Grand Strategy: George W. Bush vs. Barack Obama

Ted Ellis

Security,

Who wins? 

President Obama took office promising change and a “new direction” for American foreign policy. To what degree—if any—did he fulfill this promise? The Center for the National Interest partnered with the Charles Koch Institute to host a foreign policy roundtable. Participants responded to the question: After eight years of Bush and eight years of Obama, what’s changed? Watch the rest of the videos in the “Grand Strategy” series.

Partisan pundits would likely recoil at the suggestion that George W. Bush and Barack Obama pursued similar foreign policies, but if we set aside partisanship and look past the rhetoric surrounding U.S. foreign policy, what will we find? Are the foreign policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama at all similar? The Bush administration oversaw the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, waging long and expensive wars while calling for democracy and freedom to be exported to the Middle East. Supporters of those policies often accuse President Obama of “retreating” from the world and “leading from behind,” despite his decision to continue the fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, intervene in Libya, and add a theater in Syria. Yet this is a fiercely contested narrative.

John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago argues that the respective grand strategies of the second Bush administration and the Obama presidency share “a great deal of continuity.” Mearsheimer observes that Bush and Obama were both interested in the same fundamental objective: regime change in the Middle East.

President Bush’s invasion and attempted democratization of Iraq may be the most flagrant case of American-led regime change in the Middle East. However, the Obama administration has demonstrated similar instincts. Indeed, it was under the Obama administration that the United States invaded Libya, to catastrophic effect. Mearsheimer notes that it was Obama who involved the American military in Syria, who “upped the ante in Afghanistan,” and who “put us back in Iraq.”

Read full article