As Barack Obama’s Midwest ‘firewall’ was delivering him the presidency, the ABC’s Mark Simkin asked Jeffrey Bleich, the US ambassador to Australia, whether the electoral outcome would affect US-Australia relations.
Amid the predictable diplomatic niceties was a clear message: The relationship is above politics.
Although a longstanding US ally should expect that kind of consistency, the election was never going to produce much movement on foreign policy.
Mitt Romney was actually running on the same foreign policy ticket as Obama.
From the limited containment of China to maintaining global US military primacy and cautious pragmatism on the uprising in Syria, Obama and Romney were reading from the same script.
In a series of uninspiring campaign debates, their foreign policy debate was the blandest.
Obama and Romney were in furious agreement on the most pressing foreign policy challenges faced by the United States. As the New York Times concluded, the debate showed the ‘differences between the two men on foreign policy rest more on tone, style and their sense of leadership than on particular policies.’
This should hardly come as a surprise.
The US foreign policy establishment is united in its commitment to a US-led rules-based liberal international order.
There might be differences of tone and style – Obama’s conciliatory Cairo speech versus Romney’s tough-talking commitment to cracking down on China, but both candidates held to the course set by Washington D.C.’s foreign policy elite.
Robert Kagan, a former State Department officer and one of the most forceful advocates of continued US global leadership in the twenty-first century, was both lauded by Obama and an adviser to Romney.
As bad as it might be for the quality of presidential debates, the predictable vacuum of ‘big picture’ foreign policy disagreements in the United States is good for the world.
It means that for all the bitter wrangling over domestic US politics, we can still expect a superpower committed to upholding the globe’s liberal economic order and spurring the spread of democracy.
Romney might have lost the race to the White House, but much of his foreign policy platform will live on in the Obama presidency.
Benjamin Herscovitch is a Policy Analyst at The Centre for Independent Studies.