The Obama administration feels like ancient history

For good or ill, Donald Trump has shaken up the political system so rapidly and so thoroughly, as promised, that he’s created some kind of time warp, observes editor CHRISTIAN CARYL

We’re coming up on the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s presidency. Is it just me, or does it feel as though a lot of time has gone by? Can it really be just a year?

I’ve been ruminating about this since I watched a new documentary called “The Final Year” and interviewed some of the film’s subjects and its director, Greg Barker. The film follows key members of the Obama administration’s foreign policy team during their last few months in office, focusing on Samantha Power, who was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and Ben Rhodes, one of President Barack Obama’s national security advisers. The film ends, fittingly, with the 2016 election that brought Mr. Trump to office.

The documentary offers a look into the everyday routine of top government officials, so if you’re into that sort of thing, you’ll probably have a great time. Here’s Secretary of State John Kerry paying a visit to Vietnam, where he once fought in the Navy; here’s Ms. Power visiting the families of girls kidnapped by Boko Haram in Nigeria; here’s Mr. Rhodes poring over the text of a speech his boss is about to give at the United Nations. Every scene fits into a familiar template of the classic White House career: earnest folks trying to balance idealism and the complicated realities of power.

2016 wasn’t that long ago. Yet the events shown in the film feel shockingly far away — as if they were taking place not months but many years ago.

There is, I suppose, one simple explanation for this: Mr. Trump generates a lot more news than his predecessors, so his era feels excessively eventful. Earlier presidents held occasional news conferences, chose their words carefully, and prized control and forethought. Mr. Trump is constantly barraging us with tweets, and he wields language like a barely controlled fire hose (or, depending on your perspective, a flamethrower). Where his predecessors prized caution in their statements, Mr. Trump prefers improvisation, venting or (verbally) blowing stuff up.

Mr. Trump’s approach to the presidency correspondingly creates an information environment that is noisy, chaotic and hard to navigate. Some of this appears to be by design: No one, least of all Mr. Trump, can ever hope to keep up. Scarcely have we begun to parse the latest astonishing utterance than it’s on to the next one.

What “The Final Year” helped me to understand, though, was that this feeling of a news cycle accelerating into permanent hyperdrive isn’t just a matter of Trumpian style. It’s also about substance. Mr. Trump promised his voters that he would be a radically different kind of president. That’s one promise on which he has certainly delivered.

The Obama administration approach to government that’s shown in the film is fairly traditional. Mr. Power and Mr. Rhodes see their job as defending U.S. interests by cultivating Washington’s allies, working with international institutions and pushing back against rivals who are seen as encroaching on U.S. interests. We see Mr. Obama using an international summit meeting to announce that the United States is going to ratify the Paris agreement on climate change. We see Mr. Kerry spending long hours negotiating on the Syrian civil war (to little apparent effect).

Mr. Obama’s policies sometimes differed from those of his predecessor, George W. Bush, but

their view of the big picture was ultimately similar. They both believed in America’s traditional alliance systems. They both recognized the usefulness of various multilateral institutions underpinning a global, rulesbased order, and they both engaged in the constant push-and-pull (sometimes cautious, sometimes rude) with competitors such as Russia and China. In fact, the foreign policy philosophy of the United States remained essentially the same throughout the post-Cold War era. George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Mr. Obama all had more in common on foreign affairs than any of them do with Mr. Trump.

The documentary captures the moment when Mr. Rhodes realizes that the rise of Mr. Trump, as part of a broader global challenge to old assumptions about the international order, threatens to undermine long-held assumptions about U.S. foreign policy: “The irony of the Obama years,” Mr. Rhodes says, “is going to be that he was advocating an inclusive global view rooted in common humanity and international order amidst this kind of roiling ocean of growing nationalism and authoritarianism.”

Mr. Rhodes is right. Today the U.S. president questions our alliances and sings the praises of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. He insists on prioritizing relations between “sovereign nations” while sneering at the multilateral organizations that the United States has used in the past to bolster its interests on trade and other issues. His contempt for diplomacy and other non-military tools marks a radical departure from all the presidents who have gone before him.

And this doesn’t apply only to foreign policy, of course.

So it should be little wonder that we feel as though we’ve been going through a time warp. The current administration set out to destroy the old way of doing politics, and that’s exactly what it has been doing.

What we’re feeling now is probably similar to what many Russians felt back in 1917, when the old order was being swept away in a matter of months. Do radical breaks with the past accelerate our sense of passing time? I suspect they do — and especially when those doing the breaking have no clear idea of what they’re trying to build in its place.