Strategic Failure: How President Obama's Drone Warfare, Defense Cuts, and Military Amateurism Have Imperiled America.

• Author: Ozdemir, Gloria Shkurti
• Position: Book review

Strategic Failure: How President Obama's Drone Warfare, Defense Cuts, and Military Amateurism Have Imperiled America

By Mark Moyar

New York: Threshold Editions, 2015, 401 pages, $28.00, ISBN: 9781476713243

Grand strategy is a blueprint that sets the path to foreign policy; more specifically it reveals which foreign policy decisions should be taken and which tools can be used to protect national interest and security. Among many states, which produce and follow a grand strategy the United States is the most remarkable example. Soon after the Cold War, different conflicts started to emerge and the approach of different presidents to these conflicts resulted in different grand strategies. Indeed, within the context of grand strategy, the United States started wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after the September 11, 2001 attacks, soon to find itself socioeconomically damaged. Moreover, the United States was shaken even more by the economic crisis of 2008, which translated into difficulties in domestic politics. In light of these developments, Obama came to the presidency and set out to follow a new grand strategy.

Strategic Failure aims at analyzing the strategy followed by Obama during his eight years as U.S. President. With critical tones, Mark Moyar, a historian who has been in and out of government on national security affairs, offers a detailed analysis starting from Obama's electoral campaigns. Nevertheless, the main focus of the book remains war in the Middle East, especially the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan, and how Obama responded to the threats that loomed large during his presidency.

Calling Obama "the man of change," Moyar in the first chapter presents how Obama changed his position regarding national security issues quite often. A good example of this is how, while previously Obama had argued that 9/11 was the result of Americas neglect of global poverty, later (a couple of years before running for president), Obama argued that the U.S. needs to fight against these perpetrators. A similar change was seen in Obama's stance toward the war in Iraq and Afghanistan where the main reason behind this shift can be found in the swing votes that Obama was trying to attract. In the next two chapters, the author analyzes Obama's team and its divisions to later focus mainly on the fact that when he came to power, Obama -albeit not in a visible way--ignored the military and tried to leave them out of politics. In a struggle of power between the...