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American grand strategy after the global financial crisis: Obama’s grand- strategy makers and imperial restoration
Ist Teil von
American Grand Strategy and Corporate Elite Networks, 2015, p.208-253
Ort / Verlag
United Kingdom: Routledge
Erscheinungsjahr
2015
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Alma/SFX Local Collection
Beschreibungen/Notizen
While the limits to the neoconservative grand strategy became increasingly
apparent during Bush’s second term, it was in the context of the financial crisis
that erupted at the end of the Bush presidency coming on the heels of what many
perceived as the Iraq debacle, and a resulting general sense of weakening of U.S.
power relative to rising powers such as China, that Obama’s call for “change we
can believe in” became so resonant not only with regard to domestic but also to
foreign policy. However, rather than representing any fundamental change, the
Obama administration set out to readjust U.S. grand strategy in terms of its
means while remaining fully committed to its longstanding ends – upholding the
exceptionalist claim to global hegemony, with the stated aim of U.S. military
power underwriting “global security” and supporting the opening of markets
around the globe, and – protestations to the contrary notwithstanding – expanding the War on Terror on several fronts, even if adjusting its focus and means.
At the same time, seeking to restore and preserve American global “leadership
for the coming decades,” Obama not only focused on restoring the economic
foundations of American power in the wake of the global financial crisis, but
also “rebalanced” American grand strategy to Asia in recognition of the global
power shift taking place and the potential threat emanating from China to the
Open Door. As such, what came to be called the “Asia pivot” became a central
element of what we here identify as Obama’s strategy of “imperial restoration.”
In keeping with the structure of the two preceding chapters, we will now first
present an overview of a selection of Obama’s grand-strategy makers and the
corporate and policy planning elite networks in which they are embedded, before
moving on to analyzing the changing global context around the time that Obama
and his team came to power, and how this context was interpreted within affiliated policy planning bodies. We will then in the third section substantiate our
claim that under Obama once more the Open Door worldview has been reproduced, and then in the final section analyze how, on the basis of this worldview
and in the evolving global context, Obama’s grand-strategy makers, shaped in
their agency by the (corporate) elite network of which a majority of them are
part, pursued a grand strategy that while containing some new elements represents yet another variety of America’s Open Door imperialism.