The Obama-Trump Foreign Policy

It is a conceit of the Trump administration that its foreign policy is entirely different from that of Barack Obama. Even in an otherwise conciliatory State of the Union address, Trump strove to set himself apart from Obama, touting his own policy of “maximum pressure” on North Korea as an example of how he would not “repeat the mistakes of past administrations.” Similarly, Trump has made a point of contrasting his support for the anti-regime demonstrators in Iran with Obama's silence amid the Green Movement protests there in 2009.For their part, Obama-era officials agree. The stakes, according to former national security adviser Susan Rice, could not be greater: “What's been happening is not that the administration is undoing President Obama's legacy; it's undoing American leadership on the international stage.” During the 2016 campaign, Obama warned that if Trump were elected, “all the progress we've made over the past eight years goes out the window.” Thus most of the advice on Iran from former Obama aides has been to stay quiet as Obama did and, above all, to preserve his nuclear deal.