He loves what it should — and can — be. A Jeffersonian policy of restraint and withdrawal requires cooperation from many other countries, but the prospect of a lower American profile may make others less, rather than more, willing to help the United States. We could not prevail in Iraq or Afghanistan; we failed in Syria; we destabilized Libya; China is on the road to global ascendency with our help; Putin’s Russia is a corrupted form of Soviet autocracy; Europe has lost its way; the United Nations and other multinational organizations have no interest in, let alone an ability to enforce, just standards; Israel is not secure; the Middle East is convulsed with sectarian violence; Nietzsche’s “Will to Power” is the norm for international relations. Some presidents build coalitions; others stay close to one favorite school. Committee Calls On Hong Kong Stock Exchange, U.S. Investment Banks To Assure Full Disclosure Of Ant Group’s Material Risks Prior To I.P.O. Bush could not have developed a strategy better calculated to dissolve his political support at home. And the most purist of the Jeffersonians — neoisolationists on both left and right — turned on Obama as a sellout. Obama’s long deliberation over the war in Afghanistan is a case study in presidential schizophrenia: After 94 days of internal discussion and debate, he ended up splitting the difference — rushing in more troops as his generals wanted, while calling for their departure to begin in July 2011 as his liberal base demanded. This dichotomy resulted in bitter administration infighting when those ideologies came into conflict — over humanitarian interventions in the Balkans and Rwanda, for example, and again over the relative weight to be given to human rights and trade in U.S. relations with China. But the conflicting impulses influencing how this young leader thinks about the world threaten to tear his presidency apart — and, in the worst scenario, turn him into a new Jimmy Carter. The Jeffersonian concern with managing America’s foreign policy at the lowest possible level of risk has in the past helped presidents develop effective grand strategies, such as George Kennan’s early Cold War idea of containment and the early 19th-century Monroe Doctrine. Did the administration not renew its efforts to build a relationship with the regime in Tehran even as peaceful democratic protesters were being tortured and raped in its jails? At this strategic level, Obama’s foreign policy looks a little bit like that of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Will other countries heed the president’s call to assume more international responsibility as the United States reduces its commitments — or will they fail to fulfill their obligations as stakeholders in the international system? It is not only Americans who will challenge the new American foreign policy. Like Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Martin Luther King Jr., Barack Obama doesn’t just love the United States for what it is. His policy sought on détente with both nations, which were hostile to the U.S. and to each other. He looks to achieve an opening with Iran comparable to Nixon’s rapprochement with communist China. But if he can't reconcile his inner Thomas Jefferson with his inner Woodrow Wilson, the 44th president… So do most U.S. presidents, of course, and the ideas that inspire this one have a long history at the core of the American political tradition. Move right toward the Sarah Palin range of the party and the Jacksonian influence grows. Wilsonians interpret Jeffersonian restraint as moral cowardice. “He's the kind of fellow that could have an emotional collapse,” he remarked. It was a sober compromise that suggests a man struggling to reconcile his worldview with the weight of inherited problems. Can the president execute an orderly reduction in the U.S. military stake in Iraq and Afghanistan without having hostile forces fill the power vacuum? This is both an ambitious and an attractive vision. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars. An early and consistent opponent of the Iraq war, Obama was able to bring together the elements of the Democratic Party’s foreign-policy base who were most profoundly opposed to (and horrified by) Bush’s policy. Nixon focused on reducing the dangers of the Cold War among the Soviet Union and China. To find ourselves dishonorable graves. Jacksonians think it is cowardice pure and simple. But Obama found harsh critics on all sides: Wilsonians recoiled from the evident willingness of the president to abandon human rights or political objectives to settle the war. Originally Published in ANDMagazine | by Stephen B. In general, U.S. presidents see the world through the eyes of four giants: Alexander Hamilton, Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson. Warnings Against Investing In China: Doubling Down – Seeking Even More Money From U.S. Investors, Bankrolling The Enemy: Malevolent Chinese Companies Benefit From Both U.S. Don't already have an Oxford Academic account? Just as Nixon and Kissinger sought to divert international attention from their retreat in Indochina by razzle-dazzle global diplomacy that placed Washington at the center of world politics even as it reduced its force posture, so too the Obama administration hopes to use the president’s global popularity to cover a strategic withdrawal from the exposed position in the Middle East that it inherited from the Bush administration. More than this, Jeffersonians such as Obama think oversize commitments abroad undermine American democracy at home. Kissinger did not report this January 9, 1971 concession to President Nixon or anyone else in the American government. Barack Obama might yet revolutionize America's foreign policy. Walk under his huge legs and peep about The odds, I fear, are not in his favor, and it is not yet clear that his intuitions and instincts amount to the kind of grand design that statesmen like John Quincy Adams and Henry Kissinger produced in the past. Search for other works by this author on: © The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR).

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