Americans are rejecting imperialism – on both sides of the political spectrum
As Bob Dylan put it, “the times they are a changing!” – and that is certainly the case when it comes to the debate over US foreign policy this election season. A recent article in the Boston Globe, summarizing the observations of a group of Brown University students who tracked the foreign policy discourse of the candidates, underscored what is happening on both sides of the partisan divide:
“As we watched, Republican voters rejected every candidate who favored their party’s traditional hardline foreign policies, including Lindsey Graham, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio…. Trump, the presumptive nominee, has broken with foreign policy dogma on a host of issues. He asserts that decades of foreign wars have not been good for the United States – hardly a traditional Republican view.”
The Democratic party, too, is experiencing what these youthful observers describe as a “foreign policy identity crisis”:
“Clinton, the likely nominee, is an activist by nature and supports escalation from Afghanistan to Syria to Ukraine. Her opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders, has condemned her ‘very aggressive policy of intervention’ and said he does not believe the United States should be ‘the world’s policeman.’ Yet though Sanders effectively pushed Clinton further left in terms of domestic policy, he was unsuccessful in changing her deeply held foreign policy views.”
The two parties are undergoing a process of “role reversal,” as these students put it, right before our eyes. Trump is now attacking “trigger happy Hillary,” while Mrs. Clinton is parrying these thrusts with accusations that “dangerous Donald” lacks the steadiness of an Establishment politician who sticks with the familiar script that casts America in the role of “the indispensable nation” destined to police the world.
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