Foreign policy played a minor role in the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump in September. The vice presidential exchange between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz on October 2 barely touched on it. Yet less than a month before the US elections on November 5, it is foreign policy that may upend the Democrats’ chances of winning.
It used to be a matter of great concern that in the run-up to the November elections, the party in power would spring a “October Surprise” or a foreign policy “crisis” that would swing the elections in its favor. The creator of the October Surprise this time around is not the party in power but an external actor and the event may end up derailing the fortunes of that party.
More and more people in the US worry about the outbreak of a regional war in the Middle East that can suck in Washington. Televised images of US naval deployments have raised fears about another war that most Americans would want to avoid. Israel’s reckless move of opening a new front in Lebanon has been the cause of the increased regional tensions. Indeed, Tel Aviv actually seeks a fight not only with Hezbollah but also with Iran because it wants to draw the US into active combat on its behalf. It’s the Israeli tail wagging the American dog with impunity.
The Biden-Harris administration brought this impending disaster on itself. Over the last year, its policy has been to pretend it is seeking peace in Gaza while shipping massive amounts of weapons enabling Israel to commit genocide. It’s a foreign policy debacle on all fronts, with Washington promising to fight to the last Ukrainian in Ukraine and to fight to the last Filipino in the South China Sea.
Not surprisingly Trump, despite his own not very pretty foreign policy record while he was president, has opportunistically painted himself as a peacenik and Harris as a warmonger. For many voters, his most memorable campaign line on foreign policy was his promise at the Republican National Convention in July that “I could stop wars with a telephone call.” It’s typical Trump bombast, but it may be effective in swinging the still uncommitted.
Parties of empire
As the Democrats’ prospects for victory become more uncertain, many in the Global South are asking themselves: Will it make a difference who wins when it comes to foreign policy? My answer to this is yes. There is no question that both Harris and Trump will aggressively promote US interests. Where they differ is in their conceptions of what the interests of the United States are and what their means of promoting these interests will be. These questions are related in turn to different visions of America’s status and role in the world.
Both the Democratic Party and the pre-Trump Republican Party have favored an expansive imperialism that has extended US corporate hegemony by force of arms. Both have mobilized the ideology of missionary democracy, or spreading the gospel of western democracy in what they consider the benighted non-western world, to legitimize imperial expansion. And at certain historical moments, like during the debate to invade Afghanistan in 2001, both have manipulated democratic hysteria to advance the ends of the empire.
The record speaks for itself. To take just the most recent examples, only one Democratic member of Congress, Barbara Lee, voted against the resolution authorizing the invasion of Afghanistan. Despite the absence of evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear weapons, the majority of Democratic Senators voted to commit US troops to the invasion of Iraq in 2002. And it was a Democratic president, Barack Obama, that led the campaign that, in brazen violation of the principle of national sovereignty, overthrew the Qaddafi government in Libya in 2011, leading eventually to the state of anarchy that has prevailed since then in that country.
Of course, there have been some variations in the ways Democrats and traditional Republicans have conducted their empire-building or empire-maintaining activities. Democrats have tended to be more “multilateral” in their approach. They have, in other words, invested more effort in marshaling the United Nations and NATO behind Washington’s imperial adventures than Republicans. They have also pushed the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to take the lead in economically disciplining countries of the global South. But the aim is simply to provide the US’s moves with more legitimacy than would a unilateral exercise of US power, that is, clothe the iron fist with a velvet glove. These are differences of style that are minor and marginal in terms of their consequences.
Critics from the Global South have rightly pointed out that Obama’s elimination of Quaddafi with the approval of the United Nations Security Council may have had more “legitimacy” than Bush’s overthrowing of Saddam Hussein via his much denigrated Coalition of the Willing, but the results have been the same: the overthrow via an exercise, largely of US power, of a legitimate government and the consequent disintegration of a society.
The great Republican exodus
Over the last few months, however, there has been an interesting phenomenon. More and more people who played key foreign policy roles in previous Republican administrations have declared their support for the Democratic candidate, first Joe Biden, now Kamala Harris. The most notable recent addition to the Democratic bandwagon is former Vice President Dick Cheney, who was one of the key architects of Bush Jr’s interventionist wars in the Middle East, who recently signed up along with daughter Liz.
There are two reasons why former foreign policy hardliners have been leaving the Republican fold. The first is that they can no longer trust Trump, who now has total control of the Republican base. In their view, Trump during his first term weakened the western alliance that Washington created over the last seventy eight years by speaking badly of allies and demanding they pay for US protection, declaring the Republican-sponsored invasion of Iraq a mistake, and crossing red lines that the US Cold War elite put in place, the most famous being his stepping across the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in Korea to talk to Kim Jong Un. More recently, he has repeatedly communicated implicit disapproval of US and NATO support for Ukraine in its war with Russia, while his running mate Vance, wants to eliminate aid to Kyiv altogether.
Trump, these Republican deserters feel, is not interested in sticking to the cornerstone of the bipartisan consensus that the US elite, despite their sometimes rancorous quarrels, have adhered to: expanding and maintaining a “liberal” empire via free trade and the free flow of capital–an order promoted by political canopy of multilateralism, legitimized via an economic ideology of globalization and a political ideology of liberal democracy, and defended by a western military alliance at the center of which is American power. They worry that Trump is playing to the not insignificant part of his base, personified by Vance, that is tired of bearing the costs of empire and see this as one of the key causes of America’s economic decline. They know that what makes “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) attractive to many people is its promise to build a Fortress America that is much, much less engaged with the world and focused on rebuilding the imperial heartland. They are apprehensive that under Trump, the multilateral institutions through which the US has exercised its power, NATO and the Bretton Woods institutions, would be allowed to wither away. They fear that selective, pragmatic deal-making, like the one Trump tried with Kim Jong-Un, Xi Jin Ping, and Vladimir Putin, would, instead, become the norm in US diplomacy and unilateral military action rather than allied initiatives via NATO would be the principal means to coerce and discipline the Global South.
The other reason hardline Republicans are engaging in the once despised practice of crossing party lines is that the Biden administration is now carrying out the kind of aggressive militarized foreign policy once associated with the Bush Jr administration in the Middle East in the 2000’s. Biden has given full-throated support to Israel, which the hard-line Republicans have sanctified as the only reliable ally in the Middle East, followed Bush Jr’s policy of isolating Russia by supporting Ukraine, reinvigorated NATO after Trump’s morale-sapping bad-mouthing of US allies and expanded the alliance’s reach to the Pacific, and mounted the full-blown containment of China that Bush Jr and Cheney wanted to carry out but had to shelve owing to their need to win’s Beijing’s participation in their administration’s “war on terror.”
Biden has, in fact, taken the containment of Beijing beyond Trump’s approach of curtailing trade and technology transfers by carrying out the aggressive military encirclement of China. He has done what no other American president had done since the historic 1979 Joint Communique articulating Washington’s “One China Policy,” which is to explicitly commit Washington to a military defense of Taiwan. He has ordered the US Navy to send ships through the 110-mile-wide Taiwan Strait to bait Beijing and deployed five of the US’s 11 carrier task forces to the Western Pacific. Not surprisingly, his gestures have given the green light to worrisome bellicose rhetoric from the top military brass, like the statement of Gen Mike Minihan, chief of the US Air Mobility Command, that, “My gut tells me we will fight in 2025.”
That the Democratic party elite now has a monopoly of promoting expansive imperialism was in full display during Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech during the Democratic National Convention on August 23, when she accused Trump of abdicating American global leadership, seeking to abandon NATO, and encouraging “Putin to invade our allies” and “do whatever the hell they want.” Republican defectors like Cheney and daughter Liz could only cheer when Harris promised to make sure the US armed forces would be “the most lethal fighting force in the world” and committed herself to making sure “that America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century.”
Two paradigms of empire…
In sum, what we have in contention on Nov 5 are two paradigms of empire. One is the old Democratic/Republican expansionist vision of empire that seeks to make the world safe for American capital and American hegemony. The opposing view, that of Trump and Vance, considers the empire overextended and proposes an “aggressive defensive” posture appropriate to a superpower in decline. The MAGA approach would disengage from what Trump has called “shithole countries”—meaning most of us in the Global South–and focus more on walling off the core of the empire, North America, from the outside world by radically restricting migration and trade, bringing prodigal American capital back, dispensing with what Trump considers the hypocritical exercise of extending foreign aid and exporting democracy, and abandoning with a vengeance all efforts to address the accelerating global climate crisis (preoccupation with which he considers a fetish of effete liberalism).
As far as the exercise of force is concerned, the MAGA approach would most likely be in the Israeli style of periodic unilateral strikes against selected enemies outside the wall to keep them off balance, without consulting any allies or giving a damn for whatever havoc they cause.
Too late
As far as we in the Global South are concerned, these two visions of empire are unappetizing. But one of them will prevail on November 5, and it is increasingly likely that that paradigm is Trump’s.
Throughout the 2024 presidential campaign, the Democratic Party’s weak point was inflation. Now the ravages of mega-hurricane Helene and Israel’s risky provocations in the Middle East have fused with inflation to create the perfect storm for them and an increasingly likely victory of Donald Trump on November 5. Coming into the last phase of the campaign, the Democrats could no longer do anything about inflation, and Helene was an ”act of God.” But they could have leashed Israel, as most of the world demanded. Now it’s too late.
Will Trump be able to stamp out the wars of the Biden era with just one telephone call? That is very unlikely, and even two won’t do it. But what the world will be treated to will likely be what was the signature of his foreign policy during his first term: unpredictability.
This text first appeared on Meer and it is reproduced here with the author’s permission.
Walden Bello is currently the honorary senior research fellow at the Sociology Department of the State University of New York at Binghamton and Chair of the Board of the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South.
Cite as: Bello, Walden 2024. “The October Surprise” Focaalblog 1 November. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/11/01/walden-bello-the-october-surprise/