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The Obama Doctrine – Détente or Decline?

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Abstract

The Obama administration's first year in office has been characterised by the rhetorical rollback of the Bush administration's excesses and an emphasis on inclusiveness and restraint. This article considers the grand strategic response to the end of the Cold War of Obama's Democratic predecessor as President to highlight that the strategic challenges faced by the new President are more fundamental than simply reversing the policies of George W. Bush. So far, Obama has used rhetoric and engagement to buy time; it remains to be seen whether his policy of détente will be better understood in terms of the decline of American power.

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Notes

  1. ‘World politics in the twenty-first century will in all likelihood be driven primarily by blowback from the second half of the twentieth century – that is, from the unintended consequences of the Cold War and the crucial American decision to maintain a Cold War posture in a post-Cold War world’ (Johnson, 2002: 238).

  2. The editors of Foreign Policy's summing up of the Clinton Years were prescient: ‘Bill Clinton might have helped usher in the age of global interdependence, but it will be incumbent upon his successors to make globalisation sustainable’. (Clinton's Foreign Policy, 2000: 28) President Obama himself has indicated that the Washington consensus may have been too rigidly applied (Obama, 2009).

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Kitchen, N. The Obama Doctrine – Détente or Decline?. Eur Polit Sci 10, 27–35 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/eps.2010.71

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