There are at least three major foreign policy models at play in American history.
Each model aims for peace in its own way.
Each also raises the potential for war.
- Isolationism seeks avoidance of conflict with major powers (in Europe), even if this means preemptive military intervention in spheres of influence (e.g., Latin America).
- Liberal internationalism seeks to build cooperation between nations by constructing international institutions (e.g., the United Nations), and seeks to advance liberal institutions throughout the world, often by military force.
- Realism seeks to build peace by creating a balance of power, typically through diplomacy and the creation of alliances (that are ever-shifting and sometimes secret), and by undermining regionally and globally dominant players through military force.
American liberals are associated with liberal internationalism.
But it gets complicated.
During the Cold War, the Republican Party largely adopted liberal internationalism as a framework to isolate the Soviet Union.
The late Senator John McCain was a liberal internationalist.
Within the Republican Party, neoconservatism represents a hybrid foreign policy.
Neoconservatives seek to impose democracy on the world. There is a consonance here with liberal internationalism.
But neoconservatives seek to do this without the support or construction of the international institutions that liberal internationalism espouses.
Neoconservatives also scorns the alliances that are central to realism.
There are Democrats who are neoconservatives. (Former Senator Joseph Lieberman was virtually an undeclared neoconservative.)
What is Donald Trump's foreign policy? As a person, Trump does not seem to have any interest in or knowledge of foreign policy. As a politician, Trump embraces a unilateral interventionist isolationism that appeals to his rural base.
One example is Trump's attack on a Syrian airbase in 2017 in the response to the Syrian government's use of chemical weapons in its civil war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Shayrat_missile_strike
On the morning of 7 April 2017,[1][8] the United States launched 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles from the Mediterranean Sea into Syria, aimed at Shayrat Airbase controlled by the Syrian government.[8][9][10] The strike was executed under responsibility of U.S. President Donald Trump, as a direct response to the Khan Shaykhun chemical attack that occurred on 4 April.[9][11
Trump stated after the US attack that the ultimate goal was to prevent a wave of refugees flowing out of Syria.
The strike was the first unilateral military action by the United States targeting Ba'athist Syrian government forces during the Syrian Civil War.[11][12] Trump stated shortly thereafter, "It is in this vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons."[13][14]
The method was interventionist (war in other societies), and the style was unilateral (no consultation with allies), but the objective was isolationist (keep foreigners out of the West).
Another of Trump's intentions was to differentiate himself from Barack Obama.
Obama warned Assad not to use weapons of mass destruction at the risk of US intervention. Yet when Assad used WMD, Obama did not retaliate. This reluctance to intervene goes against the realist emphasis on maintaining credibility.
Obama also publicly called for the overthrow of the Assad regime. Yet Obama never pursued that goal. This goes against liberal internationalism.
So what exactly was Obama's foreign policy orientation?
A list of public responses on NPR immediately following Trump's attack on Syria include:
- a liberal journalist said that she was so overjoyed by the attack on the Assad government that she cried (liberal internationalists want to overthrow tyrants)
- a liberal senator decried the attack, saying that diplomacy and not war should be the first recourse to conflict (liberal internationalists want cooperation)
- a conservative senator said that at long last, after years of Obama's promising retaliation without delivering, the USA had regained its credibility (realism)
- a conservative commentator said the the USA has no business fighting other people's wars (isolationism)
In his rhetoric, Obama seems to touch on all of them at his convenience.
In terms of consistency, Obama's focus seems to be on polishing his public image.
During the Arab Spring of the early 2010s, the Obama administration worried about the fate of the dictator of Egypt, Mubarak, who was an American ally. The general feeling among the Obama cabinet was that the USA should support Mubarak in order to shore up American credibility with its allies and as a bulwark against the rise of extremism in the Arab world. This is realism.
However, Obama turned against Mubarak. If Obama supported a dictator, he asked his cabinet, "What will young people around the world think of me?"
Obama's staff found this disturbing. Barack Obama was not trying to remain an honest man clinging to his idealism by opposing a dictator. This was Obama the politician trying to maintain the facade of himself as as an idealist at the expense of US foreign policy.
Obama's cynical preoccupation with appearing to be idealistic while being can be found early in his first presidential campaign.
When Obama first emerged as a contender for the presidency in 2008, the conservative columnist David Brooks liked what he saw. Brooks declared that Obama is the "ultimate realist". Obama, Brooks said, was not really a liberal pursuing social justice. Obama is really a progressive in the sense of the progressive movement of a century ago, which sought to promote rational public policy (as opposed to the usual negotiation and backroom dealings).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism
Not long after that, however, Brooks rescinded his approval of Obama. Obama, Brooks said, was willing to sacrifice anything to win the election. At the end of the day, Brooks asserted, one must believe in something.
Barrack Obama manifests a cynical ambition that disguises itself as idealism.
(It is no accident that "House of Cards" became a hit during the second Obama administration.)
There is thus a striking continuity between Obama and Trump that tells us something about the era and the country that we live in.
That being said, Obama is also a thoughtful, analytic, reflective man with a first-class intellect who took his terrible responsibilities seriously.
Below the lofty rhetoric, what kind of foreign policy orientation does one find in Obama?
Obama has been described as a "reluctant realist" in his foreign policy.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/what-sort-of-foreign-policy-hawk-is-hillary-clinton
While he isn’t averse to using deadly force—witness the drone-assassination program—he is extremely wary of being drawn into extended military campaigns. One of Obama’s intellectual inspirations, Goldberg informs us, is Brent Scowcroft, the foreign-policy realist who served as George H. W. Bush’s national-security adviser. (In a post in 2014, after Obama gave a big speech at West Point, I described the President as “a reluctant realist.”)Obama was reluctant to involve the USA in conflicts that he thought did not involve vital American interests. This is evident in his decision not to strike against the Assad government after they used chemical weapons, despite his promise to do so.
Goldberg’s piece takes up Obama’s thinking about Syria in some depth, and specifically the decision, in 2013, not to bomb President Bashar al-Assad’s forces after U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Syria had used chemical weapons against rebel forces—an action that Obama had previously said would draw a strong U.S. response. “Syria, for Obama, represented a slope potentially as slippery as Iraq,” Goldberg writes. Obama was also unnerved by the fact that the British Parliament had voted against military action in Syria. He feared possible civilian casualties, and was aware that a retaliatory missile strike wouldn’t eliminate Assad’s chemical weapons. Moreover, he didn’t believe that Syria’s civil war threatened vital U.S. interests.Obama is a realist focused on America's interest, not on ideology. Obama is not interested in propagating democracy around the world.
But Obama's realism is at odds with the realism that has comprised the policy making of the establishment for decades.
Mainstream realism asserts that one must always back up a promise once one has made it.
If you're gonna talk the talk, you gotta walk the walk.
Hillary Clinton subscribes to this old-school realism.
Obama’s U-turn on Syria infuriated some of America’s Arab allies, and it alarmed some U.S. officials and former officials, who believed that it damaged the credibility of the United States. Goldberg quotes Leon Panetta, who served under Obama as C.I.A. director and Secretary of Defense, to this effect. He also reports that Clinton, who by the summer of 2013 had left the State Department, agreed with the critics of Obama’s decision. “If you say you’re going to strike, you have to strike. There’s no choice,” she remarked privately.Hillary Clinton is a prototypical liberal Democrat in domestic policy.
But HRC is an old-fashioned realist in foreign policy. She is essentially a foreign-policy conservative. (This would make her the exact opposite of John McCain, who was a foreign policy liberal but a conservative in domestic policy.)
HRC is very much a realist in foreign policy, but to what extent is that brand of hard realism outdated?
The Middle East is of vital interest to the USA, but not in the same way that it was during the Cold War. During the Cold War the threat of direct Soviet intervention was real and looming.
Places like the Middle East and Central America may still be crucial to American security. But they are no longer "hot spots" that could suddenly explode and lead to world war.
So Barack Obama does have valid concerns about the conventional playbook of US foreign policy that so often calls for military action as a response to aggression.
That is, without the USSR around, that aggression may not actually endanger the USA.
In making this statement, Clinton was echoing a foreign-policy playbook that has ruled Washington for decades, and that Obama told Goldberg he was proud to have broken with. “The playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses,” the President said. “Where America is directly threatened, the playbook works. But the playbook can also be a trap that can lead to bad decisions.” Inside the White House, Goldberg reports, Obama went further, arguing that “dropping bombs on someone to prove that you’re willing to drop bombs on someone is just about the worst reason to use force.”On the other hand, Obama did promise retaliation in Syria if the Assad regime used WMD, and Obama failed to retaliate when Assad did just that.
Also, at some point, Obama mentioned that Assad should be overthrown.
Those were two obvious and significant mistakes on Obama's part.
But Obama is still a 21st-century realist.
