Donald Trump delivered his foreign policy doctrine during a speech Wednesday that had a moderate tone appealing to older millennials who critique the Bush Administration’s hawkishness, but are disappointed with the Obama Administration’s failures to defeat Islamic terrorism.
Older millennials (like me) grew in the shadow of the Iraq War, only carrying vague memories of Bill Clinton’s presidency and almost none of the Cold War.
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In the wake of the September 11 attacks, millennials rallied to support the president and many joined the military to show their patriotism.
Yet the decade long war, horror stories of torture and mistreatment of veterans, tales of corruption and insurgency, and the ever-growing certainty that the nation would never accept Western Democracy loomed in millennials’ minds.
They flocked to Obama over Hillary Clinton, in part, because he was against intervention in Iraq.
Obama also let millennials down with his unorganized, incoherent, and ineffective foreign policy. According to a report by the Harvard Review in October 2014, 62 percent of millennials disapproved of Obama’s actions in Syria. A poll by USA Today found that nearly a majority of Gen Y wanted to fight ISIS, and a plurality considered themselves conservative when it came to foreign policy.
Trump’s foreign policy speech found a happy medium; he promised that the his doctrine would abandon Bush’s nation building.
“We are getting out of the nation-building business, and instead focusing on creating stability in the world,” Trump said. “Our moments of greatest strength came when politics ended at the water’s edge.”
The billionaire also slammed Clinton’s senseless policy of overthrowing Middle Eastern dictators and attempting to install democracies in countries that entirely reject the very notion.
“We went from mistakes in Iraq to Egypt to Libya, to President Obama’s line in the sand in Syria. Each of these actions have helped to throw the region into chaos, and gave ISIS the space it needs to grow and prosper,” he continued. “It all began with the dangerous idea that we could make Western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interest in becoming a Western Democracy.”
Unlike Obama, Trump promised to look strong to the global community and be willing to fight a war if need be, but with every intention of winning.
“And then there’s ISIS. I have a simple message for them,” he continued. “Their days are numbered. I won’t tell them where and I won’t tell them how. We must as, a nation, be more unpredictable. But they’re going to be gone. And soon.”
Trump’s rejection of the neoconservatism that Bush and Clinton espoused, and his strong backbone that Obama lacked, make him an appealing candidate on foreign policy to older millennials. His speech touched on everything they wanted but never had in a candidate before.
