Dr. Manoj Kumar Mishra
Almost all opinion polls and surveys including the ones conducted by Pew Research Centre and Gallup signal that the Presidential nominee of the Republican Party for the upcoming Presidential elections in the US, Donald Trump outweighs the outgoing President and Democratic Party Nominee Joe Biden in certain critical parameters which could win him as the next President of the US. The key issues driving Trump’s popularity are national economy, immigration and national security. People believe that the US under President Trump better handled these issues with a focus on ‘America First’ approach. The assassination attempt on Trump through assault rifle amid his electoral campaigns must have raised his popularity further. This sends a signal that Trump’s popularity at home has not changed the fact of his unpopularity abroad. The American intelligence agencies have allegedly found some clues of external power’s involvement in staging such an attack.
Biden Administration’s Achievements Outweighed By Predicaments
The Biden administration had to deal with an economy badly battered by Covid-19 pandemic and during his entire regime the economy remained as the most significant challenge from the perspective of Americans. The resultant inflation and higher interest rates impinged on and constrained the abilities of the President on other fronts. However, it was the Biden administration which succeeded in getting critical laws passed in a divided Congress to address the climate, domestic manufacturing and historic infrastructure spending that Trump promised but failed to deliver during his regime. It was under the Biden’s leadership that the US re-joined the World Health Organization and the Paris climate accord. The country proactively collaborated with the international community to fight COVID-19 and worked to build collective synergies along with the European Union and Britain to meet collective challenges such as climate change. The administration also fared much better towards maintaining racial relationships and health care facilities compared to the Trump administration. More importantly, while the Biden administration had to respond to two wars – one between Russia and Ukraine and another between Israel and Hamas waged during his tenure and took efforts to serve American interests by working with allies and with provisions of military assistance, the Trump administration had imposed a massive defence budget on its citizens to provoke and coerce adversarial powers such as China, Russia, Iran and North Korea in order not to pose threats to American insularity and the ‘America First’ idea.
Trump’s Short-term Perspective on National Interest
The Trump administration was known for a foreign policy approach based on hard power and promotion of American national interests with a short-term perspective on interests rather than treading a long-term path of building American image through collaboration and leading international community and enhancing soft power. For instance, it decided to withdraw from the landmark Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, indicating that China needed to be part of the agreement. The administration construed the Treaty ineffective as China had become a new strategic reality. However, turning away from the Treaty only soured bilateral relations with Russia and strengthened the Russian resolve to militarily and strategically beat the US through diverse ways. During his regime, Russia continued to express its misgivings about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s eastward expansion and the US anti-ballistic-missile systems placed near its doorstep in countries such as Romania and Poland.
While in response to the US withdrawal from the INF Treaty, many strategic experts argued that Moscow could respond by deploying intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles at its borders, which would directly impinge on European security, and European countries were likely to emerge as sites for this renewed Russian-US confrontation, on the other side, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a spate of new defense systems that could reach any point in the world and a supersonic weapon that could not be tracked by anti-missile systems. Meanwhile, President Trump was recorded remarking that the US would build up its arsenal “until people come to their senses.”
Indicating a militaristic turn in his administration’s foreign policy, Trump had approved a whopping defense budget of US$717 billion. Trump said: “The [2019] National Defense Authorization Act is the most significant investment in our military and our war fighters in modern history.” He further averred that “we are going to strengthen our military like never ever before, and that’s what we did.”
The budget also sought to outmanoeuvre China and enhance US investments and strategic influence by financially empowering the Committee on Foreign Investment. Apart from earmarking huge spending on modernizing and equipping the army and air force, the US Congress’s approval of $1.56 billion for three littoral combat ships in response to the navy’s request for one and allocation of a gigantic sum towards developing a fourth Ford-class aircraft carrier, six icebreakers, and a Columbia-class ballistic-missile submarine pointed to the Trump administration’s focus on growing Chinese influence in the oceans.
Further, the act stipulated allocation of substantial resources toward the development of energy and space sensing projects as well as hypersonic defence capabilities primarily aimed at fostering US security objectives in various parts of the globe.
American Soft Power
US pursuits of hard power did not come without costs to its soft power. Its withdrawal from major international agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris Climate Agreement and the Iran nuclear deal along with the administration’s hard-line stance on immigration and trade indicated Washington’s lack of trust in soft power as an effective instrument to enhance influence through attraction.
Joseph Nye, a professor at Harvard University who coined the term “soft power,” argued that the Trump administration had acted as if soft power did not matter and emplaced a “hard-power budget” by cutting down funding for the State Department and the US Agency for International Development by 30%.
In a similar vein, Professor William Rugh of Northeastern University in New York state argued that Trump’s pronouncements on foreign policies damaged America’s soft power abroad.
An annual global ranking of nations’ soft power based on surveys conducted by London-based Portland Communications and the University of Southern California’s Centre on Public Diplomacy projected a substantive decline in US soft power during the Trump’s regime.
The American Insularity
The US refusal to accept the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, which ruled that Washington must ensure that its sanctions did not affect humanitarian aid or civil aviation safety for Iran, indicated that the US was backing away from the international norms that it sought for others to uphold.
Trump sent signals of his inclination toward insularity in his threats to change the international normative order and prevailing trade arrangements early in his presidency when he threatened to withdraw the US from NATO, the World Trade Organization, and the UN Human Rights Council and began trade wars with China and the European Union.
Based on the ‘American First’ idea and to reduce the American expenses on European security, the administration pitched an innovative idea to strengthen NATO and urged the European partners to enhance their defence spending to 2% of their gross domestic product, while there was no indication whether the US would opt for a budget with less funding on defence.
Trump raised the Russian spectre in an attempt to persuade Germany to raise its contribution to defence. For instance, he said: “It should never have been allowed to happen. Germany is totally controlled by Russia because they will be getting 60-70% of their energy from Russia and a new pipeline.”
However, many European member-countries of NATO did not share the arguments that US objectives were limited to the defence of Europe. These countries seemed to believe that the US supported a range of interests and allies around the globe which rather impinged on European security.
The US policy posture under the Trump administration toward Russia, China, Iran and North Korea either in the form of imposition and continuation of sanctions and/or withdrawal from international treaties and agreements indicated that foreign policy under the Trump administration was more militaristic and coercive which sought to change the behaviour of adversaries through sticks rather than carrots.