Obama’s foreign policy and the Greek debt crisis

President Barack Obama’s critical role in helping Greece stay in the eurozone follows in the post-WWII tradition of American engagement in the European project for geopolitical reasons, even though it was initially driven by financial concerns, argues Katerina Sokou, ELIAMEP and Atlantic Council non-resident research fellow in a research paper just published.

This research paper examines the role of the US in the Greek debt crisis and how it fit into the foreign policy of President Barack Obama and was part of the Theodore Couloumbis Research Fellowship on “Greek-American Relations.”

In that, Sokou provides a case study that may help reassess his foreign policy as a hybrid of pragmatic considerations relating to the limits of American power and an internationalist liberalism that, though criticized as isolationism, was anything but.

President Obama’s foreign policy has been criticized for being ideological and isolationist, the report notes. Yet, the Greek debt crisis provides a case study of his engagement in Europe in a manner that continues the tradition of US involvement in the European project for geopolitical, as well as economic, reasons.

For international relations theorists, it has been hard to fit President Obama’s foreign policy into a single school of international relations theory. His approach to the Greek debt crisis supports the argument that he applied a hybrid approach based on Secretary Albright’s term “Realist Idealism.” 

As President, Obama started with a liberal internationalist approach, developed a healthy dose of pragmatism in prioritizing his foreign policy engagements, and employed a “smart power” approach that used every aspect of America’s power and sometimes meant leading from behind, Sokou notes in her research.

In the context of the Greek debt crisis, the US role was limited in terms of how much it helped alleviate the prescribed austerity or provided meaningful debt relief, since President Obama was inclined to leave these decisions to the Europeans.

Still, his interventions in 2010, 2012, and 2015 helped keep Greece in the eurozone, and his support for Greece as a trusted mediator helped improve perceptions of the US among the Greek public, the report says.