During his inaugural address to the US nation in January 2009, Barack Obama noted that the US people were faced with a fundamental crisis of confidence, characterized by “a nagging fear that America’s decline is inevitable, that the next generation must lower its sights..” In less than one year, Obama transformed the international perception of crisis into one of hope and change. This hope for transformational change would dim by Obama’s midterm, as the US administration confronted growing difficulty in achieving its long-term political and economic policy objectives around the world. While no longer confronting a crisis of legitimacy, President Obama has adapted many Bush administration policies and experimented with new strategies to confront several long-term structural problems, including the growing US debt, the strategic threats from Asia, the Middle East, and international terrorism, and the instability in the international economic regime.
