Introduction

Upon assuming the presidency in 2009, President Obama outlined a foreign policy encompassed by restraint. The US was in the midst of an economic recession and struggling to exit two costly wars in the Middle East. Throughout the campaign, Obama had emphasized the need to reel in the crusading overstretch of the Bush administration. This theme of restraint carried through the early years of his presidency, highlighted at major international addresses at Cairo University, as well as his Nobel Prize Acceptance speech in 2009. During these engagements, Obama would stress the need for humility, multilateralism and burden-sharing in efforts to rid the world of evil (Obama, 2009a; 2009b). In this way, Obama sought to advance a foreign policy grounded in the premise that one of the jobs of the President is simply to ‘don't do stupid shit’ (Obama quoted in Goldberg, 2016). Despite these efforts, Obama's position on the use of force would vary through his presidency. Across the next two chapters, I examine the Obama's decisions concerning the use of force in Libya and Syria. These are important cases as they represent significant variation in decisions to use force in response to similar types of mass atrocities within the same administration.

In this chapter, I first outline the professed foreign policy set forth by the incoming Obama administration. Indeed, throughout the campaign of 2008, Obama made a concerted effort to distinguish his foreign policy from that of the outgoing Bush administration. Through continued appeals, Obama would argue that America was a force for good. However, there was a need to recognize the limits of US power, and that it was in the US's vital interests not to overstretch, but a reversion to isolationism was not the answer to America's security challenges. Furthermore, when democratic uprisings began in the Middle East in 2010, the administration would adopt this same restrained, cognitive approach.

Second, I show that despite attempts to reel in crusading impulses of the previous administration, when faced with the prospect of mass atrocity, Obama would succumb to principled types of ideas, becoming drawn into the conflict in Libya in 2011. Despite efforts to avoid entering another Middle Eastern conflict, the belief that Libya was on the verge of mass atrocity would see normative displacement allow more principled interpretations of the US's role to emerge.