Obama pursued US hegemony through air power, drones, and multilateral alliances, not ground wars.

Evidence

The document continues, “US forces will no longer be sized to conduct large-scale, prolonged stability operations.” Instead, the political class drew the lesson that the way to achieve its objectives is through missions like the NATO military campaign in Libya, which involved air power and relied on local allies on the ground. In sum, Obama’s imperial posture involved trying to establish US hegemony in Asia (preventing the rise of China) and in the Middle East (containing Iran) through multilateral alliances and the use of air strikes, drone attacks, counterterrorism, and special operations forces as well as cyber warfare. In short, despite the Right’s charge that Obama was a “secret Muslim agent” working on behalf of foreign governments, he was in reality a liberal imperialist at the helm of a nation trying to reassert its domination in an increasingly multipolar world. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 512

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• DEFINE: Defines the post-Iraq/Obama doctrine shift from large-scale stability operations to air power, drones, and local allies — a useful conceptual distinction.

Related

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• Obama’s drone strikes killed Muslims across five nations (similarity 0.79)
• Obama’s conciliatory rhetoric masked continued drone and surveillance warfare (similarity 0.78)
• Obama continued the War on Terror through rhetorical seduction. (similarity 0.78)
• Obama continued and expanded Bush’s imperial wars despite softer rhetoric (similarity 0.78)
• Obama’s drone campaign killed civilians in five Muslim-majority countries (similarity 0.78)
• Obama-era policy reports rejected clash-of-civilizations thinking for liberal imperialism (similarity 0.78)
• Failed Iraq and Afghan wars drove Obama toward a rebranded smarter war on terror (similarity 0.78)