In a rather autumnal new interview in Vanity Fair, Barack Obama reflects on his soon-to-be relinquished presidency. The subject of Syria, he reveals, “haunts me constantly”. “Was there something,” he asks himself, “we hadn’t thought of?” But he consoles himself by saying: “I don’t want ever to be a President who is comfortable and at ease with killing people.”
One must be glad he does not want to be that sort of President, but his formulation does not really deal with the issue. The problem of Syria is about other people killings hundreds of thousands of people, not about how the President of the United States feels personally about ordering deaths. The sad fact is that Mr Obama’s self-preoccupied conscience (“There’s a writer’s sensibility in me”) helped create a vacuum in world power. In Syria, it made it easier for the civil war and the mass killings to take place.
Thanks to his passivity, the Russians have now arrived. Kept at bay in the Middle East since Nixon and Kissinger pushed them out, they are back. They are so contemptuous of the Western-dominated world order that this week they bombed an international aid convoy on the outskirts of Aleppo, killing more than 20 people. They are confident, almost certainly rightly, that they will get away with it. What is over-flatteringly called “the international community”, expressing itself through the United Nations this week, has probably never been weaker since 1945.
So Russia’s behaviour ought to make any foreign affairs part of the first television election debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump on Monday pretty easy. As a former Secretary of State, Mrs Clinton knows how the rules-based international order works. She shares Mr Obama’s enlightened views but is tougher than he is on “bad actors”. Mr Trump, on the other hand, knows nothing about such matters and has no expert entourage. He seems to admire Vladimir Putin as just the sort of stripped-to-the-waist Action Man he can relate to. The world would seem to be safer with Hillary.
There is another dimension, though – a way of thinking about global security which goes beyond conventional considerations of alliances, international organisations and the balance of power. Theresa May expressed some of it in her speech in New York this week. Leaders should not forget, she said, “the people we represent back at home” and the safety they require. The mass movement of people has doubled globally in 10 years. It is not only a social and economic issue, but also a security one. The right of a country to control its borders is – or should be – part of its basic guarantee to its citizens. Mr Trump is on about the same thing, without any of Mrs May’s polite restraint.
A week ago, there was an explosion in New York which injured nearly 30 people. The City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, described it as “an intentional act”, but could not bring himself to commit to it being terrorism or trace the likely Islamist origin of the intention. Ahmad Khan Rahani, an Afghan émigré with an admiration for Osama bin Laden, was arrested and charged. Mr de Blasio declared that “militant violence” was “vanishingly rare”, although roughly 400 people born abroad have been convicted of terror-related offences in the United States since September 11 2001. Jointly with the Mayor of Paris and Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, he wrote a perky piece in the New York Times about how their great cities should not have any restraints imposed on their openness and diversity. In a separate interview, in the Evening Standard, Sadiq Khan told Londoners to accept that terrorist threat was “part and parcel of life in a big city”. It seemed a funny way to put it. Most big city-dwellers would surely see it as part and parcel of death, and as the greatest single current menace to openness, diversity and, indeed, civilisation. Mr Khan might as well have resurrected that notorious Seventies phrase about Northern Ireland – “an acceptable level of violence”.
Donald Trump boasted that he had spotted and announced earlier than any reporter that the New York attack (and other ones over that weekend) was a terrorist one. He taps into public contempt for the sheer unrealism of leaders who refuse to identify what is happening, and he relates it to immigration. It is important, he says, that when America admits new entrants, they should not be people who hate the place.
However improvised or silly some of his remedies for this problem, he is surely right. Countries that admit significant numbers of deadly enemies cannot remain free countries for long. He is right, too, that a political culture which cannot face this fact is weak or sick. Mrs Clinton – though not as bad an offender as President Obama, who has never even used the phrase “Islamist terrorism” – is on the weaker side of this argument.
This is a classic example of the split, which everyone now talks about, between ruling elites and people in general. Every week, often almost every day, in the part of south-east England where we live, the local BBC News shows film from the migrant camps in France. Recently there has been increasing violence, including attacks on lorries entering the Channel Tunnel. However much sympathy one feels for the plight of refugees, it is hard not to be disgusted by such scenes. No one with a good reason for wanting to live in Britain would wish to injure lorry drivers heading there. Yet our official culture of global human rights seems to direct more hostility towards indigenous people who resent such attacks than to the attackers themselves. Such resentment at the authorities, who don’t understand and even disapprove, helped the Brexit vote here. It will surely help the Trump vote in America.
Another effect of the threat of extremism is to change security policy. Nearly 10 years ago, at a meeting of the think tank Policy Exchange, I heard someone say that, in the modern environment, who is the Chief Constable of West Yorkshire might matter as much as who is First Sea Lord. This becomes truer each year. The combination of the mass movement of people, the global reach of the internet and the presence, in Britain, of significant numbers of Muslim extremists makes the police and the Border Force and intelligence services as much in the front line as any expeditionary force of old. Similar problems affect most other Western countries.
Just now, one feels quite glad not to be an American voter. The choice between a possibly ill, somewhat tainted establishment figure of the 20th century on the one hand, and a brash, blowhard egomaniac on the other would be highly unwelcome. But media hostility over here to Mr Trump is blinding us to why he has a chance. Over global and domestic security, as over economics, the people in charge of the West are not impressing voters, so they incline to look elsewhere.
In that Vanity Fair interview, Mr Obama puts down Mr Trump as “a phenomenon of an expression of certain fears”. He is not all wrong, but he does not ask why those fears have arisen, let alone whether some of them might be well founded. So far, I gather, Mrs May’s people have few links with the Trump camp. It might be time to forge some.
