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Obama criticized much of his predecessor’s foreign policy, embodied in Bush’s term “global war on terror.” Obama believed that that concept exaggerated the threat, rationalized disastrous decisions like the invasion of Iraq, sacrificed American ideals in the pursuit of security, and distracted attention from serious problems at home. In office, however, Obama left some Bush initiatives in place. The Bush administration had ended its use of torture, but Obama failed to convince Congress to close Guantánamo, where sixty prisoners remained, without rights, in 2016. Obama greatly increased the use of unmanned drone strikes in other countries, killing hundreds of people, both terrorists and innocent citizens. Continuing Bush’s surveillance programs, the Obama administration secretly collected data about millions of citizens’ communications.

Obama followed the Bush administration’s plan to withdraw from Iraq, and the last troops departed in 2011, whereupon terrorist violence and sectarian strife grew stronger. He dispatched 50,000 more military personnel to Afghanistan, nearly 10,000 of whom remained there in 2016. In May 2011, U.S. special forces killed Osama bin Laden, who was hiding in Pakistan, weakening but not destroying Al Qaeda and its offshoots.

Obama wanted to regain the trust of Muslim nations, but he sometimes floundered when confronted with difficult decisions about what the United States should do, such as when, in 2011, popular uprisings, collectively referred to as the “Arab Spring,” sought reforms from entrenched dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria. Each country had experienced long-standing internal divisions, decades of official corruption, and neglect of its population’s basic needs, such as water and food; moreover, terrorists operated in each country, hoping to exploit the situation to install a radical fundamentalist Islamic state. Although some rebellions toppled corrupt dictators, such as Libya’s Muammar al-Gaddafi, little progress was made toward stability, constitutional government, equal rights, and economic security. Protests in Syria turned into a civil war that took more than 200,000 lives; sent four million Syrians into exile creating a refugee crisis in Europe; and provided an opening for the spread of the radical Islamist organization ISIS.

The calamity of the Iraq War and the desire to improve the nation’s international reputation made Obama wary of intervention. Though reluctant to commit military force beyond air strikes and some special forces on the ground, Obama insisted that the United States must remain engaged in the Middle East. Preferring to attack problems with diplomacy, in 2015 Obama worked with China, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany to secure a treaty with Iran to keep that nation from developing nuclear weapons. The harsh condemnation of the Iran nuclear deal by most Republicans reflected how much Americans disagreed about where their nation’s international interests lay and what the United States could and should do to protect those interests and national security.