The Geopolitical Discourse of Barack Obama’s State of the Union Addresses: Pursuing a Geopolitical Reorientation from the Middle East

ABSTRACT

President Barack Obama came to office with the expressed intention of breaking with the geopolitical orientation of his predecessor. Obama argued that George W. Bush overemphasized the Middle East at the expense of the Asia-Pacific region, the war in Afghanistan, rising non-Western states, and domestic affairs. To this end, Obama sought a strategic shift away from the Middle East and toward these other geographic areas. Obama also sought changes to policies which were closely associated with Bush’s focus on the Middle East: counterterrorism, democracy promotion, and foreign military interventions. This article evaluates whether this proposed reorientation away from the Middle East was reflected in Obama’s geopolitical discourse by examining his State of the Union addresses in comparison to those of his predecessor. It finds that these intended changes were largely evident in these speeches in that they exhibited a far greater geographic diversity than Bush’s, reflected adjustments to these policies, and paid substantially more attention to domestic affairs. However, this shift was limited by external events and the Middle East continued to command Obama’s primary focus. These findings reinforce the notion that while leaders seek to shape geopolitical understandings through their discourse, this discourse is in turn restricted by global realities.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Colin Flint and Stephanie Day for their help with this project.

Notes

1. According to the administration, Obama’s 2009 speech was technically not an official SOTU address, but rather a speech to a joint session of Congress. This was merely a semantical difference and it was functionally identical to a typical SOTU address.

2. Bush’s 20 September 2001 speech was not included in the database since it was a one-off, special event speech and therefore outside of the annual SOTU addresses.

3. This included references to cities within those countries or to foreign leaders. When a foreign city was identified, but it referred to a treaty name (e.g., the Doha Agreement), this was not included in the count for that country.

4. Words or sentences that were not part of the presidents’ speeches (e.g., “applause,” “laughter”) were deleted before these counts were collected.

5. The percentages for Table 1 and Table 2 were gathered from the data on the countries mentioned during these speeches added to the unique references to specific regions that were not included in the country totals. This provides a total number of times that a region was mentioned.

6. Afghanistan, North Korea and the United Kingdom.

7. Bush mentioned Israel nine times over his SOTU addresses. Nearly every reference to Israel was in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian peace process. Palestine was referenced 15 times during these speeches, in the context of both the peace process and US support for democracy in the Palestinian Authority.

8. There was a tie between Pakistan and South Sudan for the tenth-most referenced country, with six sentences each.

9. The most-referenced country in the Western hemisphere was Colombia, which was tied for fifteenth place with Japan with only four references over 8 years.

10. Like Table 1, Table 2 includes references to individual countries of a particular region, as well as references to that region not in the country totals.

11. In addition to the shift away from Iraq, this decline was aided by a sharp reduction in references to Israel and Palestine, with Obama’s references to Israel being nearly half those of his predecessor and making only a single mention specifically to Palestine. Despite a brief foray into the peace process early into his first term, Obama made few references of this issue, focusing instead on defending himself against charges that he was soft on America’s commitment to Israel, in part to assuage concerns over the Iran nuclear deal.

12. Figure 5 includes the number of sentences which refer to the regions themselves, as well as the countries of those regions.

13. This was balanced out, in part, by the singular reference to terrorism in his 2001 speech, which skewed the first term’s numbers.

14. Some variant of this phrase was utilized in his 2010–2015 SOTU addresses.

15. The same could apply to other presidents as well.

16. Such as the 2010 and 2015 National Security Strategies.