I recently read a piece in The New York Times on the Syrian resettlement in the United States. The piece followed a family from their time as refugees in Jordan to resettlement in Illinois.
They note that most of the family had to leave their adult son and his wife and their two sons. Despite passing the Enhanced Syrian Review, these four were held in Amman due to a background check delay. They waited almost a year, but after the Paris attack, presidential candidates compared refugees to “rabid dogs” (Ben Carson) and proposed a ban on Muslims (Donald Trump).
Hearing of the proposed shutdown on vetted refugees, they decided that the only option was to smuggle their boys over the Mediterranean. “After all the news,” they wrote to their family, “we have no hope to travel to America.”
This was the effect of U.S. candidates’ mere rhetoric across the world. How much more powerful — and difficult to quantify — is U.S. foreign policy on the course of human lives outside the U.S.?
American voters need not all vote for a candidate based on their foreign policy. But once the election is over, we all at least owe the world a moment’s pause to honestly consider the way that the decisions of our leaders can shape the lives of the most vulnerable in dozens of other nations.
Just because some Americans remain unconvinced that policy makes a difference in our lives doesn’t mean that there aren’t millions who experience, every day, the tangible effects of U.S. foreign policy on their ability to live in peace. From East Aleppo to the Philippines, it matters.
And we must reckon with what our nation voted for. A vote for Trump was not a renunciation of global involvement or a mandate for limited hegemony. Rather, his credo is the continued use of influence worldwide — but under a new set of values. His values are opaque, but seem to include transactionalism, alignment with Russia and, potentially, resentment for the post-1945 peace-building institutions.
As the world watches the Syria-Russia coalition bomb the civilians of East Aleppo relentlessly this week, we must hope that lawmakers and heads of state are finding ways to ensure that neither Putin nor Assad is truly emboldened by Trump’s win. We may hope that Trump chooses not to fit Assad’s chilling assessment of him: as a “natural ally.”
Trump’s administration may present a host of problems to peacebuilding in the world, on which I barely want to speculate. Beyond war, the most pressing threat may be to impartial aid. Humanitarian aid on principle does not discriminate among civilian groups, and the global obligation for aid is often led by the U.S.; however, this principle may be in danger.
