диссертация (1169605), страница 13
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Altogether, the question no longer becomes whether Obama inherited anempire, but should more aptly be reframed as asking what sort of empire Bushhanded down to him and how flexibly could it change?Speaking of Haass, it is necessary to mention his book (together with MartinIndyk) “Restoring the Balance: A Middle East Strategy for the Next President” 102.This political work was a collection of essays that spoke about the sort ofinternational challenges that Bush’s successor would have to deal with. Whoeverthe 44th President was going to be, the two writers wanted to warn them thatSee, for instance: Kagan R. The Benevolent Empire // Foreign Policy.
– 1998. - No. 111, pp. 24-35; EncarnacionO. The Follies of Democratic Imperialism // World Policy Journal. – 2005. - Vol. XXII. - No. 1, pp. 47-60;Friedman G. The Next 100 years. A Forecast for the 21st Century. N.Y: Anchor Books, 2010. 253 p.; HendricksonD.C. Republic in Peril. American Empire and the Liberal Tradition. N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2018. 304 p.;Pillar P.L. Why America Misunderstands the World. National Experience and Roots of Misperception. N.Y.:Columbia University Press, 2016. 224 p.102Haass R., Indyk M.
Restoring the Balance: A Middle East Strategy for the next President. Washington, D.C.:Brookings Institution, 2008, pp. 27-93, 199-200.10153Bush’s policies of regime change and “democratization” and Clinton’s policy of“peacemaking” and “containment” were no longer as suitable for dealing with thechanged international conditions that they would have to confront. Some of themost relevant ones were the need for a strategic framework in handling an eversectarian Iraq, the Iranian nuclear energy issue (deliberately and inaccuratelydescribed as a “nuclear weapons” problem), and the failing Lebanese government.The most crucially urgent issue addressed in this book, however, was obviously theneed for a balanced military withdrawal from Iraq, which occupied center stageduring the 2008 election and ended up being one of the defining events of ObamaPresidency, no matter how misleading this “withdrawal” was in practice when hepartially backtracked on his decision from 2014 onwards during the War on Daesh.The most forward-looking idea presented in that book, however, was that theUS must rely on supercharged diplomacy in shifting its focus from Iraq to areprioritized Iran, hence the need for a balanced withdrawal from the occupiedcountry.
As part of the Iranian-centric Mideast policy that Haass and Indyk wereproposing, they said that the next president should promote a Syrian-Israeli peaceaccord in order that Damascus could then be divided from Tehran andsubsequently used as a staging ground for the dissimulation of more pro-Americaninfluence in the region. The overriding idea is that the US wouldn’t have to resortto military means against Iran like it did with Iraq, but that it could neutralize thepurported ‘Iranian threat’ through diplomatic means in eventually isolating andpressuring it into conforming to the US dictates.
This multi-step processincorporates such varied but interconnected elements as the stabilization of thefailing Lebanese government, the de-escalation of tensions in Palestine, and theencouragement of a Syrian-Israeli peace agreement, but with the end objectivebehind each of these foci being to weaken Iran’s strategic position in the Mideast.It will be examined in depth later on in the upcoming subsection how the ObamaAdministration came to deal with the Syrian component of this grand strategy.54The Obama Doctrine was analyzed in detail by Colin Dueck in his book“The Obama Doctrine: American Grand Strategy Today” 103. He says that PresidentObama was so concentrated on pursuing his domestic agenda that he paid littleattention to foreign affairs during his entire presidency, which explains why henever took any clear or decisive action, nor engaged in what Dueck says were anyrisky international military engagements like Bush did.
He’s of the opinion thatObama cut back the US military presence abroad and accommodated internationalrivalries. Some significant episodes from his two terms lend credit to thisobservation.It’s true that the US did conventionally withdraw most of its military forcesfrom Iraq, and it’s equally true that it initiated the failed “reset” with Russia duringthis time. Also, the US diplomatically took steps to bring Iran, Cuba, and Myanmar‘in from the cold’, though it never succeeded in its G2 proposal of jointlymanaging global affairs with China. However, there’s a lot that Dueck gets wrongin his book, such as not identifying the 2011 NATO War on Libya as a Bush-likemilitary disaster.
He also questions whether the US drawdown in conventionalinternational military commitments under Obama might have contributed to globaldestabilization, not countenancing that this might have been partially the point allalong in Iraq, for example. Additionally, even speaking in such terms as describingObama’s foreign policy as a retrenchment of military power abroad is startlinglyinaccurate because it displays ignorance of the scale and scope of the US so-called“Pivot to Asia”.Academic Alyssa Eldridge disagrees with Dueck’s conclusions and doesn’tthink that there’s really much of a difference between the Obama and BushDoctrines. Eldridge explains how the US never stopped focusing on the Mideastsince the beginning of the Cold War.
Though President Obama promised to changethe Bush Doctrine, he only ended up strengthening it. This is attributable to thecontinuity of national interests, foreign policy ideologies, and political players inthe US permanent decision-making bureaucracy. For example, these include103Dueck C. The Obama Doctrine: American Grand Strategy Today.
Oxford UP. 2015, pp. 13-33.55securing unrestricted access to the region’s oil reserves, the US-Israeli partnership,American military power, “democracy promotion” and “human rights”, and thepost-Cold War influence of the neoconservatives. The Bush and Obama Doctrinesweren’t a departure from general American foreign policy in the Mideast, butrather its natural evolution.A.
Eldridge explains that the Cold War saw the US practice a policy of “dualcontainment” in turning Iraq and Iran against each other in order to divide and rulethem. 9/11 then gave the neoconservatives the excuse for invading Iraq. VicePresident R. Cheney unveiled the so-called “one percent doctrine” to argue that theUS is warranted in militarily acting if there was even a one percent chance thatterrorists had a chance to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
This was abused, asexpected, to manufacture intelligence in justifying the preplanned War on Iraq, aconflict which was partially due to the US national interest in lessening itsdependency on Saudi oil supplies by forcibly acquiring access to Iraq’s reservesinstead. Regime change in Iraq was intentioned help to Israel against Iran throughthe instigation of a “domino effect” that would weaken Tehran’s regional standing,though this didn’t occur until later and only then during the CIA-orchestratedtheater-wide Color Revolution referred to as the “Arab Spring”. Just as Bushforeign policy was a logical outgrowth of his predecessors’, so too was Obama’s,such as through his escalation of drone strikes and even the surge in Afghanistan,which Eldridge says was a Bush-like face-saving action.
She doesn’t think that thispattern will change anytime soon because it is impossible to alter the deeplyingrained neoconservative ideals that pervade the American establishment strategicthinking.Andrew Bacevich who writes rather critically on the American internationalstrategy, defining the United States as a “National security state”, is equallypessimistic about America’s future. He states that militarism is inscribed in the UScollective consciousness and that the crusading idealism of “AmericanExceptionalism” will bring both itself and the rest of the world to instability and56conflict104. A.
Bacevich focused on the history and evolution of the Americannational security ideology and practice. He describes a “sacred trinity” that upholdsthe country’s self-proclaimed exceptionalism. The American Credo includes:central role and influence of the national security institutions, American militarysuperpower position in the world and its global projection; the US penchant forintervention. A. Bacevich brings us to the conclusion that anyone involved inpolitical mainstream, including the President, cannot be free and has to actaccording to mainstream ideology. The same refers to the expert community andmass media working for the government 105.
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