Foreign Policy: Are Presidents Trump and Obama All That Different?

Wilbur Ross, Donald Trump’s Secretary of Commerce said, last Wednesday, that Hong Kong was an internal matter for Hong Kong and added: “What are we going to do – invade Hong Kong?”  In response, Edward Luce, of the Financial Times, commented: “In a few words, Mr Ross captured the degeneration of US foreign policy.”¹  Which may be true, but it didn’t start January 20, 2017.

Secretary Ross’s choice, invasion or doing nothing, sounds suspiciously like the phony choices Barack Obama used to justify his do-nothing, or at least, do-as-little-as-possible, approach to foreign policy.  For example, when Russia invaded Ukraine, annexed Crimea, and fomented a war in eastern Ukraine in 2014, President Obama asked: “Do people actually think that somehow us sending some additional arms into Ukraine could potentially deter the Russian Army?”  In fact, the Trump administration, even though President Trump is supposedly in the pocket of Vladimir Putin, has sent the kinds of defensive weapons that President Obama refused to send.  And it has seemed to help.

Consider what commentators in other countries said about President Obama’s foreign policy.  In May of 2014, The Economist said this:

“First, [President Obama] has broken the cardinal rule of superpower deterrence: you must keep your word.  In Syria he drew ‘a red line’: he would punish Bashar Assad if he used chemical weapons.  The Syrian dictator did, and Mr Obama did nothing.  In response to Russia’s aggression [in Ukraine], he threatened fierce sanctions, only to unveil underwhelming ones. …

Second, Mr Obama has been an inattentive friend.  He has put his faith in diplomatic coalitions of willing, like-minded democracies to police the international system.  That makes sense, but he has failed to build the coalitions. … Credibility is about reassurance as well as the use of force.”²

In January of 2014, even before Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, Gideon Rachman said this in The Financial Times:

“[T]he most important emerging theme in world politics is America’s slow retreat from its role as global policeman. …

It is possible that America’s isolationist mood will simply be a phase. … For the moment, however, it is the rest of the world that is adjusting to any emerging political and security vacuum. … As Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister [in 2014], acknowledges: ‘Nobody can take over from the Americans from a military point of view.’  And, if the Americans cannot or will not act, he says, there is a ‘risk of letting major crises fester on their own.’”³

Which pretty much sounds like the complaints on the substance of President Trump’s foreign policy.  It is true President Obama would have kept us in the Paris climate accords and in the Iran nuclear deal.  It is also true that he talked a lot nicer than President Trump.  But the substance of President Obama’s foreign policy: let somebody else lead; the only choice is doing nothing or going to war, is not all that much different than the current administration’s.  On the surface, President Obama seemed better because he wasn’t as obnoxious as President Trump.  But other countries don’t look at how you say something.  They look at whether you do what you say are going to do and whether they think they can count on you in a crisis.  On that basis, the level of confidence in the United States under President Obama probably wasn’t all that different than it is now – except that we are four years farther along in our withdrawal from the world.
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¹ Edward Luce, “US apathy over Hong Kong reflects decline of its foreign policy,” Financial Times, August 16, 2019.
² "What would America fight for?", The Economist, May 3, 2014.
³ Gideon Rachman, “Get ready, the indispensable Americans are pulling back,” Financial Times, January 20, 2014.
UPDATE (8/23/19 9:25 am): Added a link for the comment by President Obama in the second paragraph.