Goldberg Jeffrey: Obama: Vanjskopolitička doktorina

Jeffrey Goldberg: Obama: Foreign Policy Doctorate

The US president talks about his most difficult decisions about America's role in the world.

Jeffrey Goldberg's text was published in April 2016. Already some half a year later, the entire series of conclusions and analyzes seems outdated.

With the election of Donald Trump as the President of the United States, there was probably the most dramatic turn in American foreign policy in the history of the world's only superpower - more dramatic than the turn in 2008 that occurred with Obama's election after eight years of George W. Bush.

All that President Obama cited as the most important international achievements of his two terms have already failed. or it is about to collapse (the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, the Paris Agreement on climate change, the agreement with Iran on nuclear weapons, the opening of relations with Cuba, the policy towards the Middle East, the fall of Aleppo, etc.).

However, a number of aspects of Goldberg's story are more fascinating than the fact that the foreign policy legacy of Obama's presidency will disappear even before the first day of Donald Trump's term. From our Croatian and European perspective, it would be worth highlighting two things. First, Europe is obviously of third-rate importance in Obama's understanding of global politics. Another aspect of Obama's foreign policy doctrine that is worth highlighting from our perspective is his consistent focus on American national interests. His fascination with the administration of George H. W. Bush and especially with Bush's national security adviser Brent Scowcroft is extremely interesting.

While Obama's foreign policy doctrine can be called a mixture of realism and internationalism, Trump's vision of America's role in the world is political realism on steroids - political realism with extremely narrow and short-term defined American national interests. In such a constellation of forces, squeezed between two possible new partners in Washington and Moscow who share similar views on the world, Europe - and with it Croatia - is facing an essential turning point. Either we will find strength and solve our own internal weaknesses and problems - or we will become on the world stage a group of completely insignificant, atomized societies, trapped in the atavisms of the first half of the twentieth century.