foreign policy or standards of international conduct that the United States expects of others. Obama too restrained, and hope to see some middle ground.”īaker quotes James Jeffrey of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy as articulating the same theme: “Bush’s excessive use of military force disillusioned the American political base for engagement. Then Obama’s timid use of military force disillusioned the American regional diplomatic base in allied governments.”Īll of this loses sight of how much the framing effects have skewed this entire discussion. Bush’s signature use of military force and the defining initiative of his presidency - the invasion of Iraq - was an unusually extreme act as measured either by past U.S. Bush was judged to be too assertive,” writes Baker, “many here consider Mr.
president, like Goldilocks, should use some amount in between. This theme appears, for example, in an article by Peter Baker in the New York Times about the next administration’s choices in the Middle East. Bush used too much, Barack Obama used too little, and the next U.S. administration should use military force. A common refrain has been that George W. So it has been recently with discussion of how the next U.S. The nation’s recent history and the sheer volume of argumentation on one side of an issue or another create powerful framing effects. A commonly felt sense of what is extreme and what is reasonable may derive mostly from the framing, detached from any more broadly based standard. Similar dynamics apply not just to manipulation of options papers but also to public debate about foreign policy. The whole framework may be skewed. The offered alternative on one side may be inherently more extreme than the one on the other side. If a more complete list of options were presented, the additional alternatives may be mostly on one side, and the pre-cooked “middle” option would be revealed to be not in a moderate middle after all. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
President Barack Obama talking on the phone in the Oval Office, Oct.