Bush to Obama was a rhetorical shift masking unchanged imperial fundamentals.

Evidence

This chapter outlined US foreign policy since 9/11. The neocon wing of the policy establishment, out of power in the 1990s, was finally in a position of power to realize its vision. However, the confrontations in Afghanistan and Iraq did not go as planned. The implosion of the Bush agenda then saw the baton handed over to liberal imperialists, who instituted a rhetorical shift and continued the multilateral strategies adopted in Bush’s second term to project and maintain US hegemony. This did not, however, change the realities of people’s lives in the “Muslim world,” which in some ways got worse under Obama. Even while we witnessed a rhetorical shift from the Bush to the Obama era, the fundamentals of how empire in the twenty-first century would function remained the same. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 527

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to the author’s broader argument about liberal vs overt Islamophobia; also echoes Gramscian discussion of hegemony elsewhere in the reading list.

Related

• The Bush-to-Obama transition was rhetorical, not structural (similarity 0.93)
• Obama’s Cairo speech repackaged rather than abandoned the imperial frame (similarity 0.86)
• Obama’s liberal-rhetoric foreign policy continued Bush-era imperial military operations. (similarity 0.84)
• Liberal Islamophobia under Obama worsened conditions for Muslims at home and abroad (similarity 0.83)
• Obama’s election rebranded rather than ended American imperial policy (similarity 0.82)
• Obama continued and expanded Bush’s imperial wars despite softer rhetoric (similarity 0.82)
• Obama’s Cairo speech was a calculated image-repair maneuver, not philosophy (similarity 0.82)
• The Iraq War’s failure forced a rhetorical shift from unilateral coercion to counterinsurgency (similarity 0.81)
• Obama’s multilateral realism was a continuity of Bush-era imperial strategy (similarity 0.81)
• Failed Iraq and Afghan wars drove Obama toward a rebranded smarter war on terror (similarity 0.81)
• The oil-embargo problem, not ideology, made reshaping Iraq urgent by 2001 (similarity 0.81)
• Obama legitimized and expanded the war on terror, not reversed it (similarity 0.81)
• Neoliberalism replaced modernization as the Clinton-era imperial model (similarity 0.81)
• Bush and Clinton administrations resisted the neocon anti-Islamic-terrorism agenda (similarity 0.80)
• Obama’s inaugural staff retained Bush hawks while launching new wars (similarity 0.80)