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.”

Obama aides also said the moves by Bush complicate matters for McCain, who is more hawkish than his opponent on issues including the crisis in Georgia and the war in Iraq.

“What we have here, in many ways, is that a McCain presidency would look a lot like a Bush first term and a move back in that direction,” said Rand Beers, who served as a National Security Council staffer in Republican and Democratic administrations and is now an unpaid adviser to the Obama campaign. “The flip side of that is that John McCain is therefore to the right of George Bush, which I don’t think is the way he conceived of his campaign.”

But Randy Scheunemann, McCain’s top foreign policy adviser, accused the Obama campaign of “rank hypocrisy” and said it was “comical” for the Democrat to now claim accord with the Bush administration on some issues.