One of four commentaries from the 16 October 2024 event in the Panel Discussion Series: American Election 2024, from The Finsbury Institute, City International Policy Studies, and the Research Group on Global (Dis)Order.
By Hilde Restad (Oslo/UT Austin)
From 1941 to 2016, there was overarching bipartisan agreement on the U.S. grand strategic narrative. The United States, conservatives in the Republican party and liberal internationalists in the Democratic party alike agreed upon, was to be the “leader of the free world” because the United States was an exceptional great power. As opposed to all others, the United States was leading by the examples of its democratic institutions and its liberal values, not merely its military power. With Donald Trump’s semi-hostile takeover of the Republican Party, the era of bipartisan agreement on U.S. leadership over the “Liberal International Order” (LIO) is over. What will replace it?
Currently, I see three different foreign policy camps of unequal size and influence: the old-school LIO camp, the America Firsters, and the Progressives.
LIOs:
Biden’s overarching message to the world has been that “America is back.” Biden has strongly reaffirmed U.S. leadership of the web of international institutions it has sat atop since 1945. Especially in its handling of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden seemed to be right about renewed U.S. commitment: Putin presumably thought he would weaken the LIO by attacking Ukraine, instead inadvertently reviving it.
Biden’s tenure is decidedly mixed, however. Agnes Callamard, the Secretary General of Amnesty International, has argued in Foreign Affairs that the U.S. support for Israel’s indiscriminate and illegal war in Gaza is undermining the LIO. She links today’s “diplomatic complicity in the catastrophic human rights and humanitarian crisis in Gaza” with the War on Terror, calling it the culmination of years of erosion of the international rule of law and global human rights system.
“America First” is now the main challenger to the old LIO consensus. The name of course originally belonged to the “America First Committee”, a group lobbying against U.S. intervention in the Second World War. Disbanding after Pearl Harbor, the slogan was rarely used in mainstream public discourse, except when right winger Pat Buchanan revived it in the 1990s, railing against globalization, immigration, and free trade. Trump’s neo-Buchanian foreign policy (2017-2021) was populist, nationalist, militaristic, and unilateral. It was not, despite many such accusations, isolationist.
A second round of America First would be more extreme and chaotic than the first one. It would pose a threat to liberal democracy abroad and at home. According to Trump’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, retired General Mark A. Milley, Trump is “fascist to the core.” A second term would face countervailing institutions even weaker this time around than they were in 2016: today’s Republicans are far more Trumpish than the old-guard GOP leadership of five years ago.
Progressives
Once marginal, Progressives have risen to the fore with the two presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Their foreign policy agenda has some similarities with America First in that their scepticism of free trade and globalization, especially their effects on the U.S. working and lower middle classes. According to Matt Duss, the Biden administration has shifted toward a “post-neoliberal” trade policy partly as a response to this. Progressives furthermore favour more diplomacy, less military force in U.S. international engagements, and are generally sceptical of U.S. support for states that are not liberal democracies such as Saudi Arabia and Israel. Essentially, they would like to see the United States nation-build more at home than abroad.
What About Harris?
In picking Tim Walz, one of the most pro-worker governors in the country, Kamala Harris could be signalling that she onboard with the post-neoliberal economic agenda, writes Duss. But what is her perspective on the U.S. role in the world?
One could imagine a more Progressive-leaning version of the Harris-Walz administration focusing on climate, democracy promotion, promoting the global working class, and strengthening ties with the Global South. Or, one could imagine a continuation of the primacist LIO-approach of Biden.
Harris has generally been quite vague in her statements on foreign policy, leaning on traditional American exceptionalist, patriotic rhetoric that she hopes will attract voters from the left to the previously conservative. On specific issues, like Israel/Palestine, this has resulted in rather general statements, presumably trying to attract both pro-Israel voters and left-leaning Progressives out in the streets protesting the Gaza war. Attempting to unite and attract a much more disparate and diverse coalition than Trump, Harris has her work cut out for her.
About the Author
Hilde Restad is an Associate Professor of International Studies at Oslo Nye University College. She is also a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Clements Center for National Security at UT Austin.