On foreign policy, he had been inspired by the program built by Indiana Republican senator Richard Lugar and Georgia Democratic senator Sam Nunn, which over two decades had help secure and eliminate more nuclear weapons than those in the combined arsenals of China, France, and the UK. Obama and Lugar would go on to work together to pass a bill that expanded funding for nonproliferation initiatives, but the spirit of bipartisanship that animated the Nunn-Lugar partnership—and that appealed to Obama—was rapidly fading.
