Last year US president Barack Obama mapped out a foreign policy in a speech at the National Defence University at Fort McNair in Washington – he wanted to take the US off "a perpetual wartime footing" and dismantle the 2001 and 2002 laws that allowed George W Bush launch a global "war on terror".
This was in line with a president who had campaigned to end the unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Now Obama, the Nobel peace laureate has – in the sixth year of his presidency – used the same laws to embark on another indefinite, open-ended war in the Middle East against other terrorist groups.
On Monday the US began the first air strikes against the Islamic State (and other extremists) inside Syria, the first time the US has intervened in the country's three-year civil war, aiming to strike at the centre of command of a radical Muslim group that has quickly seized control of large parts of Iraq and Syria.
Less than two months after Obama’s administration called for the congressional authorisation of the 2003 Iraq war to be repealed, his officials have cited that authority to sanction the expanding attacks on the Islamic State, painting this conflict as a natural successor to Bush’s war.
The newly aggressive language used by Obama, who until this month showed himself to be a reluctant military leader, is becoming remarkably similar to the fighting talk of his forerunner.
“There can be no reasoning – no negotiation – with this brand of evil,” Obama told the UN on Wednesday in his annual address. “The only language understood by killers like this is the language of force.”
Calling on world leaders to unite to confront the "cancer of violent extremism" that has ravaged many parts of the Muslim world, he said: "So the United States of America will work with a broad coalition to dismantle this network of death."
The rhetoric echoed Bush’s “axis of evil” and framed Obama’s war in the same “us versus them” parameters that his predecessor used.
The administration has stressed that Obama has refined the fight into limited, targeted actions, fighting alongside nations from the same Muslim Sunni tradition as the extremist group.
“This is not America’s fight alone,” he said on Tuesday.
The significant difference compared with Bush is Obama has said he will not commit combat troops to another protracted ground war. Hawkish critics say reality has caught up with Obama’s foreign policy and he cannot destroy the Islamic State without US “boots on the ground”.
While the recent beheadings of two US journalists by the Islamic State has turned Americans in favour of tougher action, it was the rapid advance of the group and its seizure of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, in June, alarming US allies in the region, that prompted Obama’s sharp change of direction.
He may not have started this conflict but Obama has inherited it and he’s stepping up the fight.
