Colin Dueck With Josh Busby

President Obama has almost finished his second term. As the country prepares to elect the next president, it is worth looking back at the President’s foreign policy successes and failures. Was his foreign policy effective? We’ll debate that question on November 4th with Dr. Colin Dueck and Dr. Joshua Busby. Dr. Dueck recently published The Obama Doctrine where he examines this question at length. Dr. Joshua Busby will challenge some of his assertions and conclusions. Who will be more convincing?

In The Obama Doctrine, Colin Dueck analyzes and explains what the Obama Doctrine in foreign policy actually is, and maps out the competing visions on offer from the Republican Party. Dueck, a leading scholar of US foreign policy, contends it is now becoming clear that Obama’s policy of international retrenchment is in large part a function of his emphasis on achieving domestic policy goals. There have been some successes in the approach, but there have also been costs. For instance, much of the world no longer trusts the US to exert its will in international politics, and America’s adversaries overseas have asserted themselves with increasing frequency.

Colin Dueck is an Associate Professor in George Mason University’s School of Policy, Government, and International Affairs. He studied politics at Princeton University, and international relations at Oxford under a Rhodes scholarship. He has published two books on American foreign and national security policies, Hard Line: The Republican Party and U.S. Foreign Policy since World War II, and Reluctant Crusaders: Power, Culture, and Change in American Grand Strategy.

Dr. Joshua Busby is an Associate Professor of Public Affairs and a fellow in the RGK Center for Philanthropy and Community Service as well as a Distinguished Scholar at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law. He originally joined the LBJ School faculty in fall 2006 as a Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer. Prior to coming to UT, Dr. Busby was a research fellow at the Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School (2005-2006), the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s JFK School (2004-2005), and the Foreign Policy Studies program at the Brookings Institution (2003-2004). Busby is a Life Member in the Council on Foreign Relations. His works have appeared in Political Geography, International Security, Perspectives on Politics, Security Studies, International Studies Quarterly, Current History, and Problems of Post-Communism, among other publications.