Between Obama's silent footprint and Trump's simulation of sovereignty
Is the future of US foreign policy non-interventionist? Against pervasive readings of the Obama foreign policy doctrine as one of ‘retreat’, a new book chapter by Vibeke Schou Tjalve suggests a very different kind of perspective.
Tjalve’s chapter is part of the joint DIIS-AUB monograph New Conflict Dynamics: Between Regional Autonomy and Intervention in the Middle East and North Africa (DIIS, 2017) and argues why Obama, far from abstaining US global influence has tried to radically rethink and redefine it.
Under the title “Rethinking Obama’s ‘Retreat’: The Ironies of US Leadership in an Ungovernable World”, Tjalve’s chapter argues that Obama reads 21st century power as synonymous with partnership, subtlety and hybridity – an approach most poignantly expressed in the US military doctrine of ‘silent footprint’.
As the chapter concludes though, neither silence nor subtlety offers much to a US public nostalgic for more conventional forms of influence, honor and bravado. That nostalgia has now put Donald Trump in the White House, leaving US foreign policy subject to struggle between two almost opposite views of force: the Obamian push for discrete and often indirect ‘new’ power – a push still vibrant in parts of the US security environment – and the Trumpian preference for theatric adoption or right out simulation of ‘old’ power.
Most likely, it is on the turf between these two trends that the near future of US foreign policy – in the Middle East and beyond – will play itself out.
