Global context makes 2024 US race different to 1968

Andrew Hammond

The recent Democratic presidential convention in Chicago drew sweeping pre-event comparisons with the same event in 1968 held in the same city during the Vietnam conflict. However, while there are some similarities, the foreign policy context between then and this 2024 campaign is significantly different.

The 1968 election, which pitted Republican Richard Nixon and Democrat Hubert Humphrey, came during a distinctive, approximately quarter of a century political era from 1948 to 1972 during the early Cold War era. During this time, foreign policy was usually the single most salient issue in US elections, as it was in 1968 with the Vietnam war.

1968 saw an unusually turbulent period framed by that Vietnam conflict with then-President Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to run for re-election (paralleled this year by President Joe Biden’s decision not to seek a second term), the assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4 and the killing of Robert Kennedy on June 5. This was capped off in August 1968 with the riots at the Democratic convention in Chicago, of which there was an important echo with high profile pro-Palestinian protests against Israel’s military operation in Gaza in recent days.

Since the 1970s, however, economic issues have tended to be the U.S. electorate’s highest priority. Most recently, in the 2020 presidential race for instance, during the first year of the pandemic, the U.S. economy was spun into recession after more than a decade of growth, one of the longest expansions in U.S. history.

This is not to dismiss the importance of U.S. foreign policy in the 2024 U.S. campaign, even though the United States is not formally engaged in any war today, unlike 1968. Take the example of the Associated Press- University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center (AP-NORC) survey earlier this year which saw 40 percent of voters cite foreign policy as a key issue. That’s about twice as many who mentioned international topics in the AP-NORC poll conducted around a year before in 2023.

The big troubles in the Middle East since last October’s Hamas attacks in Israel, and the subsequent offensive in Gaza, have spiked U.S. voter concerns about geopolitics. This alongside concerns about the Ukraine war, plus the possibility of wider challenges, including China’s posture toward Taiwan.

While foreign policy is still not as salient for voters in 2024, as it was generally during the early years of the Cold War from 1948 to 1972, there are a significant number of reasons why international affairs will remain prominent in coming months before election day. For one, there remain very high escalation risks in the Middle East with the region at its most febrile point in years.

In Ukraine, meanwhile, Kyiv has launched in August a spectacular new offensive inside Russia, gaining more than an estimated 1000 square miles of territory, at the time of writing. After months of Moscow making gains in Ukraine, this has at least temporarily changed the narrative of the war there.

Meanwhile, in Asia Pacific, significant numbers of U.S. voters are concerned about the potential for a crisis there too. This could create a third major source of international conflict for the United States and its Western allies, with resources increasingly stretched.

Yet, even if foreign policy issues were to grow significantly further in salience in 2024, there are nonetheless till a major key difference between now and the first quarter of a century of the Cold War. That is, the earlier period was characterised by a relative policy consensus and widespread bi-partisan cooperation on foreign affairs.

Today, however, this policy domain is significantly more divisive. To be sure, the early Cold War consensus can be overstated. Nonetheless, a significant degree of bipartisan agreement on foreign affairs, and wider political decorum, did exist, at least until it broke apart in the late 1960s under the strain of the Vietnam debacle, and the demise of the notion of monolithic communism in light of the Sino-Soviet split.

No clear foreign policy consensus has emerged in recent years, and if anything the gaps are widening. Even before Trump took up presidential office in 2017, many Republicans and Democrats differed significantly on how they view the power and standing of the United States internationally; on the degree to which the country should be unilateralist, in their attitudes toward the campaign on terrorism and the methods by which they are being fought and on what the priorities of foreign policy should be.

These divisions have grown, further, since Trump’s presidency with 2024 seeing significantly divergent U.S. grand strategies. That is, Trump’s "America First," versus the more internationalist vision of the Biden-Harris administration which is much more similar to the foreign policies of both Republican and Democratic predecessors in the post-war era.

The increasingly polarisation of foreign policy also reduces the scope for the longstanding "rally-around-the-flag" at times of geopolitical tension. This is illustrated by the blaming by some Republicans of current geopolitical tensions on the Biden-Harris administration.

Especially if the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine continue into late 2024, it is therefore increasingly plausible that the salience of international issues could remain high on election day. Moreover, partisan splits on foreign policy will reinforce high rates of U.S. political polarisation, potentially increasing global interest in the race to boot.

Andrew Hammond is an Associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics.