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The chapter explores how as President of the United States, Barack Obama was in a constant exchange with both political opponents and diverging voices within his own administration over defining America’s world political role and the purpose behind American power. The chapter describes how Obama’s strategic vision not only informed the political debate and determined policy, but also represented the central hub in an intertextual network of grand strategy discourses, providing the focus for the policy advice and criticism of Washington think tanks, the reporting and commentary of the media, and the intellectual attention of academic researchers interested in the study of US foreign and security policy. The chapter examines how Obama reconfirmed a national and bipartisan consensus, -the ideational dimension of American exceptionalism, liberal hegemony, and military supremacy-, while linking this identity to a pragmatic policy course of cooperative engagement and military restraint that large segments of the Washington establishment rejected for challenging the elite consensus on liberal hegemony.

This chapter compares and contrasts the Obama Doctrine with various foreign policy traditions. The Obama Doctrine is in many ways unique, approximating most closely the foreign policy of President Carter during his first three years in office. The Obama Doctrine stands furthest from the foreign policies characteristic of Truman, Reagan, and George W. Bush. None of the traditional formulations of American foreign policy fully captures President Obama’s unique synthesis. Ironically, the Obama Doctrine is most closely aligned with the outlook of Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who also advocates a substantial devolution of American power and discounts ideology and regime type as key variables for identifying friends and foes.

The Obama Doctrine, defined as a coherent worldview informing the formulation of a twenty-first-century foreign policy, can be traced back to Barack Obama's formative years and is linked with the development of his identity. Obama himself has often made the connection between his life story and his foreign policy views. Obama gave his first interview as president to the Arabic television news channel network Al-Arabiya. He was the first president to mention Muslims in his inaugural address, and in the interview he reiterated his desire for outreach to the Muslim world. Obama's background and intellectual development attest to an experience with foreign cultures and a keen interest in foreign policy issues. He represents a break both with the transatlantic focus of the Eastern Establishment and the unilateralism and Pacific and Caribbean imperialist orientation of Southern and Western conservatism. In his autobiography, Obama recorded his first impressions of Indonesia and recounts his childhood in Hawaii in terms of his search for identity. He also traces his roots to Africa.

This chapter examines the foreign policies of six key actors in the Persian Gulf in light of middle power rivalries and sectarian tensions. The actors include Iran and Saudi Arabia, which the chapter argues are today perhaps the Middle East’s most significant middle powers, in addition to Turkey of course. There are two other states in the area with aspirations of being middle powers, namely Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, despite their small geographic size and equally small populations.

This chapter provides a summary of the book’s findings. The chapter argues that the geopolitical vision of a more restrained leadership role and more cautious global engagement Obama formulated was reflecting the post-American future rather than the hegemonic past of America’s role in world politics. It assesses that most influential scholars, pundits and policy makers in turn remained embedded in the Washington consensus of hegemony and mired in a unipolar worldview. The chapter identifies a further fracturing of the grand strategy consensus, between elite opinion and the foreign policy establishment denouncing ‘isolationist’ tendencies, and an American public increasingly in favour of non-interventionism and in acceptance of a less singular hegemonic role. The chapter briefly reviews how this conflict was also encapsulated in the contest for Obama’s succession between Hillary Clinton, a quintessential Washington insider and firm believer in America’s role as the world’s indispensable nation and Donald Trump, an anti-establishment populist that had aggressively questioned the elite consensus on US foreign and economic policy.

Since the early years of the twentieth century, the Persian Gulf has been viewed as a strategically vital waterway, both for the global economy in general and for the continued prosperity of advanced economies in particular. In the process, the region has become an arena for the emergence of multiple and often overlapping security challenges, many of them indigenous to the area and many imported from abroad. Up until the 2011 Arab uprisings, most of these security challenges revolved around territorial, political, and military competitions and conflicts within and between actors from the region itself and from the outside. While threats and challenges to human security were also present, they were often overshadowed by more immediate and more tangible threats to territorial sovereignty and those posed by various forms of political and military competition between state actors.