A foreign policy election? Careful what you wish for

If there's one thing George W. Bush and Barack Obama have in common, it's this: Both promised a much different foreign policy as candidates than they delivered as presidents.

Americans don't want to be fooled again. And they don't deserve to be, either. But it still might happen.

There's always a powerful incentive for Beltway experts to define a presidential election in advance. This year, there's an added temptation. To the surprise of many (but not all), President Obama's foreign policy has unraveled enough that it's now an open question as to who should be trusted to mend the fabric. Although Obama has managed to keep Russia and ISIS at bay, he has done very little to clarify the endgame for both those slow-motion crises and the unfolding situations in Iran, China, Venezuela, and elsewhere.

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That's why, as Byron York has observed at the Washington Examiner, pundits, strategists, and reporters have been quick to foretell that Election 2016 is all about the foreign policy:

That's a broad ideological cross-section of influential mainstream opinion. But though every likely Republican candidate, from Jeb Bush to Chris Christie, is taking time to establish their foreign policy bona fides, no GOP candidate has used foreign policy to jump to the front of the pack. Barring some global calamity, it's likely that none will.

We might well face a foreign policy election — but one in which Americans discover there just isn't much of a choice between the two contending parties. Both Hillary Clinton and the leading mainstream GOP hawks share the same basic goal: to gain the confidence of the American people to conduct a more interventionist foreign policy than the American people want. As cynical as this may sound, it actually plays pretty honestly to our own ambivalent interests. We know the world is a mess. We'd rather not deal. But we know we'll have to, and we want experts we can trust to do so in the most judicious possible manner.

The more overlap between the parties, however, the harder it'll be to discern who to trust more. The choice could come down to intangibles, with voters crossing their fingers and hoping they can guess which candidate will do the least damage.

Fortunately, there's an alternative, unlikely as it may be. Perhaps Election '16 will be a full-on campaign in the foreign policy weeds, where the subtle but important differences between Democrats' neoliberal interventionism and Republicans' selective internationalism can be hashed out by candidates forced to be clear about their goals and expectations.

To get there, however, the American people will have to hold both parties to a standard that both Bush and Obama failed to meet over the past 16 years. Important as it is to stay flexible in a dramatically changing world, America has crossed the line from adaptivity to reactivity. The presidency could — and should — go to whomever convinces the electorate that they can be trusted: not just to regain the initiative, but to use it.