You are cordially invited to a book lecture for
The Obama Doctrine: American Grand Strategy Today
with author
Colin Dueck
Associate Professor
School of Policy, Government, and International Affairs, George Mason University
Wednesday, June 24
4:30 PM
The Institute of World Politics
1521 16th Street NW
Washington, D.C.
Parking map
Please contact sdwyer@iwp.edu with any questions about this event.
By mid‐2015, the Obama presidency will be entering its final stages, and the race among the successors in both parties will be well underway. And while experts have already formed a provisional understanding of the Obama administration’s foreign policy goals, the shape of the “Obama Doctrine” is finally coming into full view.
In The Obama Doctrine, Colin Dueck analyzes and explains what the Obama Doctrine in foreign policy actually is, and maps out the competing visions on offer from the Republican Party. Dueck, a leading scholar of US foreign policy, contends it is now becoming clear that Obama’s policy of international retrenchment is in large part a function of his emphasis on achieving domestic policy goals. There have been some successes in the approach, but there have also been costs. For instance, much of the world no longer trusts the US to exert its will in international politics, and America’s adversaries overseas have asserted themselves with increasing frequency. The Republican Party will target these perceived weaknesses in the 2016 presidential campaign and develop competing counter‐doctrines in the process.
The Obama Doctrine not only provides a sharp appraisal of foreign policy in the Obama era; it lays out an alternative approach to marshaling American power that will help shape the foreign policy debate in the run‐up to the 2016 elections.
Colin Dueck is an Associate Professor in George Mason University’s School of Policy, Government, and International Affairs. He studied politics at Princeton University, and international relations at Oxford under a Rhodes scholarship. He has published three books on American foreign and national security policies, The Obama Doctrine: American Grand Strategy Today (Oxford 2015), Hard Line: The Republican Party and U.S. Foreign Policy since World War II (Princeton 2010), and Reluctant Crusaders: Power, Culture, and Change in American Grand Strategy (Princeton 2006.) Dueck has provided congressional testimony and published articles on these same subjects in journals such as International Security, Orbis, Security Studies, Review of International Studies, Political Science Quarterly, and World Policy Journal, as well as online at RealClearPolitics, National Review, Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, and the New York Times. His current research focus is on the relationship between party politics, presidential leadership, American conservatism, and U.S. foreign policy strategies. He is the faculty adviser for the Alexander Hamilton Society at George Mason University, and a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.