The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: The Liberal Tradition and Obama's

Counterterrorism Policy
Michael C. Descha1
a1
University of Notre Dame
Michael C. Desch is a professor in and chair of the department of political science at the University of Notre Dame. He is the
author, most recently, of Power and Military Effectiveness: The Fallacy of Democratic Triumphalism(Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2008). He can be reached michael.desch.4@nd.edu.

Barack Obama campaigned on a platform of ―Change We Can Believe In.‖ One of the biggest changes many anticipated with his

election was a dramatic break with the previous administration's counterterror policy. There were good reasons for thinking that

this would be the case. George W. Bush was a Republican who took his cues from the most conservative elements of his party,

including neoconservatives, the religious right, and other proponents of an assertive stance of U.S. global primacy and a forward-

leaning posture in the war on terror. Conversely, Barack Obama is a liberal Democrat who opposed the Iraq War and seeks to

―reset‖ America's relations with other countries around the world by recommitting the United States to a more moderate approach

to waging the war against al-Qaeda, including measures such as adopting a more multilateral foreign policy, closing the detention

center at Guantanamo Bay, ending the practices of extraordinary rendition and enhanced interrogation, and showing a greater

respect for civil liberties domestically.

Given those differences, Obama's behavior a year into his administration presents us with a puzzle: while there is no doubt that

the rhetoric of the two administrations is markedly different, particularly if the baseline is the first term of the Bush

administration, it is not clear that a similarly dramatic shift in actual behavior has occurred.

Admittedly, some of the people who suggest that the continuities between the administrations outweigh the discontinuities, such

as Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith and Duke political scientist Peter Feaver, served in the previous administration, and so

this argument could be dismissed simply as an effort to provide political cover for a counterterrorism policy that is widely

regarded as having failed in making America safer after September 11 while simultaneously undermining civil liberties at home

(Goldsmith 2009; Feaver 2009; Brooks 2009). But irrespective of the possible motives of those who argue that the actual

differences between Bush and Obama counterterror policies is small, their substantive observations about the continuities

between the two administrations ought to be judged on their own merits.

Moreover, when individuals like writers for the liberal Nation and Salon.com and editorialists for the pro-Obama New York

Times who have no vested political interest in making the case that the differences are less than the rhetoric suggests also do so,

there are grounds for seriously considering the possibility that, at least in the realm of counterterrorism policy, the change we can

believe in is more the audacity of hope than an established fact (Sanchez 2009; New York Times 2009; Greenwald2009;

Karon 2010).

In this article, I make two arguments: First, proponents of the continuity thesis, particularly in the counterterrorism policy arena,

have a strong case. To be sure, there are important differences between the forty-third and forty-fourth presidents' policies that

should not be ignored. However, the continuities are striking as well. Second, these surprising continuities demand an

explanation. I suggest that Louis Hartz's famous ―liberal tradition‖ thesis can account for both the continuity between the two

otherwise very different presidencies and also the ironically ―illiberal‖ bent of the otherwise liberal Obama administration (Desch
2007/2008).
PLUS ÇA CHANGE: 43'S AND 44'S COUNTERTERRORISM POLICY?
The rhetoric of the current and previous administrations' counterterrorism policies is very different, and these differences in

language and packaging do matter at some level. Moreover, on some important issues—ranging from the discontinuation of

enhanced interrogation techniques against terror suspects, the closing of overseas secret prisons, the drawdown of the U.S.

military presence in Iraq, a willingness to engage in dialogue with Iran about its nuclear program, and a renewed willingness to

participate in international regimes to control environmental change—their concrete behavior has diverged.

But on many other policy issues, particularly those related to the conduct of the global war on terror, there has been striking

continuity. Goldsmith identifies a number of such policy areas in which the difference between the two administrations is

imperceptible.

First, as the Bush administration did, and contrary to the views of many of his supporters, Obama has framed the conflict with al-

Qaeda as a ―war,‖ rather than a criminal matter, and mostly prosecuted it as such. As the President reminded the nation after the
failed Christmas underwear bomb plot, ―We are at war. We are at war against al-Qaeda, a far-reaching network of violence and

hatred that attacked us on 9/11, that killed nearly 3,000 innocent people, and that is plotting to strike us again‖ (Obama 2010c).

The decision to try September 11 mastermind Khalid Shaik Mohammed and his confederates in civilian courts in New York

notwithstanding, Obama, like Bush, considers himself a war president, and this has shaped his approach to many other aspects of

the war on terrorism.

Second, while Obama might detain fewer terrorist suspects without trial than Bush did, his Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has

nonetheless indicated that he would do so in at least some cases, a position which the President recently affirmed

(Goldsmith 2009).

Third, former constitutional law professor Obama campaigned for the presidency on the platform that habeas corpus—the

principle that individuals incarcerated by U.S. officials should be able to petition our courts for release—also applies to prisoners

in the war on terror. However, Obama has retreated from this position, particularly regarding its application to detainees at the

U.S. prison at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. There have been reports that if and when the United States turns over

control of the prison to Afghan authorities, prisoners will be able to petition for redress in Afghan courts, although the degree to

which that ability would really improve their status remains to be seen, given the state of the Afghan judicial system (AFP 2010).

Fourth, while the Obama administration modified the Bush-era military commissions in some ways, it did not, as initially

expected, kill them, and the modifications made to date (suppression of evidence derived from torture and increased latitude for

defendants to choose their own counsel) represent, at best, evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, change.

Fifth, one area in which Obama has outdone his predecessor in vigor in waging the war on terrorism is the use of unmanned

aerial vehicles (U.A.V.s) armed with guided missiles to kill Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives in the tribal regions of Pakistan and

Afghanistan.

Sixth, many perceive CIA Director Leon Panetta's promise to discontinue the practice of extraordinary rendition of terror

suspects to countries that are likely to torture them as a dramatic break with the past. But, as Goldsmith points out, this policy
shift may be less than meets the eye, given that the Obama administration has not ruled out the practice in general and appears to
have adopted the same less stringent criteria employed by the Bush administration to gauge the likelihood that another country

will employ torture (see also Spillius 2010).

Seventh, both as a U.S. senator and as a candidate, Obama was critical of the Bush administration's expansive domestic

surveillance program in the war on terror. But as president, he has done little to change these Bush-era programs or institute

stronger oversight of these activities.

Finally, the Obama administration has thus far not backed away from the expansive ―state secrets‖ definition that the Bush

administration used to restrict evidence used in court cases on the grounds that it would compromise intelligence ―sources and

methods.‖

There are at least three additional lines of continuity between the two administrations:

First, both the Bush and Obama administrations regard the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear

weapons, as one of the defining threats of the twenty-first century, primarily on the grounds that terrorists might somehow obtain
them. While their stances are different in nuance (Bush focused more explicitly on rogue states while Obama has pursued a more

generic antinuclear agenda), both in practice have focused the bulk of the counter-proliferation efforts on undemocratic, anti-

American regimes such as Iran and North Korea and largely ignored pro-American and democratic nuclear powers like Pakistan,

India, and Israel (Obama 2010b; Obama 2010a).

Indeed, the Obama administration has gone to great lengths to highlight the continuity of its efforts with previous administrations

in this aspect of its counterterrorism policy (Obama 2009d). The President has even quoted with approval Reagan Reagan's

famous mantra that ―a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought‖ to justify his effort to abolish all nuclear weapons,

an effort that has garnered bipartisan support (Obama 2009a).

Second, Obama has shifted the central front in the war on terror from Iraq back to Afghanistan. He initially maintained that the

United States is ―not in Afghanistan to control that country or to dictate its future,‖ but rather to defeat al-Qaeda (Obama 2009f).

But now his strategy for waging the war there bears striking similarities to the strategy employed by the Bush administration in

Iraq, including a surge in the number of troops in the theater and a shift toward counterinsurgency and nation-building as the core

strategies for winning the war (Desch 2009).

Finally, one of the biggest potential changes between Bush's and Obama's foreign policies was assumed to be the latter's

reengagement in the Middle East peace process. Beginning with his much-heralded Cairo speech of June 2009, Obama promised

to adopt a more evenhanded stance toward the Israelis and the Palestinians, manifested most dramatically in the new President's

call for a ―freeze‖ on the construction of Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories (Obama and Netanyahu2009). Despite a

very public rebuke of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu after his government announced the construction of 1,600 new

housing units in disputed East Jerusalem during a visit by Vice President Biden, the Obama administration nonetheless appears to

have retreated to the United States' default position of unconditional support for the Jewish state, with Obama's Secretary of State

Hillary Clinton recently characterizing Israel's hard-line coalition government's intransigence on settlements as ―unprecedented‖

concessions and her spokesman parroting the Israeli government's dismissal of the report of the United Nations Fact-Finding
Mission on the Gaza Conflict (Ravid 2009; Guttman 2009; Quandt2010).
Given these many continuities, Goldsmith's conclusion that ―the main difference between the Obama and Bush administrations

concerns not the substance of [counterterror] policy, but rather its packaging‖ is not wide of the mark (Goldsmith 2009). Indeed,

from the opposite end of the political spectrum, but reaching a nearly identical set of conclusions, blogger Glenn Greenwald

laments that Obama ―has actively and affirmatively embraced those very policies as his own—the very policies which Democrats

and liberals almost unanimously claimed for years they found so offensive and dangerous—and he has vigorously defended them

and repeatedly applied them in numerous circumstances‖ (Greenwald 2009, emphasis in original). In other words, there is broad

recognition of the extensive continuity between the forty-third and forty-fourth presidents.
WHAT EXPLAINS THIS CONTINUITY?
Goldsmith suggests four possible explanations for the continuity between the two administrations. One is that many of these

policies persist simply because it is hard to change policies implemented by the previous administration, and not because of

positive commitment to them by the new president. But to endorse this theory is to embrace the implausible notion that even

determined presidential effort cannot overcome institutional inertia.

Another explanation is rooted in a core assumption of bureaucratic politics theory: where you sit (as president) determines where

you stand (increasing presidential authority)—that is, by virtue of incumbency, a president wants to expand presidential

authority. This assumes, though, that the institutional interest of the presidency is clear and unchanging, and that identical

policies are the only way to advance it.

A third explanation highlights the differences between campaigning and actually governing, and argues that the exigencies of the

latter pushed both administrations in roughly the same direction. It is certainly true that campaigning and governing are two

different things, but it does not follow that governing occurs in the same way across administrations. There is, in sum, an element

of truth in each of these three explanations, but none fully account for the remarkable continuity between important elements of

the Bush and Obama foreign policies.

Goldsmith's fourth explanation, in contrast, explains a large part of the consistency. He points to the broad consensus among the

country's political elite that we are in an unprecedented era of peril after September 11 that requires extraordinary measures to

survive in. What makes the war on terrorism so dangerous, from the perspective of what historian Arthur Schlesinger referred to

as the ―vital center‖ of U.S. politics, is not so much the physical threat of terrorism to the United States, but rather the existential

threat to the American way of life as a result of the uncivilized means that adversaries employ in seeking to destroy it

(Schlesinger 1949).

I explain this tendency to overstate the real—but hardly apocalyptic—threat from terrorism by turning to Louis Hartz's famous

observation that, at its core, the United States' liberal tradition contains a ―deep and unwritten tyrannical compulsion‖ that

―hampers creative action abroad by identifying the alien [e.g., the nonliberal] with the unintelligible, and it inspires hysteria at

home by generating the anxiety that unintelligible things produce‖ (Hartz 1955, 12, 285). Or, as McKittrick puts it, ―With nothing

to push against it, [liberalism] thinks in absolutes; the occasional shadows which cross its path quickly lengthen into monsters;

every enemy is painted in satanic terms, and it has no idea how it would behave if the enemy were either bigger or different‖
(McKittrick 1955). But to put the terrorist threat in perspective, of the roughly 14,000 Americans who were murdered in the

United States in 2009, just 14 (or .01%) died as a result of terrorism (Shane 2010; Walt 2010; Desch 2010).
In addition to overstating the threat we face today, America's liberal tradition also understates the difficulty of eliminating it once

and for all through such extravagant measures as nation-building and the spread of democracy. Were it not for this liberal

tradition, the United States might view the threat from global terrorism in a less alarmist light (more akin to a chronic crime

problem than World War IV1) and adopt more restrained policies in response (i.e., containment rather than global

transformation).

Despite important differences with its predecessor, there is substantial evidence that the Obama administration, like the Bush

administration before it, embraces the core tenets of America's liberal tradition. For example, the Obama administration shares

many elements of the Bush administration's view of the nature of the threat we face. Vice President Joe Biden has warned that,

along with the Persian Gulf states and Israel, the United States faces an ―existential threat‖ from Iran's nuclear program, despite

no evidence that Iran has made the decision to pursue nuclear weapons and the fact that even if it did, the United States and Israel

would retain a huge nuclear advantage.

In a similar vein, President Obama refers to September 11, 2001, as ―the deadliest attack on American soil in our history,‖

neglecting the almost 100,000 deaths as a result of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent war to defeat Japan

(Obama 2009g; see also Obama 2010a and Biden 2009). Like the Bush administration, Obama National Security Advisor

General James Jones waxed nostalgic for the ―simpler‖ days of the Cold War threat environment, a period in which we fought

wars in which we suffered tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of casualties and faced Armageddon

(Jones 2009).

As with the Bush administration, the Obama administration underestimates the difficulty of addressing these real, but hardly

existential, threats. For example, the President, like his predecessor, continues to link the spread of democracy to U.S. success in

Iraq and Afghanistan (Obama and al-Maliki 2009). As he explained in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, echoing classic

democratic peace theory, ―Only when Europe became free did it finally find peace. America has never fought a war against a

democracy, and our closest friends are governments that protect the rights of their citizens‖ (Obama 2010a). This belief has

convinced the current administration to commit to nation-building in Afghanistan on the grounds, as the President puts it, that

―military power alone will not win this war … We also need diplomacy and development and good governance‖ (Obama 2009e).

Nor are the days of the United States striving for primacy fully past either. Vice President Biden argues that the Obama

administration's core foreign policy objective is to ―first and foremost, reestablish America's preeminent leadership in the world‖

(Biden 2009; Obama 2009b). President Obama justified this effort by reminding the world in Oslo last year that ―it was not

simply international institutions—not just treaties and declarations—that brought stability to a post–World War II world.

Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States has helped to underwrite global security for more than

six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms‖ (Obama 2010a).

Finally, the naïve belief that we can have our cake (vigorously waging the war on terror in much the same way as the previous

administration) while eating it too (doing so at no cost to our international standing or our domestic civil liberties) is alive and

well in Obama's White House. As the President puts it, ―America is unique—because of that fundamental belief that we are

committed both to our security and to the rule of law‖ (Obama 2009h), and so we can ―reject the false choice between our
security and our ideals‖ (Obama 2009c; see also Obama 2010a). If only it were so easy.
CONCLUSIONS
I conclude with two points, one theoretical and one policy-relevant: First, the liberal tradition argument provides a convincing

solution to the puzzle of why, despite so much talk about change during the campaign, the Obama administration has actually not

departed all that much from the policies of its predecessor. Second, if we accept this argument, then real change in U.S.

counterterrorism policy can only come from outside the liberal consensus. Our task then is to identify the approaches that are

compatible with the many desirable elements of liberalism that are central to our domestic political system.

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NOTE
1
According to neoconservatives, the Cold War was World War III, and therefore the war on terror is considered World War IV.