As details of his administration’s global war against terrorists,
insurgents, and hostile warlords have become more widely known -- a war
that involves a mélange of drone attacks, covert operations, and presidentially selected assassinations -- President Obama has been compared
to President George W. Bush in his appetite for military action. “As
shown through his stepped-up drone campaign,” Aaron David Miller, an advisor to six secretaries of state, wrote at Foreign Policy, “Barack Obama has become George W. Bush on steroids.”
When it comes to international energy politics, however, it is not
Bush but his vice president, Dick Cheney, who has been providing the
role model for the president. As recent events have demonstrated,
Obama’s energy policies globally bear an eerie likeness to Cheney’s,
especially in the way he has engaged in the geopolitics of oil as part
of an American global struggle for future dominance among the major
powers.
More than any of the other top officials of the Bush administration
-- many with oil-company backgrounds -- Cheney focused on the role of
energy in global power politics. From 1995 to 2000, he served as
chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Halliburton,
a major supplier of services to the oil industry. Soon after taking
office as vice president he was asked by Bush to devise a new national
energy strategy that has largely governed U.S. policy ever since.
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