Almost a year ago, I presented my readers with a question: when Obama is gone – when he is no longer President of the US – will US-Israel relations get better, after eight long years of acrimony? In fact, this was not really a question, but more of a warning sign: “did anyone promise Israel, did anyone whisper to Netanyahu, that after Obama a more understanding President is a done deal?”
The post-Obama years are still a mystery, for Israel and for the rest of the world. Israelis might think – and they do – that Obama is the “worst ever” American President for Israel. But his successor can be just as problematic, or even more problematic. The next President can be a Bernie Sanders, whose approach to Iran irritates even Iran-deal supporters such as Hillary Clinton. Or it can be a Donald Trump, who suggested in his latest debate appearance that President Bush and his administration lied to the American people in arguing that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
These two candidates – the front runners in their two respective parties, whether we want to believe it or not – are signaling to the rest of the world, Israel included, that the Obama years might not have been an aberration from some traditional US foreign policies. As Gideon Rachman aptly wrote in the Financial Times, “the current frontrunners… have embraced ideas that are isolationist, in all but name. If those ideas prevail, they would make Mr. Obama look like a super-engaged internationalist.” Or they could make him look like a super-engaged supporter of the US-Israel alliance. Or they could make him look like a super-engaged preserver of conventional US foreign policy.
Rachman writes: “the popularity of their campaigns, and their influence on the more mainstream candidates, suggests that there is now a strong constituency in the US for a retreat from globalism: repudiating international military and economic commitments.” Having seen these two candidates campaigning in the last couple of weeks, and having talked to their supporters in Iowa and New Hampshire, there is nothing in this observation that sounds inaccurate to me.
With Sanders, it is clear that both the candidate and the candidate’s supposed constituency have little interest in foreign affairs – and certainly no inclination towards interventionism (Sanders still uses Clinton’s ancient vote for the Iraq war against her). And last Saturday in North Carolina, Trump betted on a similar GOP fatigue from interventionism. He attacked the Bush family, and with it the prevailing beliefs of the party concerning foreign policy (we already know what Trump thinks of Senator John McCain, the party’s most notable internationalist of the last decade).
Of course, there is still a possibility that neither Trump nor Sanders will ultimately become the nominees of their parties. There is still a possibility that Clinton – a fairly hawkish internationalist – or Rubio – an internationalist of the Bush-McCain typecast – will get the nomination and become the next president. And yet, there is something to learn from the ascendance of the two candidates that are the most isolationist, least interested in formulating a serious foreign policy (other than “we will win”), most focused on protecting narrowly defined American interests, least concerned about making the world, not just America, a better place.
And there is also a possibility that some of us – maybe all of us – still don’t fully understand the meaning of Sanders and Trump. Maybe both of them have not yet bothered to formulate a complete world view, maybe they don’t pay attention to foreign affairs. Is Trump really an isolationist, as Rachman argues, or a “realist”, as Daniel Drezner argued a few days ago. Is he the candidate proving that Rand Paul’s instincts on where the GOP should go were right – by making similar arguments, only better? Or is Trump gradually moving towards a Stephen Walt worldview? Or maybe he is just inconsistent to a degree that makes any interpretation of his views a Rorschach test that tells us more about the interpreter than about Trump’s future policies?
There are no reliable definitive answers to these questions, but there are real concerns that are beginning to impact foreign governments as they think about the future, and about the way a changing US, and radically changed US policies, might influence them. One specific example: If Israel is indeed considering the pros and cons of completing the negotiations over the next US aid package now – versus postponing the completion of the agreement and waiting with it for the days of the next administration – a viable Sanders\Trump candidacy certainly adds to the pros column. That is, to the column that argues for trusting Obama – rather than waiting for someone whose outlook could may well prove much more complicated to understand, let alone please.
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