This was published 3 years ago
Opinion
If Biden wins, he will not inherit a foreign policy crisis from Trump
By Timothy Lynch
It has become an article of faith to his detractors: President Donald Trump is the cause of a global crisis that only his removal from office can begin to resolve. The United States is a laughing stock. China is rising. The European Union is collapsing. Climate change gathers at an uninterrupted pace. A restoration under Joe Biden – of prestige, respect, alliances, diplomacy, science, the second coming of Barack Obama – will erase the Trump interregnum. "The old has passed away; behold, the new has come."
Like all faiths, this one relies on assertion and repetition more than observed reality. Trump has not fomented a crisis in his nation’s foreign policy. While he deserves much blame for the catastrophe of coronavirus at home, this global pandemic derives more from biology and the globalisation favoured by his Democratic opponent, which intensified its effect, than from the diplomacy of Donald Trump.
President Donald Trump on the campaign trail this week. Credit: AP
Indeed, if he loses, Trump will be the first president for decades to hand over the White House keys with his nation mostly at peace abroad – even if it is in conflict at home. A new dark chapter of American foreign failure and crisis did not begin on January 20, 2017; it started much earlier.
In 1991, George H.W. Bush, in order to kick Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, assembled in the Saudi Arabian desert one of the largest armies in history. Bush’s refusal to use it to remove the Iraqi dictator locked his people into penury from which they have never fully recovered.
In 1999, Bill Clinton bombed Serbs to halt their war on Kosovo Muslims. This campaign had neither congressional approval nor United Nations permission. It brought the US to the edge of war with Russia.
We all remember the pre-Trump period of global communitarianism and international law otherwise known as the War on Terror. Under its logic, the US and its allies, not least Australia, made war in Afghanistan, Iraq and wherever else George W. Bush deemed there was a threat. Where was the rules-based world order then?
Barack Obama, newly armed with the moral authority of the Nobel peace prize, was complicit in regime change in Libya in 2011 – a consequence, unapproved by the UN, of his joining of a neo-colonial campaign against Muammar Gaddafi. The community organiser-in-chief promptly deserted the Libyan people, plunging them into a decade of anarchy and civil war.
He followed up this urbane and cosmopolitan pragmatism by refusing to support moderate forces in the Syrian civil war, leaving that nation, as he had left Libya, to descend into chaos. Obama instead focused on keeping a fascist theocracy in power in Tehran. His Iranian nuclear deal freed up frozen Iranian assets and gave the regime every hope it could both cement its grip on power and legally pursue a nuclear weapons capacity.
To appease Iran’s great foe, Saudi Arabia, who opposed the nuclear deal, Obama gave them a free hand to suppress an Iran-backed uprising in Yemen. Bombs and missiles have been raining down on Yemenis ever since. Trump has continued this indulgence, but Obama started it.
And yet this period is remembered and eulogised by Trump’s critics as one of US "global leadership", where alliances mattered, adults ran the show, the international community was taken seriously, and the UN was the world’s moral arbiter.
What has Trump wrought in comparison? He left the Paris climate agreement; for metropolitan elites there is no greater crime. But which other US president has given the climate crisis real, as opposed to cosmetic, priority?
Trump has caused consternation at NATO HQ. But who among his predecessors ever believed Europeans were paying what they could really afford? Under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Russia invaded Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014) – their NATO leadership surely as ineffectual as Trump’s?
Trump has not given priority to the Palestinian cause. But Obama did that and achieved zilch. Trump’s Abraham accords, on the other hand, have left Israel more secure with more of its neighbours than at any time since 1948. Even Sudan, one of the world’s most anti-Semitic regimes, has now recognised Israel as per Trump’s latest deal. Remarkable.
If the greatest crisis facing America and the world is an emboldened China, we can hardly lay the blame for this on Trump. The People’s Republic has enjoyed a seemingly inexorable economic rise on the back of a free trade system that his predecessors erected, and that Trump has spent decades condemning.
Trump called Xi Jinping on Chinese manipulation of its currency and its "theft" of US manufacturing jobs. He has done so imperfectly, crudely, with undercurrents of racism and xenophobia. But it was Clinton, both Bushes, and Obama who ceded the global economy to a communist regime with a controversial human rights record.
So before we prematurely rejoice in an impending return to a "rules-based order" led by an Obama 2.0, we should remember the conflict, betrayal and disorder basic to US foreign policy for the past 30 years – which Trump inherited and did not create.
Timothy J. Lynch is associate professor in American politics at the University of Melbourne and author of In the Shadow of the Cold War: American Foreign Policy from George Bush Sr. to Donald Trump.