Obama’s Cairo speech repackaged rather than abandoned the imperial frame

Evidence

Obama claimed that his policy was a shift to the realist tradition of great power geopolitics. As he put it, “The truth is that my foreign policy is actually a return to the traditional bipartisan realistic policy of George Bush’s father, of John F. Kennedy, and in some ways of Ronald Reagan.” Yet, as we saw above, during Bush’s second term the neoconservatives were also gravitating toward this position because of the failure of their approach in Afghanistan and Iraq. Soon after taking office, Obama deployed 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, expanded the war into Pakistan (through the “Af-Pak” strategy), tried to pressure Iraq into granting an extension of the US occupation (which failed), carried out drone attacks and “black ops” in Yemen and Somalia, and participated in the NATO war on a former ally in Libya, Muammar Gaddafi. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 501 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Obama’s Cairo speech was a calculated image-repair maneuver, not philosophy — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 497; Obama’s election rebranded rather than ended American imperial policy — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 495; Obama continued and expanded Bush’s imperial wars despite softer rhetoric — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 579 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Bush to Obama was a rhetorical shift masking unchanged imperial fundamentals. #corroborates (0.92)
• Obama’s realist framing masked a continuation of Bush-era imperial warfare #corroborates (0.90) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 501
• The Bush-to-Obama transition was rhetorical, not structural #corroborates (0.90) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 527
• Obama continued and expanded Bush’s imperial wars despite softer rhetoric #corroborates (0.85) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 579
• Obama-era counterterrorism propaganda used multicultural imagery to mask imperial policy #corroborates (0.85) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 614
• Human rights and democracy discourse replaced older imperial justifications for war #qualifies (0.75) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 403