POLITICA EXTERNĂ AMERICANĂ DE LA OBAMA LA TRUMP: RETORICĂ NOUĂ, PARADIGME VECHI

There is a widespread feeling in American society that Washington’s foreign policy strategies in recent decades has not been in people’s interest. It came with cost for many good jobs, cut their real incomes, raised their taxes, cut benefits, and imperiled their lives. Since World War II, American foreign policy has been cosmopolitan in nature at the expense of the common man. It is well-known that every modern American president has a doctrine, each of these encapsulating president’s foreign policy strategy – for better or worse. All of them were studied and analyzed extensively, but none seems to have caused as much controversy and analytical division as that of Donald J. Trump. But upon a closer look, Trump’s foreign strategy is not very different from Barack Obama’s, it’s just that it is dressed up and delivered discursively much more aggressively and in transactional rather than diplomatic language. Nuclear disarmament and the negotiation of new non-proliferation agreements, a lasting peace in the Middle East, ending the wars in which America is directly or indirectly involved, and, above all, managing the emergence of China – are the main foreign strategies addressed by both Barack Obama and Donald Trump. But while Obama was considered too liberal by conservatives, Trump’s foreign strategy is seen as too isolationist by internationalists and too aggressive towards traditional partners by democrats. This article will endeavor to explain the similarities between the doctrines Obama and Trump, starting from the premise that smart power is a balance between defense and diplomacy, and a combination of powerful instruments such as – but not limited to – coercion, inducements, payments, attraction, influence, economic sanctions and agenda-setting, tools used by both, former and current president.