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Obama’s leadership style: enabling transatlantic allies in Libya and Mali

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Abstract

This article assesses President Obama’s transatlantic leadership style with regard to foreign crises and it contrasts it with the style of the previous Bush administration. It argues that the Obama administration exercises what we call enabling leadership, which implies that the US does lead, but that it does not feel the need to project ‘leadership from the front’. The article first analyses the diplomatic aspect of leadership by focusing on the ‘speaking order’ among the United States and three of its core allies, namely the United Kingdom, France and Canada. It presents a computer-assisted content analysis of the 482 official statements issued by these four states in response to the crisis in Libya in 2011 and Mali in 2012–2013. The paper then performs a detailed analysis of the financial and military contributions of the US and its allies to confront these crises. It provides qualitative and quantitative evidence suggesting that the Obama administration consciously adopted enabling leadership, a strategy that is consistent with the worldview of the president and his foreign policy entourage.

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Notes

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, Université Laval, Pavillon Charles-De Koninck, 1030, avenue des Sciences-Humaines, Québec, Québec, Canada, G1V 0A6

    Jonathan Paquin & Philippe Beauregard

  2. Department of Political Science, Université du Québec à Montréal, Case postale 8888, succ. Centre-Ville, Montréal, Québec, Canada, H3C 3P8

    Justin Massie

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  1. Jonathan Paquin
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Correspondence to Jonathan Paquin.

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Jonathan Paquin is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Centre for International Security at Université Laval in Quebec City. He is the co-editor (with Patrick James) of Game Changer: The Impact of 9/11 on North American Security, UBC Press, 2014, and the author of A Stability-Seeking Power: US Foreign Policy and Secessionist Conflicts (McGill-Queen’s, 2010). Paquin has also written articles in multiple academic journals including Cooperation and Conflict, Foreign Policy Analysis, International Journal, the Canadian Journal of Political Science, and Canadian Foreign Policy.

Justin Massie is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Quebec in Montreal and Senior Fellow at the Centre interuniversitaire de recherche sur les relations internationales du Canada et du Québec. He is the author of numerous works on Canadian foreign and defence policy, including his latest book: Francosphère: L’importance de la France dans la culture stratégique du Canada (Montréal: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 2013).

Philippe Beauregard is a PhD candidate in Political Science and a researcher at the Center for International Security at Université Laval in Quebec City, Canada.

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Paquin, J., Massie, J. & Beauregard, P. Obama’s leadership style: enabling transatlantic allies in Libya and Mali. J Transatl Stud 15, 184–206 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1080/14794012.2016.1268793

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