ABSTRACT
The jubilation across Europe occasioned by the 2008 election of Barack Obama was in large measure due to the widespread belief that Obama was quite close to Europeans in his values, sensibilities, and world view. In these respects he was expected to be dramatically dif erent from his predecessor, George W. Bush. What Obama wrote in his two biographies, Dreams from My Father (2004a) and The Audacity of Hope (2006), what he said while a member of the United States Senate, and the criticisms and promises that he made during the 2008 campaign-including the speech that Obama gave in Berlin-together caused Europeans to expect that American foreign policy would change in important ways. In particular, Obama’s emphasis on multilateralism, his frequent references to the necessity of resolving international confl icts through the machinery of the U.N., his strong criticism of the war in Iraq and the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive military force, and his promises to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and to end both extraordinary rendition and interrogation techniques that included waterboarding were all in accord with prevailing sentiments in most other democracies.
