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 the need to solve serious problems at home. In office, however, Obama left many Bush initiatives in place. The use of torture had been ended in the Bush administration, but more than a hundred prisoners remained, without rights, at Guantánamo. 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’ telephone calls and e-mail correspondence.

Obama followed the Bush administration’s plan to withdraw from Iraq, and the last troops departed in 2011, leaving a country that continued to endure terrorist violence. Even though corruption permeated Afghanistan’s government and a majority of Americans now opposed the war there, which had taken more than 2,000 American lives, Obama dispatched 50,000 more military personnel. He promised that the United States could fully withdraw by 2014, but it seemed unlikely that Afghanistan would prove a stable ally in the region. 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 reached out to regain the trust of Muslim nations, but he sometimes floundered in the face of difficult decisions about what role the United States should take when popular uprisings, called the “Arab Spring,” sought reforms from long-standing dictators. The calamity of the Iraq War and the desire to improve the nation’s international reputation made policymakers wary of intervention. In 2011, when rebellions arose in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria, the United States participated in military action only in Libya, only with UN approval, and only in concert with NATO and the Arab League. Each country had experienced long-standing internal divisions, decades of official corruption, and neglect of the basic needs of the populations, such as water and food; moreover, terrorists operated in each country, hoping to exploit the situation to install a radical fundamentalist Islamic state. Although the rebellions toppled corrupt dictators, such as Libya’s Muammar al-Gaddafi and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, little progress was made toward stability, constitutional government, equal rights, and economic security.

Congress and the American people rebuffed Obama in 2013 when he sought approval for a missile strike against government military resources in Syria. Protests in that country had turned into a civil war in which more than 100,000 people were killed, many by their government’s use of poison gas against rebels and children. Obama insisted that the United States must remain engaged in the Middle East and pledged to concentrate on two daunting undertakings: resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and working with a new, more moderate government in Iran to keep it from developing nuclear weapons. Obama’s conversation with the Iranian president in September 2013 marked the first contact between the leaders of the two nations since 1979. Hope rose that progress in the Middle East might enable the administration to pursue its initial goal of turning attention to Asia, where China grew more powerful economically and militarily.