by ABRAHAM UNGER, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Government & Politics
Wagner College
The president’s role in the international arena is to protect American interests. Therefore, foreign policy is an area in which the president can demonstrate his leadership. The Constitution offers considerably limited powers to the chief executive, who ultimately relies on the power of persuasion in policy-making. But as “the nation’s major foreign diplomat and commander in chief of the armed forces,” presidents “are held responsible for the security and status of America in the world.” (Janda, 2012) The president is both “diplomat and crisis manager.” (Ibid.) Foreign policy has been understood by political scientists as a critical lens through which to view the relative strength of an incumbent president during an election year.
Though President Obama has had moments of seeming foreign policy success, such as the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, these episodes are considered exceptional. Overall, the president has had a mixed record of foreign policy success and, at worst, a failed record. He is viewed as indecisive and overly conciliatory in navigating American interests around the globe. Obama’s foreign policy is understood by many to be a diffuse multilateralism — and, even more so, he has been criticized for consistently repudiating his predecessor’s foreign policy doctrines and approaches without developing his own.
Democratic pollsters reported as far back as 2010 that voters held a negative opinion of President Obama’s handling of foreign policy. Scholars have critiqued his decision to “over-emphasize working with the Chinese, a miscalculation in calling for a total freeze on Israeli settlements that has contributed to the stalemate in Israeli-Palestinian talks, and the fragility of progress in Afghanistan.” But “the greatest problem” was the “administration’s inability to restore fiscal stability,” which is “crucial to the long-term health of American power around the world. It is very hard to sustain a role of global power when you are gushing red ink.” President Obama’s perceived inability to move America out of the Great Recession has weakened our standing internationally.
Nonetheless, Americans aren’t concerned this election year with our standing abroad or the success or failure of President Obama’s foreign policy, even vis a vis deep military engagements such as in Afghanistan. Every recent poll reports that Americans are overwhelmingly concerned with the economy in comparison to foreign affairs. A June Gallup poll found that 71 percent of Americans say the economy will be “important or extremely important” in determining their vote for Obama in the next presidential election, while only 49% replied that foreign affairs would be important. A poll conducted Oct. 19-24 by CBS found that 57 percent of voters feel that the economy and jobs are most important. This poll asked open-ended questions about what voters considered the most salient current issues during this election year. Respondents made no mention of foreign policy in their replies.
The shrinking role of foreign policy as a presidential campaign issue was noticed during the previous election. The Council on Foreign Relations held a major panel that took note of this trend in January 2008. The assumption made by experts was that “a combination of the calming of Iraq; the lessening of the impact, perhaps, of Iran by the National Intelligence Estimate late last year; and the issue of the economy emerging have all served to push foreign policy out of the way.”
However, that same panel astutely recognized that issues not historically considered to be part of foreign policy are in fact very much within the arena of how America deals with being part of the international community due to new forces unleashed by globalization. Robert McMahon, host of that prescient conference, claimed that “we're also seeing in the campaigns the issues like the fears — American fears about globalization, concerns about high energy prices, … immigration, are working their way into the campaigns as well.” (Ibid.)
These concerns are intertwined with the defining feature of globalization: the geographic redistribution of the largest amount of capital and labor since the Industrial Revolution. The ongoing migration of people and the circulation of investment around the globe in such intense volume and velocity, beginning in the 1990s, has not been seen since the radical technological and political changes of the late 18th and 19th centuries.
Foreign policy, in terms of traditional diplomacy and issues of war and peace, may have lost its grip on the American electorate, but concerns about the structural fallout from globalization in terms of American loss of manufacturing, the decline of the middle class, immigration issues and competition in the world marketplace are very much an integral part of American concerns about the economy. Though these issues have not been framed in the national political conversation as part of foreign policy, they are. In this epoch of globalization, foreign policy must take into account economically driven policy variables. There is no absolute delineation any more between what is domestic and what is foreign. Today the community of nations shares a deeply intertwined global marketplace.
In reframing American foreign policy within the context of globalization, we suddenly find that we, too, are struggling — as is the rest of the developed world — with the single most critical impact of globalization since the 1990s: the growing gap between rich and poor. This issue is really at the heart of any debate between Republicans and Democrats on economic policy, in terms of how to restart the economy and sustain a viable middle class. According to many activists and scholars, such as noted political theorist Michael Walzer, the global social justice issue of our time is economic justice, and it matters most on a local level where its impacts are most deeply felt. We are even witness to a grassroots social protest movement spurred on by youth but now becoming mainstreamed through an increasingly diverse constituency extending, for example, to labor unions. Occupy Wall Street has “altered our political debate, changed the agenda” and shifted the discussion in the media.
The issue of the growing gap between rich and poor is supported by hard data. Median family income declined by 6.7 percent over the past two years, the unemployment rate was stuck at 9.1 percent in the October 2011 report (16.5 percent if you look at the more meaningful U6 number), and 46.2 million Americans are living in poverty — the most in more than 50 years. Issues of equity, fairness, justice, income distribution and accountability for the economic cataclysm are front and center. We have moved beyond the one-dimensional conversation about how much and where to cut the deficit. Questions more central to the social fabric of our nation have returned to the heart of the political debate. (Ibid.) As one analyst succinctly wrote, “Occupy Wall Street deserves our respect for stubbornly refusing to let us avert our eyes from what is happening to our country.”
I suggest that Occupy Wall Street, which is a movement springing up around the developed world, combined with the American electorate’s overriding concern with the domestic economy, are implicit advocates of a new and more immediate kind of foreign policy for most Americans than traditional international diplomacy and negotiations distant from the daily lives most of us lead. That is because Occupy Wall Street and the electorate’s economic frustrations are the results of a linked, worldwide, market-based economy in the throes of structural change, the final shape of which is as yet unclear.
Whichever presidential candidate offers a resonant policy roadmap to a renewed American economic landscape of opportunity will not only win the 2012 election, but improve America’s stature in the community of nations and provide a way to navigate the challenges posed by a volatile globalization. Domestic economic policy, with its focus on reindustrialization, job creation, and related issues like immigration, organically encompasses a truly meaningful and current foreign policy in this globalizing era.
Online resources
- A centrist analysis of recent foreign policy and the economy
- Occupy Wall Street website