ABSTRACT
The chapters in this book ably demonstrate the extent to which the distinctiveness and trajectory of US foreign policy under President Obama remain open to contest. In part, this is itself a product of timing. With the president just beginning his second term at the writing of this chapter, much of the documentation that will inform later historians and analysts remains, for now, inaccessible (Pious 2011: 283). At the same time, this contestability connects also to a widespread, and continuing, impression that an overarching framework or narrative simply does not yet exist for this administration. As Adam Quinn (2011: 813) notes, ‘At one point or other the President has variously been characterized as a realist, a liberal internationalist, an isolationist, a neo-conservative and an imperialist’. Thus, while the ideological and doctrinal commitments of his predecessor’s war on terror were, perhaps, less straightforward than is often supposed (see, for example, Mazarr 2003: 305), Obama’s first term, at least, has made for a particularly amorphous presidency. And, as McCrisken (2011: 783) suggests, this brings with it its own attendant challenges: ‘Obama has been subjected to fierce criticism by the right for reversing the policies of the Bush years and simultaneously savaged by liberals for consolidating the Bush strategy’ (McCrisken 2011: 783).
