No, I don’t really think that President Trump’s foreign policy is going to work – or that it will turn out well. Janan Ganesh, in the Financial Times, however, comes up with one way President Trump’s foreign policy may work out:
“The world resented American omnipresence before it complained about American dereliction. Inadvertently, Donald Trump is forcing the end of this ambivalence. The more the US president unwinds his country’s external commitments, the more other nations see the resultant damage to the global commons. … Countries with historic qualms about US power are going through a chastening education in life without it.
The perverse result: an America First president could bequeath his successor a world that is keener on US leadership than it was before. …
If [America’s] next president wants to revive the country’s leading role, the allies will still be there to be led. If anything, they will be more biddable than they were.
Those that have always been in two minds about Pax Americana are being confronted with the alternative for perhaps the first time in memory. The worst they have known until now was the unilateral militarism of Mr [George W.] Bush (whose main western victim, in lives lost and cash blown, was the US itself) and the well-meaning tentativeness1 of Barack Obama. They are now tasting real abandonment. …
… [Before Trump] there was never real doubt about America’s reliability. That is no longer the case. It would be strange if the unfolding shock did not focus allied minds in future. We overrated the togetherness of the democratic world before President Trump. We are underrating the unity he will leave behind.”
Certainly, I think the world, and the United States, would be better off if the United States resumed a (the-?) leadership role in the international world order (a/k/a “rules-based order”). The question is whether any of the Democratic candidates for president are willing to do that. At their debate last week, they all criticized President Trump’s abandonment of our now-former Kurdish allies in Syria.2 But was that an indication of their real foreign policy views or just political gamesmanship?
Peter Beinart in The Atlantic looked at what the leading Democratic candidates were saying about Afghanistan a month ago. Elizabeth Warren answered yes when she was asked if she would bring our troops home from Afghanistan even without a deal with the Taliban. After being asked about a possible vacuum in Afghanistan when we left, Joe Biden said, “We don’t need those troops there. I would bring them home.” When Pete Buttigieg was asked “whether he would stick to his pledge to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan in his first year despite warnings from top American commanders, [he] ducked the question and insisted that ‘we have got to put an end to endless war.’” In other words, what they said they would do in Afghanistan is not all that different than what they condemned in Syria.
Which raises that question as to whether the next president3 will really revive America’s leading role. Maybe they would lead on climate change, but on the Trans Pacific Partnership (which President Obama negotiated and President Trump quit his first day in office)? Probably not.4 Would they be willing to spend the money necessary on defense so we could plausibly lead? With all the new domestic spending they want, there wouldn’t be any money left.5 For that matter, with everything they want to do in the United States (health care, taxing the rich, banning fracking, free college, solving inequality, etc., etc.), how are they going to have time for the international “rules-based order”?6
I hope Mr. Ganesh is right about the possibility of a new president in January of 2021 being able to re-establish the role of the United States as a leader for the international world order. The world, and the United States, would be much safer if that happens. The problem is that the American people need to be sold on the importance of the United States taking on such a role, and I don’t see any of the Democratic candidates being willing to or interested in trying to convince them of that.
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1 Mr. Ganesh and I may disagree how “well-meaning” President Obama’s tentativeness was. If a policy is unlikely to work and you do it anyway, is it ‘well-meaning” just because you had good intentions?
2 Just like the House Democrats voted unanimously to condemn President Trump’s decision to withdraw.
3 Assuming President Trump is not re-elected. If he is, there will be nothing left to lead by 2025.
4 In 2016, even Hillary Clinton opposed the TPP (though she was enthusiastic about it when he was Secretary of State),
5 For example, according to Elizabeth Warren’s plans for foreign policy on her website (by far the shortest section on her website): “We must continue to be vigilant about the threat of terrorism, but it’s time to bring our troops home ….” And she thinks we must cut “our bloated defense budget”.
6 This may have been one of the problems President Obama had in his first term. He didn’t pay the same amount of attention to what was happening in Iraq as George W. Bush did in 2007-08. I am sure that President Obama would say he didn’t have the time, which may have been true.
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UPDATE (10/20/19 10:30 am): I decided to strike through the last bit of footnote 6 because I wanted to make it clear that, in my opinion, President Obama could have given Iraq the time it needed, even if he didn't think he could (or didn't want to).
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