Abstract
This chapter focuses on the months from late spring to mid-autumn 2009, when Obama’s administration began to proactively implement its foreign policy agenda. The period ends with Obama’s final decision regarding a possible Afghanistan “surge.” The chapter itself first reviews early debates about how to characterize and explain Obama’s grand strategy before turning to its substantive core: how Obama articulated grand strategy and, in turn, how his administration implemented grand strategy. Brief analysis and findings at the end suggest that officials were responsive to early, perceived failures and were willing to make limited adjustments to their grand strategic approach. This grand strategy itself was a mix of liberal internationalist ambitions and pragmatic realism.
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Shively, J. (2016). Hope, Change, Pragmatism. In: Hope, Change, Pragmatism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57699-6_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57699-6_2
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