By Leon Hadar.
“Hey, guys, we are sick and tired of carrying the burden of protecting your security with our lives and dollars, and allowing your exports and your immigrants to flood our country all these years while you strengthen your economies to compete with ours and embrace unfair trade practices that end up destroying our manufacturing sector and stealing our jobs.
“So the time has come for us to take a break and to come back home, America! No more crusades for democracy, experiments in nation building, and disastrous and costly military interventions in the Middle East and the rest of the world. You (Japan; South Korea; Germany) are wealthy nations and you need to spend more on defence. Protect your interests in your strategic backyards and stop free-riding on our military might which from now on will be used to defend our own interests.
“And while for a long time, we had an interest in liberalising global free trade, helping us to expand markets for our products, we are discovering that you (China; India; Mexico) are exploiting the system and beating us in the global economic competition. That forced us to protect our national economy.
“Bottom line: Time for us to finally do nation building at home, reform our ailing educational system, impose restrictions on immigration, fix our shattered roads and the rest of our infrastructure. And hopefully sooner than later, our airports would look as shiny as yours, we’ll build the same kind of speed trains you have, and enjoy those long annual vacations, free college education, and healthcare for all. Just like you guys!”
Foreign observers of the 2016 American presidential election, joined by many local mainstream media (MSM) types, would probably counter that all this sounds like a mishmash of what the two leading populist presidential candidates – the nationalist Donald Trump (“America First!”) and the socialist Bernie Sanders (“A Political Revolution is Coming!”) – have been trying to market to the American people, that they are empty slogans and demagoguery that would be forgotten a day following the presidential election in the same way that presidential candidates promoting isolationist and protectionist agendas in previous elections had vanished eventually into political thin air. Recall the failed campaigns of nationalist Republican candidate Pat Buchanan in 1992 and 1996, and isolationist Democratic candidate George McGovern in 1972.
But it would be a mistake to assume that the election rhetoric – infused with protectionist and isolationist sentiments, and in some cases, with nativist and xenophobic attitudes – is just, well, election rhetoric. And that the Donald wouldn’t win the Republican presidential nomination and that if he does, then he would probably lose the general election. And that Mr Sanders, the Vermont senator, would be beaten by former secretary of state Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential race.
“I am willing to bet a lot of money that Hillary would be the next US president and I expect her to continue pursuing traditional internationalist US strategy” is what you hear these days from your average MSM pundit in Washington. So don’t worry. We’ll end up passing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade accord at some point. Nato would still be with us and the US would continue protecting its Asian allies and reassert its leadership role in the Middle East. Let’s all go partying in Davos!
These kinds of forecasts may cheer up the Davos Man, but the main problems with them is that they are being made by the same people (also known as the political and economic elites) who not long ago were dismissing the former reality television host from New York as a “joke” who would withdraw from the race after the third or fourth Republican primary. And that there was no way in the world that an ageing socialist who honeymooned in the Soviet Union in the previous century would be considered as a serious Democratic presidential candidate.
Moreover, the members of the foreign policy establishment who had treated with disdain the Donald’s suggestion that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was obsolete and that he wouldn’t have problems with Japan going nuclear, are the same people who were cheerleading the decision to oust Saddam Hussein. Most Americans now regard that decision – which both Mr Trump and Mr Sanders have opposed – as a historic blunder. And according to opinion polls, the majority of Americans reject the proposals by members of the same establishment to use US military power to oust Syrian leader Bashar Assad or force Russia out of Crimea.
In fact, President Barack Obama has embraced some of the foreign policy positions that the Republican presidential frontrunner and the Democrat who is running in a close second place have advocated and that have been decried by Washington insiders as “isolationist”. An early opponent of the Iraq War, Mr Obama rejected the advice by those insiders to intervene militarily in the Syrian civil war and to assert US power vis-a-vis Russia and China, even if that could lead to military escalation.
Indeed, during his lengthy interview with Jeffrey Goldberg from The Atlantic magazine, Mr Obama sounded at times like Mr Trump, when he criticised the German and Saudi “free riders” and urged them to protect their regional interests instead of relying on America to do that. And like Mr Trump and Mr Sanders, Mr Obama continues to insist that Americans should start doing serious nation building at home while cutting on those efforts abroad, reflecting the sentiment of the American electorate that has become more sceptical about the cost-effectiveness of US military interventions.
An argument can be made that both Mr Trump and Mr Sanders succeeded in emerging as serious presidential candidates not despite their challenges to Washington’s foreign and trade policy axioms, but because of them. Neither should the protectionist agendas that the two have been promoting during the campaign, including rejection of the TPP trade deal, be regarded as positions that are backed by marginal minorities in the two parties.
On the contrary, a large majority of Democratic lawmakers and primary voters, backed by the labour unions and environmentalist groups, reject the centrist pro-free trade policies pursued by former president Bill Clinton in the 1990s. That explains why his wife – who as secretary of state was a driving force behind the TPP accord – is now opposing the TPP.
Similarly, there are clear indications that Mr Trump’s nationalist economic views are gaining support among members of the GOP, which has traditionally been a powerful pro-free trade voice on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. That has raised concerns that the Republican lawmakers would be reluctant now to approve the TPP agreement.
Supporters of free trade insist that the decline of American manufacturing and loss of jobs is mostly a result of structural problems of the American economy and automation, as well as competition from China, and that globalisation and trade are only partly responsible for what is happening. But most Americans aren’t familiar with the intricacies of the theory of competitive advantage and politicians such as Mr Trump and Mr Sanders are successful in marketing their protectionist ideas, especially since the other presidential candidates haven’t been pushing in the other direction.
It’s not clear yet whether these trends mark the beginning of the end of an era in which a strong internationalist consensus on foreign and trade policies brought together lawmakers from both parties and all the Republicans and Democrats who have occupied the White House.
It’s possible that “President Clinton the Second” – backed by internationalist Republicans and Democrats – would be able to reverse these trends, especially if the American economic engine starts roaring. But even she would find it difficult to win the support of an American public that feels that it is being played for a sucker by the rest of the world.
