Confirmation of a shift in strategic culture
The 2012
campaign was marked by two candidates each advancing widely different worldviews.
Mitt Romney focused almost exclusively on a foreign policy based on the
preservation of traditional American leadership and power in the world – an
emphasis on military might, interstate and bilateral relations, a world divided
into friends (Israel, Eastern and Central Europe among others) and enemies
(Russia, China), and even a proposition to create a Ronald Reagan Economic Zone
to attract and codify cooperation between developed and emerging
democracies. Conversely, Obama placed
more emphasis on his record on foreign policy as president (for which Americans
rate him very favorably) and on the need to exercise military action as a last
resort; the importance of multilateral institutions, partnerships and
coalitions in foreign action; and on the need for renewed American
competitiveness – but also greater cooperation – vis-à-vis emerging powers.
Obama’s main messages tended to focus more heavily on frontier foreign policy
issues, transversal problems that require common approaches and multilayered responses
– the so-called global commons issues like nuclear proliferation and climate
change (which his National Security Strategy classified a threat equivalent to
a foreign invasion on US soil).
A Non Western-bound Vision of the World
Ultimately, the
competing visions put forth by Obama and Romney correspond almost uniformly to
demographic shifts already underway in American society – the emergence of two
opposing generational poles, the Baby Boomers (born after WWII) and the
Millennials (born 1981-2000). The main distinctions between the groups are: 1)
for the Boomers, a general fear of the future (immigration, the loss of
American prestige and an eventual decline, and the need to assert America’s
force in the face of changing geopolitics); and 2) for the Millennials,
America’s most ethnically diverse generation ever and the first to exceed 100
million people, an unprecedented level of social tolerance exemplified in an
embrace of immigration, social mobility programs, diplomacy and smart power,
and the conviction that the US president should focus more on Asia-Pacific,
breaking ground on climate change, and building partnerships – and less on
Middle East peace, for example.
Demographic Shifts to a New Foreign policy
Their choice of
Obama dismantled the central Republican argument against the president for the
past four years – that Obama’s presidency was a fluke of history that would be
rejected a second time as a failed experiment. Although nearly half of the
country did not vote for Obama, an overwhelming number of young Americans did.
Their participation announced at least two major changes: first, that young and
active Americans reject Republican nostalgia, concur largely with the policy
priorities laid out by Obama, and are eager to express this at the polls; and
second, that while all Americans do not welcome the emergence of a new
multicultural America, it has already proven both inevitable and very much
present in the landscape – years earlier than anticipated. Over the span of two
presidential elections, Millennials have mobilized to confirm their notion of
which direction America should pursue – to move the country away from the Cold
War paradigms that marked the Baby Boomer generation and to embrace a new
conception of the primary challenges and priorities facing the United States, as well as wielding a new set of tools to confront them.
