x
Trump's democratic challengers offer no alternative to his foreign policy. It won't be like it used to be.
The American nation is self-sufficient. In the ongoing pre-election campaign of the Democrats, there is hardly any mention of the relations between the USA and the rest of the world. If it does, then it is about foreign trade and tariffs against China and the EU. The days when the Cold War did not overshadow everything, but still overshadowed a lot in domestic politics, are over. The “Global War on Terror” proclaimed by George W. Bush never reached this rank, but it did reinforce the “imperial presidency” (bypassing the congress) that Richard Nixon had aimed for in the Vietnam War, which Donald Trump now has with one vigorously pushes isolationist program forward.
Trump's arbitrary threat of war against Iran scorned the US Constitution; his hands-free mix of confrontation and cooperation with North Korea's Kim Jong-un or other autocrats around the world also disregards all conventions on the separation of powers and contractual loyalty. In the meantime, Trump has offended all partners of the Western alliance, Japan and South Korea and especially Ukraine, and has given free hand to autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the Middle East, which was particularly highly regarded by American foreign policy after 1945, without the ongoing conflicts to calm down in Iraq and Afghanistan. The recently announced "Peace Plan" for the Middle East does not deserve the name because of its one-sidedness, not to mention Trump's simply reactionary environmental policy. In general, the risk of global escalation and even the risk of a nuclear conflict is greater than it has been for a long time.
The fact that Donald Trump could go down in history with this disastrous record doesn't seem to bother him in the least. His foreign and security policy remains determined by the erratic logic of a mediocre broker who, with threatening gestures, imposing behavior and flattery, brings about half-silk deals and sells them to his steadfast attachment as brilliant moves. Trump has ruined the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership and, with the World Trade Organization, the most important authority for settling global trade conflicts, from which the United States has benefited to the maximum. Critically liberal media like the New York Times spread this world situation on the first few pages, the audience mostly flips through it and concentrates on domestic issues.
Back to the beginning? There is no status quo ante Trump, radically new geopolitical constellations have emerged. But there is hardly any original idea to be seen among the democratic challengers.
But even with the democratic opposition, genuine foreign politicians are missed with a clear eye for the future of international relations and transnational problems. "Do the Democrats have a foreign policy?" Asked Jessica T. Mathews, the former president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who served as a security adviser to the State Department and the White House. Above all, she noted lip-service by the candidates to make up for the damage done by Trump and to return to multilateralism.
Back to the beginning? Even if Trump doesn't get a second term, his first, along with global trends since the turn of the millennium, has changed the world so radically that simply dismantling his wrong decisions and making a commitment to Western values is not enough. There is no status quo ante Trump, radically new geopolitical constellations have emerged.
But there is hardly any original idea to be seen among the democratic challengers. With his globally expanded left-wing populism, Sanders is a peacenic as out of time as Jeremy Corbyn, Elizabeth Warren does nothing about the accomplishments of her (quite justified!) Crusade against US corporations, and the demoscopically most promising Joe Biden only warms initiatives as Obamas Vice president on. Two questions arise for the opposition: Which concepts do the Democrats have for which problem situations? And what normative foundations should a foreign policy of the left have?
The "standard position of the left": to focus on improving your own society and not to intervene against oppression outside your own borders.
The political philosopher Michael Walzer raised four key questions about the latter in the magazine "Dissent", which he published for a long time: "Who are our colleagues abroad and how can we support them? How do we address inequalities in international society? When should we oppose the use of violence, when should we support it? How does a predominantly secular left stand on the renaissance of religion in the world? ”He works out the lack of the“ standard position of the left ”: to focus on improving one's own society and not to intervene against oppression outside one's own borders.
So to combine internationalist principles with an isolationist practice and to run a kind of America first from the left - that means: strictly fight violence against innocent people at home, but let it happen in the world. "Leftist inwardness" is what Walzer calls this attempt to have a foreign policy but not to practice it, which he had criticized in his earlier considerations of just wars. European readers know this from the time when pacifists and bellicists, to whom waltzes (like the author) were struck from 1990, fought over the use of the UN or Western military in the Gulf War, in Bosnia and Kosovo and in Iraq.
Walzer once again gives the short-circuits that pacifists had drawn in the earlier history of the left: that oppressed peoples (examples: Algeria, Cuba, Nicaragua) should not be criticized - right or wrong - in their liberation struggles; that US politics, wherever and whenever, is imperialist per se; that Israel is a lackey of the United States. Sartre was wrong about Camus, Foucault fell in love with Ayatollah Khomeini, and Judith Butler is wrong about the BDS campaign.
In general, Walzer criticizes every type of internationalism that goes beyond the complexity of global conflict situations with identical language regulations and academic boycott threats. And it concretely describes how difficult humanitarian interventions, even where they are authorized, would have to be implemented in individual cases, as long as there are no institutions that come anywhere near a world government beyond national statehood.
Retreating from the left in the line of Barack Obama to an “America first” will certainly not be enough to give new courage to an unsettled nation.
As evident as Walzer's theses, it is surprising in a book published in 2018 that capital challenges such as climate change and the extinction of species, cybersecurity and sustainable management are hardly mentioned. But it is precisely these planetary problems, which Trump and his peers deny or cynically disregard, that a democratic alternative would have to address and thus overcome the parameters still set by the Cold War and national interests.
The candidates have so far hardly taken up any advice from foreign policy think tanks on these issues, so that a democratic alternative to Trump's foreign policy can only be recognized in outline; this is fatal because foreign policy agendas could still have a significant impact on the further election campaign. Retreating from the left in the line of Barack Obama to an "America first" will certainly not be enough to give new courage to an unsettled nation that is now torn between Trump's open mouth and the daily rumored humiliations of a former superpower.
The cheap announcements that the US troops will “be brought back” from the Middle East will continue to be difficult to fulfill, which makes the promise to vigorously curtail the sprawling defense budget unlikely. Whether Congress can regain control of foreign and security policy guaranteed in the constitution depends on new majorities in the Senate, for which there is currently little evidence.
In recent, apparently uncomfortable debates by the Democrats on foreign policy, outsiders were left to at least touch on the climate issue and highlight their connection with foreign trade policy.
In recent, visibly uncomfortable debates by the Democrats on foreign policy, outsiders like the left-wing Mayor of South Bend / Indiana, Pete Buttigieg, and the billionaire and philanthropist Tom Steyer were left to at least touch on the climate issue and highlight their connection with foreign trade policy. The Green New Deal, which the US is proposing under democratic aegis to repair the underlying infrastructure, only makes sense if climate and species protection also become guiding principles of international trade and global investment.
