Barack Obama unveils his administration’s new national security strategy on Friday with the sound of past foreign policy promise ringing in his ears – and its unmet challenges staring him in the face.

“As-salamu alaykum,” began the president in Cairo in a famous “new beginnings” speech once aimed at bridging the divide between Islam and the US.

Three months earlier, in April 2009, he had told a similarly expectant audience in Prague he aimed to rid the world of nuclear weapons and reset relations with Russia. Only two years ago, in another landmark speech to the National Defense Academy, the president was still promising to end America’s seemingly permanent “war on terror” and curtail his use of drone killings.

Friday’s long-delayed policy document is expected to acknowledge instead the realities of a world where America is still fighting Islamic extremism on multiple fronts – not only with drones, but thousands of US troops too – spending more to maintain its nuclear weapons and squaring up against Moscow over war in Ukraine.

Congress stipulates that the White House publish a national security strategy every year, although presidents typically only renew it at the beginning of each new term in office.

But former staffers who have observed the current process say even this timetable has slipped by more than a year in Obama’s second term as officials struggled to produce a document that would not be rapidly overtaken by deteriorating world events.

“This one has had a lot of trouble coming out of the door,” says Jeremy Shapiro, a member of the State Department’s office of policy planning during Obama’s first term, who is now a fellow at the Brookings Institution.

“The process is an exercise in strategic mastication; policies are chewed and chewed,” he added.

Perhaps in keeping with the more bureaucratic nature of this strategy document compared with past presidential speeches, its publication will be followed by a speech at Brookings not from Obama himself, but from national security adviser Susan Rice.

Her staff nonetheless insist the document outlines “the president’s foreign policy vision and priorities for the American people, the Congress, and our allies and partners around the world”.

“The new national security strategy provides a vision for strengthening and sustaining American leadership in this still young century,” White House national security spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan told the Guardian. “It sets out the principles and priorities to guide the use of American power, and it affirms America’s leadership role within a rules-based international order.”

Amid fierce administration debate this week over whether to arm Ukraine in its fight against Russia, the document may also mark a stiffening of Obama’s hawkish tendencies compared with a speech to West Point military cadets last year that appeared to mark a desire to extract the US from foreign wars.

“It also signals our resolve and readiness to deter and, if necessary, defeat potential adversaries,” added Meehan. “And it serves as a compass for how this administration, in partnership with the Congress, will lead the world through a shifting security landscape toward a more durable peace and a new prosperity.”



Obama’s reversals of early priorities, abandonment of others and instances where circumstances have upended his geopolitical approaches have prompted criticism that his game plan is now fundamentally reactive. His forthcoming strategy document faces the challenge of creating an overall framework to give both allies and adversaries consistent expectations about what the United States will do.

Perhaps the most glaring case of a reversal at the core of Obama’s early foreign policy principles is Iraq. His presidential victories are difficult to imagine without it. Obama’s opposition to the Iraq war and unapologetic advocacy of extricating the US from it somersaulted him over Hillary Clinton for the 2008 Democratic nomination. When a plan to keep a residual force failed in the Iraqi parliament, Obama re-embraced full military withdrawal, particularly as a cudgel against Mitt Romney in 2012.

But along the way, military withdrawal became diplomatic disengagement. Unmoored from US backing, Iraqi security unraveled alongside Iraqi politics in a vicious circle, until the Islamic State filled the vacuum. Obama’s principles had painted him into a corner: to stay out would require gambling with a regional catastrophe; to reinvade would concede he had been reckless. Obama has now opted for daily air strikes and a few thousand ostensibly non-combat ground forces, married to a restored sponsorship of the Iraqi military, with neither an end on the horizon nor a path to victory.

The restoration of the Iraq war on a smaller scale has consequences beyond Iraq. Obama has slowed his already cautious advocacy of getting the US out of Afghanistan, prompted by a military and regional concern of a second descent into post-US chaos. The US military will have a greater role in Afghanistan this year than Obama pledged in 2012, and a security pact paves the way to a residual force lasting until 2024. His approach to the wars he inherited is now characterized by neither extrication nor resolution of the conflicts.

Other challenges have proven too complex for Obama. His first national security adviser, James Jones, called a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine the “epicenter” of Obama’s Middle East policy. Yet Obama has been consistently out-maneuvered by an intransigent Binyamin Netanyahu and undermined by a provocative Hamas, demolishing his credibility with both Israelis and Palestinians, all of whom appear to be waiting out his presidency. His relations with Israel have descended into personal snits with the incorrigible Netanyahu, matched with the bizarre spectacle of unwavering US opposition to Palestinian statehood efforts at the United Nations.

Still other priorities have simply disappeared. In 2010, Obama gathered world leaders to Washington for a summit on setting the world down a road to the elimination of nuclear weapons. Neither funding pledges for safety upgrades to the nuclear inventory nor rhetorical reminders that the sainted Ronald Reagan shared the goal of “nuclear zero” mollified outright Republican contempt. Obama barely even mentions the issue anymore.

Obama’s new budget, unveiled on Monday, contained his largest funding boost yet for nuclear-equipped missiles, submarines and bombers. The Pentagon budget even contained a plan to make the most expensive weapons system in history, the F-35 family of fighter jets, capable of carrying nukes. The Arms Control Association judged it “deeply disappointing and a lost opportunity to make common sense adjustments to the current nuclear weapons spending trajectory”.

His “reset” in relations with Russia is a distant memory, wiped away in total by Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, much as George W Bush’s gaze into Putin’s soul was undone by the time of the Russian invasion of Georgia.

Obama now attempts an economic punishment of Russia as a sort of soft containment, while pressure builds – even from his own nominee to run the Pentagon – to arm the Ukrainian government.

But Obama’s containment is caveated and compartmentalized: he still holds out hope of working with Putin to resolve the Syria conflict, now inextricably tied to the resurrected Iraq war.