, in Michelle Bentley and Jack Holland (eds), The Obama Doctrine: A Legacy of Continuity in US foreign policy? (London: Routledge 2017), 49.
95 Quoted in Jeffrey Goldberg, ‘The Obama Doctrine’, The Atlantic Monthly 317/3 (2016), 73.
96 President Obama, ‘Remarks of President Barack Obama Address to the Nation’, White House Press Office, September 10 2014.
97 Humud, Carla A., Blanchard, Christopher M., and Nikitin, Mary Beth, 'Armed Conflict in Syria: Overview and U.S. Response', 24.
98 Stewart Welch and Kevin Bailey, ‘In Pursuit of Good Ideas: The Syria Train-and-equip program’. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy 36 (2016), 5, http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/uploads/Documents/pubs/ResearchNote36-WelchBailey.pdf.
99 Ibid.
100 Doyle McManus, ‘Obama is pursuing two strategies in Syria. One is working, the other is not’, Los Angeles Times 1 May 2016 http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0501-mcmanus-syria-east-vs-west-column-20160501-4-column.html.
101 Charles Lister, ‘Obama’s Syrian Strategy is the Definition of Insanity’, Foreign Policy, 21 September 2016 http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/09/21/obamas-syria-strategy-is-the-definition-of-insanity/.
102 Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on Libya National Defense University Washington, D.C. 28 March 2011, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/03/28/remarks-president-address-nation-libya.
103 Derek Chollet, ‘Obama’s Red Line: Revisited’, Politico, 19 July 2016 http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/07/obama-syria-foreign-policy-red-line-revisited-214059.
104 Quoted in Goldberg, ‘The Obama Doctrine’, 76. Emphasis added.
105 For instance see, Ibid; Fred Kaplan, ‘Obama’s Way: The President in Practice’, Foreign Affairs 95 (January/February 2015), 52–54; and Daniel Byman, ‘Six Bad Options for Syria’, The Washington Quarterly 38/4 (2015), 171–186.
106 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500–2000, (New York, NY: Random House 1987).
107 Ibid, 514–515.
108 Denis Florig, ‘Hegemonic Overreach vs. Imperial Overstretch’, Review of International Studies 36/4 (2010), 1105.
109 Hal Brands, ‘Barack Obama and the Dilemmas of American Grand Strategy’, Washington Quarterly 39/4 (2016), 118.
110 Adam Quinn, ‘The Art of Declining Politely: Obama’s Prudent Presidency and the Waning of American Power’, International Affairs 87/4 (2011), 803.
111 Ibid, 815.
112 Nicholas Kitchen, ‘Ending “Permanent War”: Security and Economy under Obama’, in Michelle Bentley and Jack Holland (eds.), The Obama Doctrine: A Legacy of Continuity in U.S. Foreign Policy, (Oxford: Routledge 2017), 9.
113 Ibid., 20.
114 Richard K. Betts, ‘The Political Support System for American Primacy’, International Affairs 81/1 (2005), 1–14.
115 Trevor Thrall, ‘Primed against Primacy: The Restraint Constituency and U.S. Foreign Policy’, War on the Rocks, 15 September 2016, https://warontherocks.com/2016/09/primed-against-primacy-the-restraint-constituency-and-u-s-foreign-policy/
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Notes on contributors
Michael Clarke
Michael Clarke is an associate professor at the National Security College, Australian National University. He is an internationally recognized expert on the history and politics of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, People’s Republic of China (PRC), Chinese foreign policy in Central Asia, Central Asian geopolitics, and nuclear proliferation and nonproliferation. Email: [email protected]
Anthony Ricketts
Anthony Ricketts is a doctoral candidate at the National Security College, Australian National University. His PhD research is focused on American grand strategy in the Middle East from 1972 to 2016. Email: [email protected].