The Foreign Policy Paradox in US Presidential Elections

Foreign Policy Plays Almost No Role in US Presidential Election but the Result Will Dramatically Shape the US Role in the World (Ensuring Continuity or Promising Upheaval)

It’s even more true now that carnival time has begun. US presidential elections never turn on foreign policy questions, and this year’s election is no exception.  It’s the economy, stupid (now inflation); health care (aka abortion); or violent crime (real or imagined).  Even the high profile issue of immigration, while foreign policy-adjacent, is viewed largely through a domestic lens.

Photo by Vladislav Glukhotko on Unsplash

At the same time, the result of our November 5 election will dramatically shape the US role in the world.  Media prognoses have rightly focused on big issues like the future of NATO, relations with China, the fate of Ukraine, and the possibility of a widening war between Israel and Iran.  But a no less important—and far more pervasive—question relates to the role US diplomacy will play more broadly, not to mention the fate of the rules-based international order. 

Continuity or Unpredictability

No longer do our political disputes end at the water’s edge. They now extend to an absurd and pervasive infinity.

To most observers, Kamala Harris is a traditional politician and centrist in her foreign policy orientation.  With a tweak here and there, particularly with respect to Israel/Palestine, she will probably build upon President Biden’s pragmatic foundation rather than chart her own dramatic new path.  In that sense, Harris represents broad foreign policy continuity with the consensus that emerged following WWII.  

Trump is another matter entirely. 

For American diplomats, Trump 1.0 marked a radical departure from our traditional pursuit of democratization and shared prosperity, countering corruption, and strengthening our alliances and partnerships with like-minded countries in favor of the rules-based international order.  (Critics might argue Trump only unmasked the hypocrisy of our traditional approach with his “America First” orientation, but for what it’s worth that view flies in the face of the day to day experience and perception of most practitioners.)  In this context, abroad as at home Trump can be expected to pursue more of the same highly personalized and volatile drama in even less tethered fashion during a prospective second term.  

Counterfactuals Vs. Counter-Counterfactuals

First, a nod towards a Trumpian defense.  Our once and perhaps future president is praised by supporters for presiding over a first term of smooth international sailing.  “Trump was the first American president in memory not to have started a war!”  It is no coincidence, in their telling, that the wars in Ukraine and Israel broke out only after his departure, which would (magically) not have occurred if only he had remained in power.  Biden is weak; Harris will be weaker. So it follows that grave global threats will inevitably gather if he fails to be re-elected, possibly culminating in WWIII.  Yes, he alone can fix it.

I admit.  It is difficult to deal with magical thinking (not to mention this kind of catastrophizing), and disproving a counterfactual is impossible.  

But a counterfactual can always be answered in kind.  So here goes: President Putin had long planned to complete the “under the radar” incremental invasion of Ukraine begun in 2014, but this time openly and full-scale.  Moreover, he knew he could count on a green light from his American pal President Trump, whom he had done his best to help re-elect. He had even received tacit (if not explicit) approval for various moves to this end along the way.  By the time the less pliable President Biden faced Putin from across the negotiating table, Russian planning for the “surprise” military operation had come too far along to pull back.  Besides, all the momentum seemed to favor it.

As for Hamas’s horrendous October 7 attack on Israel, it was a reprisal for the Trump-negotiated Abraham Accords, which had left the Palestinian cause in the dust as Israel normalized its relations with several key Arab Gulf states.  Trump’s controversial decision to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem had only poured salt on the historical wound.  In response, Hamas (and its patrons in Tehran) understood it needed to conduct the kind of operation that grabbed the world by the throat—to force global attention back on to the plight of the Palestinians and to throw Israel on the defensive again.  And god willing, to ignite a broader regional world war, and maybe a bigger one still.  So who is to blame?

I’m not saying the assertions above are any more provable than the counterfactuals that incited them.  But who’s to say they are not?  At their core, as veteran practitioners know, complex strategic challenges of this kind are often driven by unknowable factors: the private delusions of a paranoid autocrat; the secretive plans of an underground suicidal terror cult.  And that’s just for starters.  Layers of knowns and unknowns lie in between, the path strewn with unmet promises, past diplomatic failures, earnest negotiations that ended in stalemate.  Other things, too.

As for magical thinking, let’s call it the Wheel of Fortune.  Just because something does not happen during one turn of the wheel does not mean it won’t happen during the next, or the one after that.  Can we be sure that the needle will stop in the same lucky slot for the lucky charm (once and perhaps future) president the next time around?  What happens when it does not?  What will Trump 2.0 do, for example, when the Peoples’ Republic of China moves militarily against Taiwan?

Take the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan, which gave President Biden an early and sustained bloody nose, and the perfect foreign policy talking point for his opportunistic opponent.  It is no coincidence that the debacle had its origins in a controversial peace agreement that was negotiated and signed with the Taliban by the proud Trump team.  Why do so few observers remember President Biden being pilloried, at first, for delaying the agreement’s implementation?  Before the same chorus of critics quickly changed its tune and attacked him, in even noisier and more rancorous fashion, for imprudently hurrying it along?

The bottom line is this: those who deal with strategic complexity in the global (and maybe any) arena know they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t.  They simply have to choose their poison.  And those who face the hazards of complex policy implementation know that something will almost inevitably go wrong.  There’s simply no such thing as a magic wand.

Meanwhile, the all-knowing ideologues on the sidelines jeer at the brave souls doing battle in the arena.  (These far-seeing observers, by definition, always know better.)  Yet you’re supposedly not allowed to have it both ways—pursuing a public strategy of “heads I win, tails you lose”.  Always declaring victory.  Never admitting to mistakes or defeat.  Always attacking and never conceding.  

You may not be allowed to, but some people do.  Strangely, they get away with it, too.

If Past is Prelude…

Two episodes (of many) from the first Trump term remain seared in the memory of most US career diplomats, revealing his true mercenary colors to all but the willfully blind.  The first impeachment was one; or rather, the fully justified reasons for those proceedings were.  By pressuring a foreign leader to deploy the judicial power to investigate his main domestic political rival as a condition for receiving congressionally approved US foreign assistance, Trump upended key pillars of long established US diplomatic principle and practice in one stroke: the separation of private from public interests and the fight against corruption as a core component of democratization.  It is hard to imagine a more brazen violation of every interest and value we thought we had stood for or a more perfect embodiment of everything we had sought to oppose. (For those interested in a blow by blow account of the evolution of US Ukraine policy from the fight against corruption to the demand for its facilitation on behalf of the US President, I recommend reading Marie Yovanovitch’s gripping memoir “Lessons from the Edge.”  A highly accomplished and strictly by the book career diplomat serving as US Ambassador to Ukraine at the time, Yovanovitch describes this whiplash transformation in harrowing, personal terms. An experience that can best be described as Kafkaesque, she finds herself caught in the treacherous cross-currents of the topsy-turvy, upside-down, corrupt-to-the-core Trumpistan world.) 

Trump’s infamous July 16, 2018 Helsinki press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin was the other.  By siding with Putin against the considered consensus of his own government intelligence and security experts in a wholly unscripted, haphazard, almost comically self-interested way, Trump trampled the most fundamental rules of diplomatic principle and practice on the altar of craven self-interest.  In a transparent gesture for all the world to see, the then-President of the United States threw Team USA under the bus in exchange for fool’s gold offered by a seasoned spymaster of deception who also happened to be the authoritarian leader for life of our principal geopolitical rival.  Many of us were left stunned, speechless, absolutely flabbergasted, and have remained that way since.  Imagine a high school football coach publicly belittling his own players and throwing his support to the other city’s team.  Imagine a prosecutor turning the tables and making a public case for the defense.  Imagine a CEO openly transferring sensitive proprietary information to the firm’s principal competition.  But these comparisons don’t quite capture the fundamental perversity of the moment.  How could they?  We were no longer a serious country pursuing our national interests, we were a protection racket with El Capo at the helm pursuing the interests of El Capo.

If the past is prelude, and not just more of the same but more damning, damaging, and bitter pills still, it is not hard to imagine what might come in Trump 2.0.  Nobody can pretend they didn’t see it coming.