Monthly debates kicked off in June among Democratic presidential hopefuls and American voters are beginning to pay attention to who's who and who stands for what. The issues that got the most attention inJune's debate were immigration, healthcare, the economy, climate change and gun control. Foreign policy only occupied about 15 minutes out of a total of four debate hours. Yet, these 15 minutes were enough to see that the Democrats have a foreign policy problem on their hands.
Specifically, the cohort of candidates and, by default the party, are not presenting anything that approaches a big picture alternative vision to Trump's horror-film style of foreign policy. This is underpinned by a blurry array of visions and positions, some of which are ill-informed while others are at odds with Obama administration policy. At the same time, there is a general failure to recognize the international nature of many of the biggest issues they are debating.
It's not unique to the United States that political campaigns don't always center around foreign policy. But this set of charts recently published by Foreign Policy Magazine shows that the Democratic primary in 2004 was the one most focused on foreign policy in recent memory. What made Democrats shift their focus to faraway places? Of course, this was shortly after the Bush administration entered into the highly controversial war in Iraq. Yet this was a somewhat unique case: this data show that overall, Republicans discuss foreign policy more than Democrats. One partial explanation offered in the Foreign Policy article is that Republicans “express more dissatisfaction with the U.S. role in the world.”
Yet the other piece of this puzzle is that Republican politicians mostly have some very clear positions centered around a hard-power vision for defending American security: military might and trade dominance with a preference for going it alone vs. multilateral relationships with allies. Pew data on Republican voters supports this. Their top foreign policy concerns are protecting the U.S. from terrorism, protecting American jobs, and maintaining a U.S. military advantage over other countries while showing very minimal interest in improving relationships with allies.
On the other hand, most analysts and voters are often hard-pressed to put some sort of Democratic foreign policy outlook in a nutshell. This was a particular challenge during the 2008 election cycle, when, as president of the Democratic Party in Spain, I found it very difficult to articulate what an Obama foreign policy would look like. The surest bet was to talk multi-lateralism as opposed to the unilateralism of President Bush. But most Democrats who were in Congress at the time, such as Hillary Clinton, voted to authorize Bush's foray into Iraq and those who weren't, such as Barack Obama, had the luxury of hindsight, looking back and grasping for evidence that provide that they were against it. Republicans presented a much more united front, as they tend to do on most issues.
That said, Trump has turned Republican foreign policy orthodoxy on its head: while he might make a lot of threats on Twitter, he is, to the relief of many, reluctant to use military force as we've seen recently with Iran. And then there is trade, the keystone of American foreign policy going back centuries, yet he is deeply suspicious of any trade deal he hasn't negotiated himself, preferring to leave deals like Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) all together in favor of mostly bilateral deals. But the real departure from Republican policy comes with his weaponized use of tariffs, which are basically taxes, the raising of which is a no-go for all Republicans.
Further, few Americans are happy with Trump's job performance and even less with his foreign policy. The most recent Real Clear Politics average job approval ratings show that 45% approve vs. 52.6% disapprove of his overall performance. But when asked specifically about foreign policy, it sinks to 41.4% approval and rises to 53.8% disapproval. This, combined with Republican divisions over Trump's actions suggests that the Democrats have an opportunity to exploit this, but it remains to be seen that they are capable of doing so.
On the other hand, Democrats are indeed generally averse to using military might—but the range of views can be dizzying. Sander's supporters accused Hillary Clinton and even Barack Obama of being hawkish while longing for a U.S. that stays out of the world's issues. The far left of the Democratic party often connects with the far right libertarian types in their isolationist tendencies and while Republicans have, until Trump, shunned this view within the party, Democrats have often torn each other apart over it. Hence the enormous amount of foreign policy debate among the Democrats in 2004 and to a lesser extent, in 2008 which centered more around who supported the war in Iraq and who didn't.
There was a notable exchange between Representative Tulsi Gabbard and Representative Tim Ryan after Ryan was asked why the Afghanistan War was not over and why U.S. presidents couldn't seem to bring it to an end. As he finished stumbling through an evasive explanation about how the U.S. must remain engaged in the world and tried to pivot back to domestic issues, Gabbard, a military veteran, jumped in to ask “Is that what you will tell the parents of those two soldiers who were just killed in Afghanistan? We have to be engaged? As a soldier, I will tell you that answer is unacceptable.” She then had to explain to him the difference between the Taliban and Al Qaeda and how the Taliban were there “long before we came in; they’ll be there long before we leave.” Other candidates, especially Joe Biden and to a lesser extent, Kirsten Gillibrand have more foreign policy experience but Gabbard was the only candidate who showed some very decisive policy positions on these issues, even if she didn't stand out on domestic policy.
When asked about the biggest threat facing the United States, Governor Jay Inslee got a big applause for answering “The biggest threat is Donald Trump. No question about it.” Most had a hard time containing themselves to one threat, but the ones named were China (by four candidates), climate change (four), nuclear proliferation (two) and Russia and Iran had one mention each. This is somewhat at odds with the Pew data that show more Republicans are concerned about limiting the power and influence of China and Iran while Democrats are more concerned about Russia.
With Trump's escalation of tensions with Iran—not to mention a recent close brush with an airstrike—and the fact that the nuclear deal was a major Obama foreign policy accomplishment, one might imagine that this would be a big opportunity for democrats to unite behind a foreign policy issue. Yet when asked at the first night of the debate if they would rejoin the deal, all said they would except Senator Corey Booker and when he explained that he would try to negotiate something better, Senator Amy Klobuchar and Tulsi Gabbard both chimed in to say that they would too. It's fairly astounding for candidates to go against a major policy achievement of a president from their own party, not to mention one that decisively won two terms in office.
Trade is even more problematic for Democrats, so it's unsurprising that there was almost no mention of trade on either night except in very general reference to Trump's trade war with China. While two enormous tarde deals were another big part of Obama's foreign policy legacy, Trump pulled out of the the Trans-pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has been set aside. Yet many Democrats and notably Senator Bernie Sanders were against both and applauded Trump's early move. Even Hillary Clinton moved away from TPP during the Democratic primaries in 2016 because it was a toxic issue for the far left and much of the moderate left was ambivalent. This is consistent with the Pew data that show only 40% of Democrats to be concerned with promoting U.S. business and economic interests abroad. Much like leftist opposition within the EU to trade agreements, especially, CETA and TTIP, many Democrats are suspicious that they represent corporate power grabs and will result in watered down regulations and weakened conditions for workers.
Yet trade is the foundation of a rules-based international world order, one that was built around U.S., and to a lesser extent, European interests. The strategy around the TPP was a renegotiation of NAFTA that brought Asian-Pacific countries into the fold in order to get ahead of China in the region. Democrats would do well to recognize that while the march of economic globalization can't be stopped, setting up rules-based institutions is the way to protect regulations and workers.
Which brings us to the enormous opportunity that foreign policy represents for Democrats in 2020. Trump has been bent on no less than the destruction or at least severe weakening of the so-called liberal international order. One of the few political science terms that he throws around with regularity is 'sovereignty' and it's true that international institutions require the giving up of bits of sovereignty. It's also true that any Democrat who manages to beat Trump will face the enormous challenge of re-engaging U.S. allies, especially Europe and will likely never be able to re-establish the international world order as we know it.
New governments can't ever just re-set international relations the way they can just change back concrete domestic policies. The president who follows Trump, be it in 2020 or 2024, will need to envision a multi-polar post-liberal world order and be able to make the case—both in the U.S. and abroad—for rules-based institutions that enable us to reap the benefits of cooperation on borderless issues such as climate change, terrorism, migration and health pandemics as well as the new economy. While cries for sovereignty—really a fancy word for going it alone—might be attractive to many voters on the right and even some on the left, the world no longer allows for it and arguably never did. Democrats need to learn how to talk about this and explain why engaging with the world is in America's best interest.
This wouldn't require a huge departure from the issues they are already talking about. While climate change was among the top issues in both debates and often cited by candidates as a priority, it is less often framed as a foreign policy issue. Similarly, the border crises and immigration got a lot of time in the debates and got minimal framing as the international issue it indeed is. Some Democrats, like Julian Castro and Corey Booker, have suggested more humanitarian aid for migrant countries of origin to help them rebuild their economies. While aid certainly isn't a panacea for this gut-wrenching crises, this is the right kind of global thinking and solutions that can benefit Democrats in their fight to take back the White House. Foreign policy is an enormous opportunity for them, yet at this point, few, if any, are well-positioned to seize it.
This article was published in Spanish in EsGlobal on July 31, 2019.