As for intervention, for the bulk of his presidency, Libya was the exception to Obama’s general aversion to the type of engagement that marked the Clinton and George W. Bush years. Obama was reluctant to intervene to save the population of Benghazi, promoted British and French leadership of the operation, and watched as Libya’s descent into chaos after the war confirmed his inclination to avoid military interventions. The emerging fight against the Islamic State has changed the narrative of his foreign-policy strategy, as he returned to war in Iraq for what is likely to be the remainder of his presidency. However, Obama remains wary of intervention, and his administration has done little to demonstrate the importance of actively promoting democracy and human rights as a centerpiece of American strategy apart from occasional rhetoric in speeches and strategy documents. Most notable has been his firm stand against intervening militarily in Syria (beyond bombing the Islamic State, which has served to reinforce the regime of Bashar al-Assad). Ignoring calls from the human-rights wing of the Democratic Party, the president has shown no inclination to get involved, despite a mounting death toll estimated at roughly two hundred thousand Syrian lives lost, along with millions more displaced.

Obama’s caution is rooted in part from the lessons he draws from the recent past: deep American military involvement in places like Iraq and Afghanistan did not produce countries with clean and effective governments or vibrant civil society. While he may not view the military as the problem, as many Democrats did in the 1970s, he does not view the military as the solution either, as the Clinton team did in the late 1990s. To be sure, he is not a dove, having ordered extensive drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, among other places, and having exhibited tremendous resolve in authorizing the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. While he has refused to date to send lethal military aid to Ukraine, he inflicted deep sanctions on the Russian government in the aftermath of the annexation of Crimea and Moscow’s support for the separatists in eastern Ukraine. Overall, he has remained fairly true to the realism he promoted in his first run for office. Policies ranging from his limited engagement in Libya after the overthrow of Muammar el-Qaddafi, the start of normalization with Cuba and the high-level effort to achieve a nuclear deal with Iran illustrate his overriding emphasis on pragmatism in foreign policy.

A key strategic objective for the Obama administration has been the rebalance to Asia: the notion that U.S. foreign policy was overbalanced toward Europe and the Middle East and should be refocused on the most dynamic region of the world. It is an idea that also animated the Clinton team when it came into office in 1993 and the George W. Bush administration when it took over in 2001, but the policy has been difficult to implement for all three administrations due to unexpected crises like the 1990s Balkan wars, the terrorist attacks of September 11, Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine and the emergence of the Islamic State. But the rebalance certainly represents the kind of big-picture realist emphasis on American interests and global power shifts that marks the Obama presidency and the president’s efforts to reestablish a George H. W. Bush–style foreign policy.

 

HEADING INTO the next presidential election, neither party appears to possess a clear advantage on foreign policy. With Obama having returned to Iraq, the tarring of the Republican brand stemming from the George W. Bush years is dissipating, but the great GOP foreign-policy victories of the end of the Cold War are now in the distant past, as well. Despite having no major foreign-policy failures (unusual for any president but perhaps reflecting his cautious style), Obama’s approval ratings on foreign policy have remained remarkably low. Even if he achieves major victories in his final two years—in particular the trade deals and a nuclear accord with Iran—he is unlikely to see much bump in public opinion on foreign policy given how controversial those agreements will be politically.

From the Democratic side, the real question is whether Hillary Clinton would promote a foreign policy more like her husband’s or that of the incumbent whom she served as secretary of state. The conventional wisdom is that she would be a more activist, interventionist president than Obama, and that is likely to be true. But while she would chart a different course than Obama, she would diverge in important ways from Bill Clinton, too.

While Hillary Clinton’s own forceful approach to world affairs would likely lead her to be a very different president than Obama, her orientation is reinforced by the fact that she is a Democrat. Obama’s realism made sense given the public sentiment toward the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by 2008. But the Democratic Party is the country’s progressive party, and realism is an inherently conservative philosophy. Focusing on the great powers and ignoring calls to promote democracy and protect human rights is perfectly reasonable for a Republican in the mold of Richard Nixon or George H. W. Bush. It is much more difficult to pull off as a Democrat. Even those Democrats with more realist tendencies, such as Franklin Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy, could not ignore the pull of progressivism in foreign policy.

After all, the Democrat who was president when the United States emerged as a great power was Woodrow Wilson, and despite his ultimate failure as a foreign-policy president, the themes he enunciated—support for democracy and protection of the rights of small nations in the face of aggressive major powers—have had an important pride of place in Democratic politics. Roosevelt may have acquiesced in Joseph Stalin’s territorial grab in Eastern Europe, but his cherished project was a United Nations that he hoped would serve to defend the weak from invasion by the strong. Truman’s administration saw the development and initial implementation of the Cold War containment policy but also the stirring rhetoric on behalf of the threatened populations of Greece and Turkey. And while Kennedy’s most famous foreign-policy moment came with the successful removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba, he also promoted the Alliance for Progress in this hemisphere and initiated the Peace Corps.

Are the Democratic Party and the American public ready once again to support an activist, interventionist foreign policy in the tradition of Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy, or is that tradition destined to fade away after the memories of the Second World War and the Cold War? After eight years as president, in his final foreign-policy address, titled “A Foreign Policy for the Global Age,” even Bill Clinton ruefully remarked, “People say I’m a pretty good talker, but I still don’t think I’ve persuaded the American people by big majorities that you really ought to care a lot about foreign policy, about our relationship to the rest of the world, about what we’re doing.”

Today, foreign-policy activism remains a tough sell to a country whose priorities lie in the domestic sphere. On issues related to the importance of democracy, the use of American power to protect the weak and support for women’s rights globally, Hillary Clinton is likely to try to make the case for greater engagement abroad. After eight years in her husband’s White House, eight years in the Senate and four years as secretary of state, it would be difficult to envision her not taking that road. She may not do so to any great extent in the election campaign, in which she might believe playing it safe is the right strategy, but if she were to win the presidency, she would appear by all accounts to place herself in the Truman/Kennedy tradition rather than that of George H. W. Bush. (The more likely candidate to pursue the latter approach, of course, is Jeb Bush.)

Even so, American foreign policy is unlikely to return to where it was in the Bill Clinton years. Gone is the optimism about America’s ability to remake other societies that existed in the aftermath of the collapse of Communism. That narrative, after all, was quite uplifting: after four decades containing the Soviet threat, the capitalist democracies led by the United States emerged victorious and set about to remake others. Western advisers poured across Central and Eastern Europe, Russia and Eurasia offering advice on how to successfully build a market democracy. Most of Europe hoped to join the West, including Russian president Boris Yeltsin.

The newly established narrative cautions that the United States cannot easily remake other societies. Whether in Russia, Iraq or Afghanistan, Americans understand now that their power to change others is much more limited than was believed fifteen years ago. Even if Hillary Clinton wished to return to an approach that used limited military force to alter the behavior of odious regimes, she likely would not obtain the public backing to undertake the kind of nation building in which the United States engaged two decades ago.

And then there is globalization. While Americans no longer require evidence that globalization is real, as Bill Clinton devoted considerable time to explaining in the 1990s, the old debate about free trade versus protectionism has grown rather stale. In 1992, the debate centered on the threat of manufacturing jobs leaving the United States for China and other low-wage economies. Going forward, the ability of the United States to maintain its technological dominance will be critical. If Hillary Clinton is lucky, both the TTIP and the TPP will be signed by Obama while he is still president, in which case she would be able to advocate for the need to protect workers and the environment while the country enjoys the benefits that those trade pacts are expected to provide. Given the potential primary challenge she may face from the left, she is unlikely to challenge Big Labor as Bill Clinton did in 1992. That said, a challenge from the left would help Clinton to more acutely define herself as a centrist Democrat, which is where she needs to be in order to win the general election.