Is Trump administration’s foreign policy more benign than Biden’s?

Any day now the news will come that the US and Russia have decided to renew the important nuclear arms reduction of around 1000 warheads each that was agreed by Presidents Barack Obama and Dimitri Medvedev. Another feather in Trump’s foreign policy hat? Yes, indeed.

In fact his record on foreign policy is said by his supporters to be better than both the Democrat and Republican presidents before him. Most important, he has not started any new wars.

This has led Edward Luce, the Financial Times’s wise man in Washington, to write under the provocative headline, “The case for re-electing Donald Trump”, that “the highest number of checks on Trump’s ‘promises kept’ sheet are on foreign policy”. He points to the drawing down of US troops in Afghanistan and the Middle East; Isis losing its territory; the identifying of China as the chief threat to the US and Europe; and the forcing of US allies to think harder about providing Nato with more funding, rather than piggy-backing on America. He should have added Trump’s softly, softly approach to Kim Jong-un, president of North Korea, which at the least has probably slowed the country’s rate of growth in nuclear weapons.

The US has an almost unique kind of foreign policy establishment – made up of either neo-conservatives or liberal interventionists. Both are tough on Russia and prone to intervening in foreign disputes. They are often liberal on social, human rights and economic issues but hard-line on military and foreign policy. They are well represented among Joe Biden’s advisors.

In Europe only the UK of former prime minister Tony Blair has had a similar “neo-conservative/liberal interventionist” foreign policy orientation, while at the same time being centre-left on domestic social and human rights issues.

So this raises the interesting question whether Joe Biden if he wins next week’s election will emulate Trump or will he become yet one more Democratic scalp for the foreign policy neo-conservatives and liberal interventionists, also known as the “Blob”? “Blob”, a wonderfully pejorative term, was coined by Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security advisor, which is rather ironic because on many big issues, not all by any means, Obama and Rhodes signed on to its prescriptions.

If readers want a prompt on what the Blob has been up to in recent times they should look at the suggestion made two years ago that Nato should defend Montenegro. Most Americans couldn’t place it on the map, yet the Blob was angry that Trump wouldn’t go nose to nose with Moscow over its standing. Unsurprisingly, once the Blob ran head on into Trump’s “no” the issue has faded far away. In reality tiny Montenegro isn’t important to anyone but itself.

Another more recent example is from last week when Herbert R. McMaster, Trump’ former national security advisor and a strong neo-conservative, compared the US withdrawal from Afghanistan today to the 1938 so-called Munich appeasement of Hitler.

It was the pressure from similar well-placed civilian and military opinion, and including nearly all the foreign affairs columnists in the important newspapers, that pushed Obama to raise the number of American troops in Afghanistan sharply to a total of 100,000. It did no good, as Obama now concedes.

Obama was also talked by them into supporting the Anglo-French toppling of the regime of Muammar Gadhafi in Libya-in particular by his advisors, Susan Rice and Samantha Power. If not seeing themselves as neo-cons on foreign policy they sang from the same hymn sheet on a number of issues, including Libya. (There is often such a blurring of the lines of division between liberal interventionists and neo-cons.) The consequences live on in Libya- a devastating civil war, large-scale human rights abuses and an economy driven into the sand.

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For 17 years Power was a foreign affairs columnist for the Inter-national Herald Tribune/New York Times