Word: bushing
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...they would begin to come home by mid-2011, when the U.S. would start to hand over responsibility to an Afghan national army that remains largely hypothetical by measure of an independent capability to fight the Taliban. Faced with a strategic choice in Afghanistan, Obama opted to escalate, as Bush would have done - and the smart money says that by the logic of that decision, the Afghan surge is likely to last well beyond the President's current term. Sure, Obama adopted a more confrontational tone than Bush did in addressing dysfunctional allies like Afghan President Hamid Karzai...
...Iran: Candidate Obama promised to engage with Iran, pointing out that the Bush Administration's policies of setting ultimatums backed by limited sanctions had failed to slow Iran's nuclear program. The Bush team did, of course, reach out discreetly to Tehran during its final year - though Obama made a far more public show in his Persian New Year message, respectfully addressed to the regime. But the turmoil unleashed by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's contested re-election on June 12 prompted the regime to circle the wagons against alleged "Western plots," imperiling hopes for diplomatic rapprochement. Critics may have...
...Obama Administration has maintained its predecessor's boycott of Hamas and has declined to intervene meaningfully in the standoff in Gaza, where Israel maintains an economic stranglehold aimed at toppling Hamas. So despite his best intentions, Obama closed out 2009 in a situation not unlike that of Bush's valedictory year - pressing for talks between Israel and an increasingly marginal Abbas while wishing away the problem of Hamas. After a year of peacemaking, the Administration is more likely to confront a resumption of hostilities in Gaza (and possibly the West Bank) than it is to see any diplomatic breakthrough...
...Russians say the same about the U.S. policy of maintaining the NATO alliance (constructed especially to contain the Soviet Union) and extending it to Russia's borders by seeking to draw in the likes of Georgia and Ukraine. Those policies originated with the Clinton Administration rather than with Bush, and they have locked Moscow into a strategic competition with Washington - talk of a reset button is unlikely to change that. Sure, Obama is negotiating new arms-control treaties with Moscow, but that's vintage Cold War. Even then, Russia is playing hardball and looks set to continue making its decisions...
...North Korea: Bush initially tried to reverse the Clinton Administration's policy of multilateral talks offering North Korea incentives for refraining from building nuclear weapons. The North couldn't be trusted to keep its word, Bush said, and he wasn't necessarily wrong. But he soon discovered that he had no alternative but to continue the approach of multilateral diplomacy through the six-party talks to coax North Korea into relinquishing its nukes. And that policy remained despite repeated North Korean nuclear and missile tests. Nobody expected anything different from the Obama Administration, and Obama, to his credit, didn...