The American Way of War: The dismal "War on Terror" from Bush to Obama

A year and a half into the presidency of Barack Obama, any hopes that he would usher in a dramatic rethinking of U.S. foreign policy have been more or less definitively dashed. Notwithstanding the wild-eyed warnings of right-wing hawks who see Obama as "the first post-American president", with a covert agenda that is part Saul Alinsky and part Frantz Fanon, the president has so far proven himself to be have little inclination to break with the past when it comes to foreign policy. If the George W. Bush administration introduced the U.S. public to names like Guantanamo, Fallujah, and Blackwater, it is in the Obama administration that counterparts like Bagram, Waziristan and Predator have become ubiquitous. To be sure, this does not mean, as some disillusioned Obama supporters have suggested, that Obama is "no different" from Bush - particularly if it is the assertive and unchastened Bush of the first term that they have in mind - or from the likely alternatives. But if Obama has refrained from the most egregious excesses of his predecessor, he has nonetheless remained solidly within the mainstream of what Andrew Bacevich has termed the U.S. "ideology of national security" that has reigned since World War II. Whether this sort of caution has been the result of heartfelt belief or political constraints is largely beside the point.