President Barack Obama is continuing to reorient U.S. foreign policy in general, and in the Middle East in particular, along the lines of the internationalist/neo-realist approach pursued in the pre-9/11 years of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Obama’s televised address marking the end of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq, coupled with his earlier decision to escalate U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan and this week’s start of a new round of U.S.-orchestrated Israeli-Palestinian talks in Washington, fits very much into a familiar pattern – a policy based on the assumption that Washington will continue setting the agenda and determining the policy outcomes in the Broader Middle East (Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Israel-Palestine).
That should not have come as a major surprise to those of us who have been calling for long-term structural changes in American global strategy, starting with the necessary reassessment of the U.S. goal of maintaining a hegemonic position in the Middle East. After all, much of presidential candidate Obama’s criticism of President George W. Bush’s foreign policy sounded like the kind of assessments that were being made by President Bush I’s former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft — who not unlike Obama was opposed to decision to invade Iraq and who was calling for diplomatic engagement with Iran.
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