Witches’ brew of the presidential pretenders

“Double, double toil and trouble” — Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — the three witches from Macbeth, cavorting in the fetid swamplands of American political celebrity, prophesying a good deal of misery, if not outright disaster, for us all.

“Fair is foul and foul is fair: Hover through the fog and filthy air.”

Such is the message from the American political establishment to its people and the world.

We are coming to the end of an unsuccessful presidency which leaves America enfeebled in the world and with a slow burning crisis of debt, sluggish growth and out-of-control entitlement spending sure to give it misery ahead.

And the only solution this election offers is the choice of the most comprehensively, and justifiably, unpopular presidential candidates of modern history, Hillary and Donald — eye of newt and toe of frog.

America has been here before of course. After the cataclysmic disaster of the Civil War, and the heroic presidency of Abraham Lincoln, the United States was led by a succession of turgid mediocrities in the White House (though I have a sneaking regard for Ulysses S Grant as president) until the arrival of Teddy Roosevelt in 1901.

But much as Obama, Trump and Clinton are all representative specimens of the new culture of political celebrity and money and completely plastic policies, they do represent distinctly divergent American traditions in foreign policy. Leaving aside political culture, it is possible to interpret some of the wellsprings of their foreign policy preferences.

Trump, who will not win the election, is often compared to the America First Movement of the 1930s and 40s. These were the chief opponents of the US getting involved in World War 11. They presented themselves not only as American idealists but also as hard headed realists. The idea that the US should avoid the entanglements of a corrupt and decadent Europe, with all its ancient hatreds, is very old in the US.

Immigrants came there to escape religious and economic subjugation in Europe and they found the Promised Land. The America First crowd, however, were isolationist populists who suffered the ultimate mugging by reality when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. It seemed that splendid isolation didn’t provide security after all. The Americans might not have been interested in the war, but the war was interested in the Americans.

A better historical comparison for Trump might be the mid-west Know Nothing Party of the 1840s. These were mainly middle-class shopkeepers and working-class labourers who feared Catholics and immigrants, and were scared for their jobs. Their official name was the America Party.

In policy terms, Trump, although generally incoherent, perhaps most closely resembles Herbert Hoover, the last time — indeed the only time — the US turned to a successful businessman to rescue their economy. Like Trump, Hoover believed in protectionism.

It’s common sense, isn’t it? If your imports exceed your exports and other nations, you feel, are taking advantage of you, impose big tariffs.

The Hoover presidency, from 1929 to 1933, saw the infamous Smoot Hawley tariffs. They succeeded admirably in reducing American imports and producing a trade surplus for the US. They also massively reduced American exports so that everybody was much poorer in America and in its trading partners, and they played a significant role in exacerbating the Great Depression, which crisis saw Hoover ignominiously finish one disastrous term in office.

It is not really fair to Hoover, however, to compare him with Trump. Hoover knew vastly more about what he was talking about than Trump does. But Trump’s defenders take the same Hoover line — Trump is a successful businessman, he’s not isolationist versus interventionist but smart money versus dumb money.

But in so far as you can associate Trump’s policies with the real world, they are likely to have similar consequences to Hoover’s.

Obama is the most innovative foreign policy practitioner and thinker of the three. Obama pioneered the first ever postmodern American foreign policy and while it may have failed utterly in the real world, it had a semiotic success, in the only two places that count for a postmodern politician — in the academy and on the liberal talk shows and conferences circuit, where, as a kind of upmarket, younger and suaver Bill Clinton, Obama is destined to make a great deal of money.

To understand Obama’s foreign policy you have to get two key ideas. First, he knew almost nothing about foreign policy when he took over the presidency. Second, as a result, his first four years were radically different from, if not entirely antithetical to, his second four years.

Obama knew so little of, and was so timid about, foreign policy and national security when he was first elected that he actually kept George W Bush’s defence secretary, Robert Gates. As Gates makes clear in his splendid memoirs, he essentially kept pursuing most of Bush’s policies in national security. And Obama appointed as secretary of state the most establishment and hawkish Democrat he could find, Hillary Clinton.

Through a process more or less of dumb momentum, therefore, Obama’s first four years represented broad continuity in foreign policy. He started to venture down the postmodern road, criticising America as often as he rhetorically defended it, making diplomatic love the most to the people and leaders who hated America the most, from the Iranians to the Russians, and shunning its allies. But Gates and Clinton kept things on an even keel.

As Obama grew more confident he dispensed with the dinosaurs of the past, appointing anonymous non-entities to defence and an empty suit with a bouffant hairdo at state. All decision making was centralised in the White House. Obama showed his disdain for allies, not least in the way he treacherously without notice attacked Tony Abbott, his most helpful ally in the world, over climate change at the G20 in Brisbane.

Obama virtually gave up on his own Asia pivot, and especially on any serious effort to maintain international law in the South China Sea, so that the Chinese would not deny him another media orgasm and moment of postmodern bliss at the Paris climate conference.

Of course, if this conference were really about saving the world, and were really in every nation’s interests, Obama would not have needed to bribe the Chinese with creeping appeasement in Southeast Asia in order to get their agreement to participate in a euphoric press conference and multi-media moment.

But Obama made his strategic priorities clear, for him the orgasmic multi media moment wins every time.

So which Hillary Clinton will we get after her inauguration in January?

In many respects Hillary is the most traditional of all these pretenders. She is the ultimate insider wheeler dealer. The amplitude of revelations in the Wikileaks emails of her campaign chairman, John Podesta, will keep us all busy for a long time. But what they suggest more than anything is an almost Warren Harding style determination to use public office for private profit for the Clinton family.

The Clintons do this in a completely contemporary fashion. I am not suggesting Clinton is legally corrupt in the way Harding was, but the use of office for the overriding pursuit of money, fame, celebrity and power only loosely defined, is reminiscent of the Jazz Age.

Commentators look at Wikileaks and are encouraged by Clinton’s pragmatism. She is an identity politics avatar to progressive audiences — the legal system is “riddled with systemic racism”, the whole of society suffers “implicit bias” on race issues, and to these audiences she is also the scourge of Wall Street, the avenger of the little people, but the Wikileaks emails show us that when she talks to Wall Street — admittedly at a price of a few hundred thousand bucks a time — she understands their pain. Wall St is misunderstood, she coos, if only more of them went into politics, and naturally she would like them to design any financial system reform she might undertake.

There are worse things to be than a wheeler dealer in politics of course. An ideologue committed to a mad ideology is one. But this extreme plasticity in the Clinton policy persona means that her four years as secretary of state, in which she was mainstream and sensible, do not guarantee a similar approach as president.

For the day after the election Hillary will focus on her next overriding objective, getting re-elected in four years time.

And that could take her, and us, anywhere at all.