Abstract
Barack Obama promised to transform foreign policy in a globalist direction. After raising hopes in the Prague and Cairo speeches of 2009, however, his administration turned down the rhetoric and adjusted expectations. Obama’s retrenchment strategy and cautious demeanor, exemplified in his Pivot to Asia, opened a vacuum that Donald J. Trump exploited in late 2015 and early 2016. As public fears of terrorism and refugee inflows crested just as the political campaign began, Obama and his former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, stayed focused on Asia and appeared detached from public fears of ISIS terrorists and criminals. Meanwhile, Trump’s tough talk on “radical Islamic terrorism” helped fill the foreign policy vacuum. Foreign policy had become a defining issue in the election of 2016, and the candidate who repudiated Obama emerged victorious. In a fearful political climate, tough talk trumped caution and retrenchment. History will judge whether Obama’s successors’ policies matched the moment or not. Either way, the legacies of Obama, Trump, and Biden will be inseparable from the complexities of foreign policy.
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Waalkes, S. (2022). From the Audacity of Hope to “Small Ball”: How Obama’s Retrenchment and Caution Contributed to Trump’s Rise. In: Grossman, M., Matthews, R.E., Schortgen, F. (eds) Achievements and Legacy of the Obama Presidency. The Evolving American Presidency. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89529-7_8
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