Barack Obama Didn’t Get It; Donald Trump Doesn’t Get It; Which Means We Can Only Hope Hillary Clinton Does.

If you think this is a foreign policy election, as I do, the choice is a negative one.  Donald Trump is so bad, much like our current president, that you hope Hillary Clinton will be better, though much of what she says makes you a little worried.  You almost have to hope that she doesn’t mean some of the things she is saying and that she will be better than her past record indicates.  But then, the bar of the current president and her opponent are so low, she might actually make it.

There are so many ways that our current president is bad at foreign policy that it is hard to know where to start.  Perhaps the most current: Syria.  The print edition of FT Weekend had an article entitled “Syria offensive leaves Kerry high and dry,”¹ but when you read the article, you got the feeling Secretary Kerry was being left high and dry by President Obama as much as Bashar al-Assad or Vladimir Putin.  In explaining why negotiations are the only option in Syria, Secretary Kerry is quoted as saying:  “America’s made the decision that we’re not going in with our troops.  The president’s made that decision.  What’s the alternative?” 

Secretary Kerry may be right that there is no alternative, but what he doesn’t seem to understand (or is unwilling to admit publicly) is that, under those circumstances, negotiations won’t succeed.  Just because negotiations are the only alternative doesn’t mean negotiations will work.  In fact, as we have seen, it is pretty clear they won’t work.  Why should Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin agree to a half a loaf in negotiations when there is nothing stopping them from getting the whole loaf outside of negotiations? Samantha Power talks strongly about Syria at the United Nations.  Secretary Kerry tries to talk as strongly as he can.  But without a president willing to things that this president isn’t willing to do, Ambassador Power and Secretary Kerry can’t accomplish anything.  In fact, they probably make us look weak by talking strong while we do nothing.

Let me go to one other foreign policy subject. Michelle Obama famously said, during her husband’s campaign in 2008, that “[f]or the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country ….”  I think that is probably true.  And it may be true for her husband, too.  Which means she, and he, missed the greatest accomplishment of American foreign policy in their collective lifetimes: the part we played in helping East Europeans gain their freedom and Germany reunite peacefully after forty years of communist rule and the threat of nuclear wear.

I get the impression President Obama doesn’t care much about Europe.  He lived in Indonesia from age six to age then.  He was in law school when the Berlin Wall fell.  Who knows how much attention he paid to it.  I paid a lot of attention to the 1972 presidential election when I was in law school, but maybe he didn’t care as much about the fall of the Berlin Wall.  What George H.W. Bush, and America, helped accomplish doesn’t seem to have registered, or resonated, with him as it did with me – and lots of other people, both Americans and people around the world.  It doesn’t seem to have been something he cared about – or at least it wasn’t all that high on his list.

Which brings me to Donald Trump.  He doesn’t get it, either.  He goes around almost praising Vladimir Putin, talking about him being a strong leader.  Vladimir Putin said that “the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [twentieth] century.”  Yet Donald Trump seems to like him.  And Mr. Trump says that we will honor our commitment under Article 5 of the NATO Treaty² only for countries that he thinks are spending enough money on defense.  In other words, when it comes to what George H.W. Bush helped accomplish in Europe in 1989-1991, Donald Trump is as clueless as Barack Obama – and he could jeopardize it even more than President Obama. 

Leaving Hillary Clinton – mostly because she is not Donald Trump or, one hopes, Barack Obama.  Though when she promises that, if she is president, ‘[w]e are not putting ground troops into Iraq ever again,” you have to sort of wonder.  I mean, we have troops in Iraq.  Five thousand of them.  Is she going to pull them out?  Or is she just saying what she perceives the Democratic base wants to hear her say, and she will do something else when she is president?  Using the kind of explanations and slick wording that she and her husband are famous for (“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”).  That is what one must hope for.  Which is probably why this election is so dispiriting.
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¹ The headline of the article online is different.
¹ Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty says, in part:

“The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.”