The ‘Obama Doctrine’ – Vision for Change?

The chapter explores how as President of the United States, Barack Obama was in a constant exchange with both political opponents and diverging voices within his own administration over defining America’s world political role and the purpose behind American power. The chapter describes how Obama’s strategic vision not only informed the political debate and determined policy, but also represented the central hub in an intertextual network of grand strategy discourses, providing the focus for the policy advice and criticism of Washington think tanks, the reporting and commentary of the media, and the intellectual attention of academic researchers interested in the study of US foreign and security policy. The chapter examines how Obama reconfirmed a national and bipartisan consensus, -the ideational dimension of American exceptionalism, liberal hegemony, and military supremacy-, while linking this identity to a pragmatic policy course of cooperative engagement and military restraint that large segments of the Washington establishment rejected for challenging the elite consensus on liberal hegemony.

Filming Hegemony: Hollywood and the Manichean Script of Geopolitics

The chapter focuses on popular culture as key site for the production of constructs of geopolitical identity and practices of national security as common sense knowledge and conventional wisdom, examining popular Hollywood movies of the ‘national security cinema’ and the involvement of the Pentagon in the filmmaking process. Representations of geopolitical identity and national security are analyzed in some of the commercially most successful films in the United States released between 2009 and 2015. The chapter’s analysis testifies to the enduring popularity of key ideational themes and mythologies, such as American exceptionalism, military heroism, and external threats endangering the existence of the United States, its interests and values under the Obama presidency. The serial reproduction of these national security narratives, realized in multi-million dollar film productions, illustrates the cross-discursive leverage of American hegemony over alternative formulations of grand strategy under the Obama presidency and the popularity of a particular national security imagery of American geopolitical identity.

Introduction

This chapter highlights the conflict of competing grand strategy discourses under the Obama presidency, which are identified as hegemony, engagement and restraint. It provides an overview of the political significance of grand strategy and its treatment in the academic literature. The chapter describes the political and expert debate of American grand strategy under the Obama presidency and briefly introduces the theoretical-methodological framework that has guided the research into competing discourses of American grand strategy under Obama. The chapter offers an alternative definition of grand strategy from the conventional literature, identifying it as discursive link between geopolitical identity and national security.

Strategic Vision: National Security, Defense Policy, and the Geopolitics of Military Pre-Eminence

This chapter explores how the US Department of Defense has acted as key producer of practical grand strategy discourse, regularly translating geopolitical imaginations, threat assessments and strategic narratives into concrete policy outcomes and security practices, from defense policy planning documents to the stationing of US troops and the conducting of military operations. High-level strategic documents published under the Obama presidency, such as the Quadrennial Defense Review reports or the Defense Strategic Guidance are examined in this chapter as key political outputs in providing the ‘big picture’ of national security. The chapter examines how several practical issues in defense policymaking and military planning were, at the same time, indicating are careful shift in the conceptualization and operation of American hegemony. The chapter details how budget sequestration had a lasting impact on the overall size of the US military while Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’ shifted its geopolitical and operational focus. This limitation, recalibration and downsizing challenged a status quo of American primacy and global military supremacy that politicians, policy experts and military officials had largely taken for granted since the end of the Cold War.

The American Grand Strategy Debate in International Relations

This chapter engages in a comprehensive analysis of the grand strategy debate contained in the pages of Foreign Affairs, which represents a leading elite publication that bridges scholarly debate and the policy oriented writing of experts and political practitioners. The chapter also examines how the main theoretical perspectives of mainstream IR have informed competing grand strategy visions, further detailing the concept of hybrid discourses of American grand strategy: hegemonic engagement and hegemonic restraint. These expert visions reproduced the dominant representation of American exceptionalism and military supremacy, while advocating political practices that partially reformulated and negated this hegemonic role, such as the liberal-institutionalist concept of ‘deep engagement’, or neorealist ideas of ‘offshore balancing’.

Conclusion

This chapter provides a summary of the book’s findings. The chapter argues that the geopolitical vision of a more restrained leadership role and more cautious global engagement Obama formulated was reflecting the post-American future rather than the hegemonic past of America’s role in world politics. It assesses that most influential scholars, pundits and policy makers in turn remained embedded in the Washington consensus of hegemony and mired in a unipolar worldview. The chapter identifies a further fracturing of the grand strategy consensus, between elite opinion and the foreign policy establishment denouncing ‘isolationist’ tendencies, and an American public increasingly in favour of non-interventionism and in acceptance of a less singular hegemonic role. The chapter briefly reviews how this conflict was also encapsulated in the contest for Obama’s succession between Hillary Clinton, a quintessential Washington insider and firm believer in America’s role as the world’s indispensable nation and Donald Trump, an anti-establishment populist that had aggressively questioned the elite consensus on US foreign and economic policy.

Think Tanks and the Washington Consensus on Hegemony

This chapter investigates the grand strategy proposals by some of the leading think tanks operating in Washington DC, demonstrating how their nominally impartial, and independent research reveals a dominant, bipartisan neoconservative/liberal-internationalist consensus on hegemony that further underlines the intertextual and practical interconnection between research expertise, professional knowledge and policymaking. The think tanks examined in this chapter were selected to assess those formally independent research outputs with the greatest policy impact under the Obama presidency, while also reflecting the widest range of political views on American grand strategy. The chapter examines how organisations supporting deviant grand strategy discourses of libertarian restraint (Cato) and liberal-progressive cooperative security (CAP) have attempted to shift the public policy debate and how the stigma of isolationism underwrites a powerful status quo in Washington DC.

Competing Visions for America – Popular Discourses of Grand Strategy on the New York Times Best-Sellers List

This chapter focuses on the New York Times best sellers list as the preeminent account of best-selling books in the United States to engage in a wider mapping of grand strategy discourses in American popular culture, beyond the realm of movie entertainment. Analyzing non-fiction books that have achieved the status of national bestseller illustrates how debates over grand strategy, American identity and national security are products of both political and popular culture, constructed in the public sphere at the multi-medial intersection of entertainment, journalism, academia and political commentary. The chapter details how competing discourses of American grand strategy have defined the past, present and future role and position of the United States in the popular imagination, reflecting a fractured public consensus over the ‘big picture.’ In this chapter, the analytical focus is on the cultural construction of a geopolitical identity of American leadership, military supremacy and national exceptionalism in popular works of non-fiction, and how key representations have confirmed or contested this dominant social construction of the American ‘Self’.

Reimagining Grand Strategy

This chapter provides an introduction into the concepts of grand strategy and geopolitics, and their conventional conceptualization in the International Relations (IR) literature. This is juxtaposed with the main theoretical and methodological perspectives developed by the literature in critical security studies and critical geopolitics that have informed the theoretical-methodological framework guiding the book’s critical discourse analysis. The chapter provides a detailed exploration of the key concepts of power/knowledge, discourse, intertextuality, and identity that are applied to the study of American grand strategy under Obama and detailed in the subsequent chapters. The chapter introduces the three basic discourse of American grand strategy under Obama (hegemony, engagement, and restraint) and the concept of hybrid discourses: hegemonic engagement and hegemonic restraint that juxtapose identity and practice.