President-elect Donald J. Trump has been a vocal critic of U.S. foreign policy under the Obama Administration throughout the presidential campaign, denouncing all of Obama’s “signature” foreign policy achievements such as the Iran nuclear deal, the rapprochement with Cuba and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In addition he has strongly challenged the U.S. foreign policy tradition, notably threatening to abandon the U.S. commitment to the defense of its allies if they do not pay their fair share, calling NATO “obsolete” and deeming President Putin of Russia a better leader than Obama.
But despite Trump’s seemingly revolutionary foreign policy stance, I argue that he actually shares many foreign policy views with President Obama.
First, many people would be surprised to learn than President Obama partly considers himself a “realist” in the American foreign policy tradition. One of Obama’s most entrenched foreign policy beliefs is that the United States should only use force whenever its national security is directly threatened. For example, Obama has always resisted calls for the United States to intervene militarily in a direct manner in Syria and overthrow Assad, considering that Assad, despite his brutality and daily violations of human rights, did not represent a direct security threat to the United States. Inversely, as the power of ISIS grew out of control, Obama forged an airstrike coalition to defeat it, because he considered ISIS as a direct threat to U.S. security, as the Orlando terrorist attack later proved.
Despite Trump’s criticism of the current administration's policy in Syria, his position—and the reasoning behind his position—is strikingly similar to Obama’s. In fact, despite describing Assad as “bad,” Trump has dismissed the idea of fighting both ISIS and Assad and argued that the U.S. should focus and whomever represents the biggest threat to U.S. security. In addition, both men have voiced harsh criticisms of the war in Iraq. More broadly, they both have expressed a rejection of a U.S. military commitment to the “nation-building” of other countries, instead focusing on vital national-security interests.
Trump and Obama also share similar foreign policy views in their skepticism of the foreign policy establishment and traditional alliances. In the summer of 2012, President Obama drew a “Red Line” in Syria promising to intervene militarily if the Assad regime used chemical weapons. When that happened in August 2013, Obama, after considering intervention, later changed his mind. Despite the huge criticism that followed, Obama confessed to Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic that he was proud of this decision. In fact, he had resisted the pre-defined “playbook” that the foreign policy establishment imposed on presidents, a “playbook” that tended to prescribe military action, thus sometimes leading to disasters such as the Vietnam War. Obama’s anti-establishment tendency seems oddly akin to the one Trump has exhibited throughout his campaign, including when it came to foreign policy.
Obama similarly shares the same skepticism of U.S. allies as Trump. In fact, he too believes in the ability of U.S. allies to “free ride,” namely to benefit from American military protection without paying a fair price for it. For example, he once threatened the United Kingdom to end their “special relationship” if it does not spend at least two percent of its GDP on defense. In addition, Obama questioned some of the United States’ most-entrenched alliances, being particularly virulent against Saudi Arabia, which he blames for having spread Islamic fundamentalist ideologies that have fueled anti-American terrorism. In that way, his views on the U.S.-Saudi “special” relationship are similar to Trump’s, who once threatened to stop importing oil from the Saudi Kingdom if the latter does not pay the fair price of U.S. protection.
How come two men who seem to be ideologically so distant from each other—Trump being a right-wing populist nationalist and Obama being a left-wing liberal internationalist—agree on so many issues in terms of foreign policy?
I believe that there are two paths to explore that could allow us to answer that question. First, during the talk “America’s Choice: Foreign Policy in the U.S. Election” organized by the Duke Alexander Hamilton Society last October, Michael Singh, one of the speakers and a Senior Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East policy who previously served as national security adviser to President George W. Bush, said that Obama and Trump share similar foreign policy views precisely because they are located at the “peripheries” of the political chessboard. In fact, Trump and Obama—of the far-right and the relatively-far-left, respectively—share the belief that the U.S. should first solve its own problems before taking care of other countries. While for the far-right this belief is rooted in an “America First” nationalist logic, for the far-left it is rooted in a rejection of U.S. imperialism that supposedly oppresses both foreign and American people, the latter being abandoned by a capitalist elite more interested in spending on lucracious wars than on social programs.
Contrast this with Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush who could both be considered as “moderate” or “centrist”—especially by the standards set by Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump during 2016 presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton voted in favor of the invasion of Iraq and strongly pushed for military intervention in Libya and Syria. In addition, as surprising as this may sound for many of her supporters, her 2016 presidential campaign has been endorsed and even funded by numerous prominent neoconservatives that served in the Bush Administration—people who believe the U.S. should be the policeman of the world, spreading freedom and democracy everywhere using military means if necessary.
Nonetheless, in order to fundamentally understand how Trump and Obama have come to embrace similar views, one needs to look at the broader picture. History has proven to us that the main watersheds in U.S. foreign policy did not occur as a consequence of presidential elections, but rather as a consequence of historical events foreign to them. For example, it was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941 that drove the U.S. into World War II and consecrated America as a world superpower, not Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election.
In reality, Trump’s victory on a nationalist, realist and anti-globalist platform is only the sign of the emergence of a multipolar world where the United States no longer has the means to impose a worldwide order of Western-like free-market liberal democracies bound by U.S.-dominated global rules and institutions. In this emerging multipolar world, China’s GDP in purchasing power parity surpassed that of the U.S. as early as December 2014. The BRICS yearly summit of five emerging countries that make up 43 percent of the world population—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—was founded in 2010. One year later, China founded the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) as a challenge to the Washington-controlled Bretton Woods institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank. To the stupefaction of the U.S., the AIIB was joined by 57 members including some of America’s closest allies like Great Britain. In this emerging multipolar world, Russia has rose again from its defeat in the Cold War to reclaim its historical strategic area of influence, Iran attempts to recreate the Persian Empire, and China slowly but surely turns (back) into a world power. Despite years of military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. has failed to institute Western-like liberal democracies in those countries, instead bringing about the rise of an organization that claims to be the Islamic Caliphate. The irony of this new world is that it closely resembles the old one…
The genius of Trump lies in his intuition that the world has changed and that America needs to adapt to it. But I argue that Obama’s similar policy views such as his prudence in dealing with Putin—he has refused to supply the Ukrainian army with lethal weapons—his opposition to liberal interventionism and nation-building, his realism and his occasional questioning of traditional American alliances and enmities, are also a consequence of this changing world.
Emile Riachi is a Trinity sophomore. His column, "a political night vision," runs on alternate Thursdays.
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