| Publication |
2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Fate did not deal Obama an easy hand. Taking office in January 2009, the new president faced a country mired in two wars (one from which it struggled to exit, and one it seemed unable to win); an ongoing terrorist threat, ominously accompanied by a standstill in all efforts to reduce nuclear proliferation; a low point in US-Russian relations; and, more generally, a worldview of the US as a go-it-alone actor with whom it was hard to make a deal.
His foreign policy was immeasurably complicated by the freefall of the American economy, which had shed 4.4 million jobs in the thirteen months before he took office. To avoid financial collapse, the federal government had committed close to $1.3 trillion of taxpayer money to rescue some of the largest financial institutions. The annual federal deficit had gone from an average $40 billion for the years 1993 to 2000 (with every year showing an improvement over the preceding) to an average deficit of $250 billion for the years 2001 to 2008.
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