American foreign policy: Trump or Hillary?

Trump's foreign policy is isolationist, which seems to match the mood of the American public right now. Hillary seems to promise a continuation of the status quo (more involvement in Middle East wars especially). On this one issue (ignoring the hair, ego and bigotry of 'The Donald') who do you agree with?

ETA: In other words, if it was a different candidate, and not Trump, proposing his foreign policy, would you find it preferable to Clinton's interventionist foreign policy?

BTW, Trump is wrong when he says that South Korea doesn't pay for the American forces stationed there. In fact, South Korea pays 40% of the cost (over $800 million/year).

We do not need 900+--maybe over 1000 military bases in other countries. That kind of status quo politics is not for me. Instead of fixing problems in our own country we're trying to solve but more often than not creating problems overseas. Is that isolationism? Anyway I'm not voting for either one of them.

With his unpredictability, churlishness, and simplistic analyses, Trump would have us in wars or one dust-up after another, I think. I dread to think of his finger anywhere near "the button", or pushing back in the South China Sea.

Isolationism is utterly impossible given the tangles of the last century and more plus the forceful economics tied to US foreign policy. I laughed when I read the OP.

A second thought: obviously this can't be measured, but I think it quite likely that Clinton and Trump foreign policy actions would be virtually identical. (though margd is obviously right to fear the potential for bizarre from a Trumpist presidency.)

#6--OTOH I think it's a lot more likely that congress would step in and maybe actually do its job and stop Trump than they would Clinton.

There's not much congress could do to interfere in foreign policy. The president controls the armed services, the CIA, and the state dept. If a President Trump wanted to send the navy seals into North Korea to destroy their nuclear facilities the only thing Congress could do is to withhold money for the operation but it would be after the fact and Trump would likely be able to just move the money from some other military program.

Trump would have to be pretty energetic to get the secret forces as involved as Obama has had them.

#8---kind of what I'm getting at is--it is supposed to be congress's call on declaring war. Usually they're too chickenshit to defy whoever is POTUS. Any kind of major endeavor that calls for masses of troops on the ground costs a lot of $'s. They can cut a lot of the funding out if they choose and I'm thinking that if Trump is POTUS practically everything that he gets done is going to get done almost altogether with whatever republican support he can muster. He's pretty much a demonized figure in both the republican wing of the democratic party and the democratic wing of the democratic party. All it's going to probably take is a couple dozen republican congresspeople in the House willing to throw a spanner in the works to kill whatever fucked up idea he's got twisting about inside his cranium.

Clinton on the other hand is probably going to get carte blanche to freelance however she feels like--like Obama, Bush2, her husband Bill, Bush 1, Reagan etc. etc.

Bush Jr., followed by Obama, have created a stronger presidency-- what some call an 'imperial presidency'. It scares me that Trump, if he's elected, will inherit that kind of power, where he can start wars and wage foreign policy by executive order, without Congress saying anything. He's the last person you want to give such power to. If anyone needed checks on his power, it would be 'President Trump' (God help us)

By the way, I haven't heard much about Bernie's foreign policy. I know he's a long shot, but if he was elected, what kind of foreign policy do you think he'd implement?

>11 madpoet: Bush Jr., followed by Obama, have created a stronger presidency ... where he can start wars and wage foreign policy by executive order,

Bush and Obama have created a stronger presidency, but that's nothing new; look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_war_by_the_United_States . Congress didn't authorize anything about the Vietnam War until 1964. The article claims "On at least 125 occasions, the President has acted without prior express military authorization from Congress.20 These include instances in which the United States fought in the Philippine–American War from 1898–1903, in Nicaragua in 1927, as well as the NATO bombing campaign of Yugoslavia in 1999."

Exactly, Schlesinger believed the Imperial Presidency began with FDR.

And I started hearing the phrase 'Imperial Presidency' bruited about regarding Reagan in his term.

Robert

The imperial presidency began with George Washington.

When it comes to either candidate's foreign policy, it really is a matter of picking your poison. The question then is: Assuming both would be able to implement his or her foreign policy in full if elected, which one would cause the least damage? The answer is Clinton.

American foreign policy isn't in need of a paradigm shift, but it could use a healthy dose of retrenchment. Although Trump is the one offering retrenchment, it's the kind of retrenchment that would have a decidedly adverse affect on the US and global stability. His economic policy in particular would be quite damaging to the US economy, and likely to set off another worldwide financial crisis. Not to mention that the treatment that he seems to favor doling out to treaty allies would only encourage more adventurism from Russia and China and would push some states, like Germany and India, into too much of an accommodationist stance toward other states seemingly bent on undermining the liberal international regime. Some accommodation of rising states is necessary, but only within the confines of the liberal international order.

One thing to look forward to with either candidate is that neither one will have a particularly strong hand. Either one is going to be the weakest president the US has had since at least Gerald Ford because neither is going to have anything close to unanimous backing from his or her party, with each facing a real possibility of a not insignificant faction looking to replace him or her in 2020. So both are going to have to cling as close to the party center on policy as he or she can until such time as he or she consolidates his or her hold over the party, which, barring some highly unexpected economic boom or a major external crisis that claims or threatens to claim many American lives, is unlikely to happen.

>17 Bretzky1: There has been only one single-term president in the U.S. in the last 35 years, so I think whoever gets elected will have that advantage: that Americans have come to expect a president to serve 2 terms. Bush Jr. got re-elected, would it surprise you if Hillary did too? All the candidates are quite old, though, so it's possible they might not live out both terms.

#18--that might be so but--both the republican nominee and the very likely democrat nominee are both very shaky within their own parties--both disliked by independents and completely hated by the other side. They are both polarizing figures and the likelihood is that whoever does win in November that person is going to be even more disliked four years from now. Their unfavorable ratings from the get go are through the roof. What are they going to turn that around?--and especially if the other party gets someone a lot more popular in the public's eye four years from now. So I'm not sure I'd put a lot of faith in past presidential election history when it comes to either Donald or Hillary.

I think the likelihood is much higher than normal that whoever wins in November will not be re-elected in 2020. While all candidates have to deal with a certain amount of his or her party's base who won't support him or her, that number tends to be in the single-digit percent. Both Trump and Clinton have a much larger percentage of their party's respective bases who are irreconcilables to them. The number is higher for Trump, but it's not insignificant for Clinton. My best educated guess is that the number is in the low-20s for Trump and around 15 for Clinton.

Such numbers not only encourage an intraparty fight for the nomination in 2020, but would also spark improved competition from the other side. Part of what drives the re-election strength of presidents is that the strongest potential candidates on the opposing side tend to wait until the field is clear before jumping in; i.e., they wait for the opportunity to run against a non-incumbent. After all, Walter Mondale, Bob Dole, John Kerry, and Mitt Romney don't exactly have scintillating personalities (though both Mondale and Dole did demonstrate a certain amount of charisma after their political careers were over, but it was of the self-deprecating kind, which Americans like from their failed presidential aspirants, but not from their presidents).

The advantage in 2020 will still lie with whoever gets elected in 2016, but assuming no miracle economic boom takes place and we aren't facing some major military crisis going into 2020 and the other party doesn't nominate a dog or a robot, it will be the weakest advantage in a long time. And it wouldn't surprise me at all if Trump or Clinton heads into the '20 election in the same shape as Carter in 1980: the underdog.

If elected, I predict Trump to lobby for the destigmatization of golf courses in China as a human rights issue.