In the event that President Trump is re-elected and if he follows the pattern of previous presidents, he would be likely to concentrate on foreign policy even more than during his first term. In his Wall Street Journal column Walter Russell Mead considers what that might look like:
Mr. Trump’s second term would probably be driven by a quest for “deals,†transactional bargains with other leaders, even more so than in his first term. This could be disconcerting to those around him working to create the institutional basis for a long-term approach to the rise of China and security in the Indo-Pacific. For Mr. Trump, it is all leverage, and for the right deal he will make large and unconventional concessions. China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela: Mr. Trump’s policy is likely to be a quest for dramatic if not always substantive or enduring deals.
This has several consequences. It reinforces Mr. Trump’s relative indifference to human-rights-based diplomacy. It strengthens his preference for diplomacy between sovereign states as opposed to multilateral rule-making and intensifies his impatience with international institutions. It will lead him to continue to seek good personal relationships with even the most controversial and adversarial figures on the world stage.
A second term would be at least as chaotic as the first. This is not simply because the president is undisciplined and indifferent to process and bases his decisions on intuition more than analysis. For Mr. Trump, chaos is more than a choice or even a habit. It is a tool for keeping ultimate control in his own hands. That a presidential tweet can at any moment reverse a policy that aides have labored over for months infuriates, alienates and not infrequently humiliates his subordinates, but Mr. Trump stays in control. Keeping your associates and adversaries alike guessing is, in the president’s playbook, a tactic for success. Officials can always be replaced; power needs to be conserved.
I think that’s a pretty realistic analysis.
What if Trump loses? What is American foreign policy likely to look like under a Biden Administration? I think there would be a combination of a futile attempt at restoring the status quo ante, accompanied by sometimes conflicting pressures to formulate a strategy for dealing with a rising China, more concerns about human rights, and those pushing a “responsibility to protect”.
I think Mead is correct here on Trump.
Biden, given his advising team, is likely to go more toward the status quo ante than I would like but I don’t think he’ll be the warmonger like Clinton would have been. About half of his foreign policy relates to domestic changes including immigration. The rest is boilerplate stuff on alliances and such, but there are specific promises to end “forever” wars and only leave small forces in place to deal with ISIS and AQ. He’s promised to end US support for the Saudi war in Yemen. All of which I think is good, but like Trump’s promises to end forever wars, I’ll believe it when I see it.
As with any President, a crisis can change things dramatically as happened to GHW Bush, Clinton, GW Bush, and Obama.
I still think back to my vote for GW Bush in 2000 which was primarily based on his promise for a more “humble” foreign policy. Campaign promises frequently do not survive reality.
Trump and the country are fortunate that there haven’t been any major FP crises on Trump’s watch. While I think Trump’s oft-cited skepticism of foreign wars and entanglements is true, that hasn’t really been tested.
Despite voting in every presidential election in which I was eligible to vote, I have only voted for somebody who got elected once: for Obama in 2008.