© 2018 selection and editorial matter, Geoffrey F. Gresh and Tugrul Keskin; individual chapters, the contributors. After President Barack Obama’s electoral victory in 2008, an advisor of the outgoing president, Christian Brose, expressed the expectation that President Obama’s foreign policy would resemble that of President George W. Bush’s second administration and that the variance between the two foreign policies would be thinner than the variance between the foreign policies of Bush’s first and second administrations (Brose, 2009, p. 53). But President Obama was keen to distinguish himself, at least on the surface, from his unpopular predecessor, especially in foreign policy. As he arrived in office, Obama’s apparent embrace of “realism” was therefore a clear indication that his foreign policy was the opposite of Bush’s, which was characterized as “idealist” (to use International Relations Theory terms), particularly as far as the global spread of democracy was concerned (Cohen, 2016).