One irony of the Obama presidency is how much it relies on hard power. The president came into office proposing a dramatic shift from George W. Bush’s perceived unilateralism, and most of his predecessor’s hard-edged counterterrorism tactics and massive deployments in wars abroad. Yet after three years, Obama has escalated forces in Afghanistan, embraced the widespread use of unmanned drones to kill terrorists at the risk of civilian casualties, kept Guantánamo open, and killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in a thoroughly unilateral fashion.
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