Trump-Gephardt '88: Trump's Foreign Policy is Pre-Clinton Democrat

From July 8, 2019

Pundits have spent the last four years (or longer, in some cases) trying to nail down just where the Trump forign policy fits. Clearly, it is not in the tradition of the GOP post-1952. In many ways, it is consistent with recent Democratic trends, but even then there are significant distinctions. Simply put, there is no place on the modern political spectrum where Trump’s ideas on America’s place in the world fit comfortably.

But if you extend that spectrum back in time, it doesn’t take long for those Overton Windows to retroactively shift, and soon we find the place where Donald Trump belongs. And oddly enough it’s a place where he was. He’s a 1980’s Democrat.

Almost three decades ago, Bill Clinton began the transformation of the Democratic party in the “centrist” style advocated by the then-cutting edge Democratic Leadership Council. As the narrative tells it, the oldest political party in the world was reeling from losing campaigns in five of the previous six presidential elections, and even that one victory was Jimmy Carter’s narrow win in 1976, a year that should have been a post-Watergate romp. Three of those five loses weren’t even competitive. Only a radical course change could revive the party.

(A brief aside on domestic politics — normally a no-go zone for MMD, but this is domestic politics from long ago: The historical narrative above, like most, is accepted because it is the way it actually happened. However, the 1992 election was unique in so many ways. The presence of Ross Perot. George H.W. Bush’s horrible, horrible campaign. Bill Clinton’s generational gift at retail politics. A mild, but critically timed, recession. The absence of any of those things could have turned the election to Bush. Likewise, and relevant to point I am laboring to make, Bill Clinton in primaries was the best of bad choices. He had trouble fending off the probably insane Jerry Brown and his 800-number and drove my undergrad self to place a Paul Tsongas bumper sticker on my car for a period of weeks. Clinton simply could not lose that primary, even if there were a dozen bimbo-eruptions. This bad crop of candidates was the result of George Bush’s astronomically high approval numbers post the Gulf War, and the fact that it scared most major Democrats out of the race. Had Mario Cuomo opted-in, I am certain that there would have been no Democratic move to the center.)

But Clinton did win in 1992. And while it took the GOP wave in 1994 to persuade him to find the “third-way” in domestic affairs, he did not hesitate to reform the Democratic approach to international affairs. And what was swept away was a legacy of protectionism and pacifism that appears to be back in vogue.

Let’s look at the things he actually cares about in the IR world, and compare that to mainstream Democrats during the Reagan/Bush years.

Trade: How did NAFTA pass? Not because of Al Gore debating Perot on Larry King. It passed with Republican votes — more Republican in both house voted in favor of the agreement than Democrats, despite the later having solid majorities in both chambers. Similarly, it was Democrats who consistently opposed the Clinton led efforts to grant China “Most Favored Nation” trade status and ultimately the PRC’s ascension to the World Trade Organization. Speaking of the WTO, it was Clinton who concluded the Uruguay Round of GATT (remember GATT?) and brought the WTO into existence. All of this was done with the help or Republicans, over the objections of the old-guard in his own party.

Growing up in Detroit in the 80’s, perhaps I am somewhat parochial in my upbringing, but a constant theme of the Reagan years was the Japanese trade deficit and a call for quotas on Japanese imports to the US. Organized labor, in its death throws, compelled Democrats to push this line. Trump? Traditional organized labor in the industrial sector is gone, at least as political force. But the men and women who it claimed to represent are Trumpists. They’re the 80’000 voters in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that gave him his victory. Replace “Japan” with “China” and you have Trump’s industrial policy.

Security: The anti-Trump left (AKA, “the left”) seems to believe that Trump is bellicose warmonger. I do not know whether this belief is sincere, or just a reflexive Democratic attack on anyone with an “-R” after their name, but in either case it is clearly wrong. Trump, like Obama before him, strongly criticized foreign military engagement during the campaign, running far to the left of Hilary Clinton. Again, like Obama, he promised to bring troops home and keep them here, and he has done so with much greater success than his predecessor. He has balked at confrontations with or involvement in North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Yemen, et al. In fact, all he has really done is drop a really big bomb on ISIS and confronted Iran on most matters short of confrontation. Conspicuously short of confrontation.

In this conflict-adverse regard, he would be more at home in the Democratic debates than (one would think) the GOP. Add to this his long and consistent criticism of the Iraq War - to the point of taking the Michael Moore-ian position that George W. Bush lied in order to gain support for the war, and even the original Gulf War and you have an approach to military action that reminds one of Code Pink more than Dick Cheney. But Trump likes tanks in his parades and doesn’t like illegal immigrants and seems like a bully, so he’s a warmonger. In fact, this is hardly the case and Trump would have been voting with the Ted Kennedy’s, Paul Wellstone’s and Alan Cranston’s (and Joe Biden’s) had he been given the chance.

———

So if you seek to know where Trump will fall on major issues of war and peace or trade and industry, just look to the Democrats 1988 party platform. It might have some interesting clues.

(And I didn’t even touch the Democrats unwillingness to directly confront the Soviets and their calls for reducing tensions and how that compares to Trump’s approach to Putin.)