Barack Obama contends that a John McCain presidency would amount to little more than President Bush’s third term. But as it turns out, an Obama presidency might look a bit like Bush’s second.

On a range of major foreign policy issues over the past year, Bush has pursued strategies and actions very much along the lines of what Obama has advocated during his presidential race, according to the Illinois Democratic senator’s campaign and many diplomatic and security experts.

The administration has pushed ahead with high-level diplomatic negotiations with Iran and North Korea, agreed to a “time horizon” for a reduction of US forces in Iraq and announced plans last week to shift troops and other resources from Iraq to Afghanistan. US officials also confirmed last week that Bush has formally authorized cross-border raids into Pakistan without that government’s approval — an idea that Obama first endorsed, and was heavily criticized for, in 2007.

Bush administration officials and aides to McCain, the Arizona Republican senator running for president, argue that the developments have little in common with Obama’s policies and dismiss any comparison as simplistic and misleading.

But the Obama campaign views the moves as vindication of sorts, arguing that Bush has been forced by the pressure of events to move away from the hard-line policies of his first term and toward a more pragmatic path in his second. When Bush announced the new troop deployments to Afghanistan, for example, Obama said he was “glad that the president is moving in the direction of the policy that I have advocated for years.”

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