Category Archives: US Leadership

The Impact of Trump 2.0

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They were obvious moves by Trump, I suspect. Nevertheless, some of the choices by Trump for his senior appointments were startling – and what one might otherwise describe as ‘dismaying’. For many of us not a particular surprise. So we have House of Representative Matt Gaetz nominated as Attorney General. As The Guardian declared:

Donald Trump’s decision to nominate the far-right Republican congressman Matt Gaetz as attorney general has sent shockwaves through Washington, including the president-elect’s own party.

 

Trump on Wednesday announced Gaetz as his pick to be the nation’s chief law enforcement officer in the justice department, a role that directs the government’s legal positions on critical issues, including abortion, civil rights, and first amendment cases.

Michelle Goldberg, writing for the NYT had some choice words for this Trump nomination:

Of all the people Trump was considering for A.G., Gaetz is unique mainly for how much he is hated by other Republicans, and not just moderate ones. In the final months of the last Trump administration, the Justice Department opened an investigation into whether Gaetz had a relationship with an underage girl that violated federal sex trafficking laws.

 

It should go without saying that Gaetz is not, by any normal standards, even a tiny bit qualified to be attorney general. He practiced law for only about two years before running for office, handling small-time civil matters, like suing an old woman for money she owed his father’s caregiving company.

Then, there was the equally startling nomination of Robert F Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic and more that Trump has nominated for the head of Health and Human Services. And then there is Pete Hegseth nominated for Secretary of Defence and Tulsi Gabbard nominated for Director of Intelligence. Each in their own career and experience raising questions over their appointment. And then, finally,  there is the appointment of Elon Musk Trump’s now seemingly close buddy to a Commission to bring efficiency to the US federal government. As Ed Luce at the FT commented:

What you might feel less comfortable in admitting is that Trump is giving utterance to America’s soul. The US is driven by the spirit of limitless resources and surmountable frontiers. Its mission is “To explore strange new worlds . . . to boldly go where no man has gone before”, as James T Kirk put it. On Tuesday Trump promoted Elon Musk, his own Captain Kirk, to Starfleet Admiral. Musk’s USS Enterprise is the department of government efficiency (Doge).

Notwithstanding the name the Musk initiative is unlikely to be a government department as noted by Luce:

It is unclear whether Doge will have any statutory authority, which would require an act of Congress, or simply be a super-advisory body to the Trump administration. Either way, Musk’s goal is to close down regulatory agencies in Washington or drastically pare them back. He recently said he would also cut almost a third from the federal government’s $6.7tn budget.

Government authority or not, Musk will be disruptive, as are likely to be all these recent appointments, and that is the point. Disruption, chaos and controversy  – the Trump modus operandi. As noted again by Luce on the choice of Musk:

But Musk will probably get a lot of his way on deregulation. If you work for the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Justice, the US Federal Reserve, the Bureau of Labor, the Environmental Protection Agency, the US Department of Agriculture or the departments of energy and education, be afraid; be very afraid.

For those poor souls who suggested that Trump wouldn’t follow through on some of his crazier actions, often after plaintively admitting that they had voted for him, these appointments seem to put ‘stop’ to that benign view of Trump governing.

And raising the spectre of serious policy steps likely leading to disruption, chaos and controversy, Trump 2.0 will have a significant impact on US foreign policy efforts. Here, it is worth examining the recent comments by my colleague, Susan Thornton. Susan is currently a Senior Fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center at the Yale Law School. She also participates in many of the China-West Dialogue (CWD) discussions that we have held over the last few years. Susan retired as a senior diplomat after almost three decades of experience with the U.S. State Department in Eurasia and East Asia. She retired, in fact, as Acting Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs at the Department of State.

Susan does not underestimate the prospect for a dramatic impact by Trump on American foreign policy driven, as Susan sees it, by an American public that is no longer willing to bear the burden of a leading US role in the global order. As she wrote recently at the East Asian Forum, the US public, from Susan’s view, is determined to stand down the United States:

Americans are no longer confident in the promise and effectiveness of their institutional system, they reject the obligation of answering the world’s fire alarms, they are weary of bearing the cost of global security and they see clearly that other states are free-riding on US largesse. The US electorate has been consistently ahead of its politicians in its rejection of the role of ‘world policeman’.

In Susan’s view the election of Trump satisfies, it seems, a desire among many in public to wind down US entanglements in the global arena:

Trump, and certainly his national security team, does not appreciate that he was put in power to dismantle US global hegemony. But Trump’s bullying transactionalism, his aversion to commitment, his penchant for tariffs and complete indifference to the potential impact that the United States has on other countries can have no other outcome.

 

It is obvious that permanent damage will be done to the United Nations, international economic institutions, multilateral organisations in which the United States is a member and any international effort to combat transnational challenges. The dissolution began during his first term and will be irreversible after the coming four years. The Americans who elected Trump as their standard bearer will cheer their demise.

And, the Trump actions, according to Susan, will only raise the temperature in the key global relationship, the US and China. As Susan suggests:

There will be a further sharp disconnect of the US and Chinese economies. Trump and the Republican Congress are likely to invoke more tariffs, export controls and sanctions leading to global fragmentation, rising costs and slower growth. Businesses will face an ever more complicated picture and are already strategising how to adjust. Many countries in Asia are devising economic hedging strategies and will try to walk a middle line amid deteriorating US–China relations. Whether and how a Trump administration might impose costs for such an approach remains an open question.

Susan further suggests that, in fact, Trump is the instrument of many in the US electorate that are tired with the burden resulting from the US leading role in the global order:

We have already entered the transition to a post-Pax Americana world — Trump is an accelerant. This does not mean that the United States will disappear. It will remain the most powerful and wealthy country in the world. But it does leave a vacuum in the international arena and US partners will hopefully step in to provide leadership and public goods.

My colleague Dan Drezner agrees with Susan at least with the impact of a second Trump administration. Dan is the Distinguished Professor of International Politics and Associate Dean of Research at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and among other things, the author of the Substack, Drezner’s World. In a FA piece entitled, “The End of American Exceptionalism: Trump’s Reelection Will Redefine U.S. Power”, Dan declares:

Trump will navigate world politics with greater confidence this time around. Whether he will have any better luck bending the world to his “America first” brand is another question entirely. What is certain, however, is that the era of American exceptionalism has ended. Under Trump, U.S. foreign policy will cease promoting long-standing American ideals. That, combined with an expected surge of corrupt foreign policy practices, will leave the United States looking like a garden-variety great power.”

 

He [Trump] believes that the U.S.-created liberal international order has, over time, stacked the deck against the United States. To change that imbalance, Trump wants to restrict inward economic flows such as imports and immigrants (although he likes inward foreign direct investment). He wants allies to shoulder more of the burden for their own defense. And he believes that he can cut deals with autocrats, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin or North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, that will reduce tensions in global trouble spots and allow the United States to focus Inward.

For Susan the change in foreign policy is driven by the American public; for Dan the direction comes from Trump and his acolytes but the outcome appears to be the same. The end of American leadership as we’ve understood it for seven decades and more.

So how, or what will provide the leadership that can manage the global order? Who can help shape and critically, who can presumably stabilize the increasingly fractious international environment?  Positively, who can promote international development, energize the efforts to meet the climate crisis, and reform international financial reform and meet the growing debt crises for many? Who will energize the multilateral institutions that can promote peace and security and advance global governance? Where is the leadership?

Here Susan gives us a bit of a hint. As she suggests:

In this more fragmented, disordered world, US partners in Asia should also pursue more networked security cooperation and regional integration to safeguard peace and mitigate the negative effects of deglobalisation for their economies. Such measures are useful on their own merits, no matter who is in the White House, as the world is set to become a more difficult and dangerous place.

We have, at recent gatherings of the China-West Dialogue, been exploring the role of Middle Powers. I hope to turn back to the potential key roles that Middle Powers may bring to the growing threats to the global order. I think that may be a hopeful direction.  I will return to this subject.

Image Credit: ABC News

This Post first appeared as a Substack Post at Alan’s Newsletter. Feel free to comment and subscribe to Alan’s Newsletter.

https://globalsummitryproject.substack.com/p/the-impact-of-trump-20

 

 

 

The ‘Global Order’: ‘Who is on First’

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I was trying very hard to ignore the impending vote for US president upcoming next week. We will have plenty of time to contemplate the action and consequences of the presidential choice on US foreign policy and global leadership.

But then again I was not fully able to ignore the consequences for the international order of this event. I was caught by a very recent Special Report from CIGI on: “Scenarios of Evolving Global Order”. Now CIGI is located in Waterloo Ontario and CIGI stands for the Centre for International Governance Innovation. I have a small soft spot for the think tank as I and a number of close colleagues spent some good years there when it launched as a global affairs outfit and, I think produced some good early work on global governance, among other things.

Anyway, the Report is interesting as it attempts to:

… fill a gap between the analysis of current trends and mapping of potential futures by outlining five possible scenarios for an evolving global order. These five scenarios represent a spectrum from the most modest plausible change (reform of the current system) to the most radical (transformation of the whole system due to a global shock).

There clearly is much current discussion over the evolving global order in the context of significant geopolitical tensions between the two leading powers and the numerous conflicts burdening international relations. So the Report describes 5 different scenarios built on these assumptions:

• The current international system is not working; international institutions, including the United Nations and Bretton Woods institutions, are unable to address most contemporary challenges.

• Responses to contemporary global challenges are siloed, nationally and institutionally.

• The United States’ global leadership is waning due to reduced capacity and internal focus.

• The relative economic power of liberal democracies is diminishing.

• Emerging powers — including, but not limited to, China and India — are increasingly asserting their influence and driving change.

• Finding new pathways of international cooperation on security issues may be more elusive, meaning attention may focus on cooperation on economic issues.

• Deglobalization, and regional integration as an alternative to multilateralism, continues to accelerate by many, but not all, measures.

• Momentum for nationalist and isolationist policies continues to build in many countries.

The result five different scenarios as filled out by the author team:

Scenario 1: Reform of the Existing Global System

Scenario 2: Replacement of the Existing Global System

Scenario 3: The Emergence of a Bloc-Based Global System

Scenario 4: A Case of Disorder

Scenario 5: Transformed Global Order

Each scenario is interesting and for every scenario there are two pathways described by the authors leading to an identified outcome:

The authors’ view is that these five scenarios broadly represent core directions that global order may evolve toward in the coming months and years. They acknowledge that there are numerous potential pathways that the five scenarios could take — by choosing only two for each, many possibilities remain for further exploration.

Now each scenario is worth assessing – and I will try and examine some perghaps at a later date, but I was struck by the perspective the authors identified for the structure and the dynamics for all five scenarios. As the Report suggested:

All of the scenarios explored assume the current and evolving global dynamics are multipolar (rather than other forms such as bipolar, hegemonic or concerted). It is, of course, possible that global order does not continue to evolve in  a multipolar way — for example, that one group of states forms a security and economic coalition in a way that dominates all the rest or that the world devolves into a bipolar world utterly dominated by American and Chinese spheres of control. The world is currently operating with multipolar dynamics on most issues, and this is likely to continue into the future.

Now that assumption of a multipolar system struck me. The reason is I came across an interesting Substack Post from Clarence Gu and Chenghao Sun, ChinAffairs+ describing in the Post titled “Yan Xuetong & John Mearsheimer Conversation: Who Shapes Global Order, and Who Will Win the Competition?”an interesting encounter, the third in fact, between these two experts. Now Yan Xuetong is the Dean of the Institute of International Relations at Tsinghua University, a highly prestigious university in China and John Mearsheimer is, as he describes himself, “the  R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1982 and an international relations theorist. More specifically, I am a realist.”

Now I have known John for many years as we were graduate students together at Cornell University with the same adviser, the recently passed Richard N Rosecrance, renowned international relations expert. But we were seldom on the same side of the fence when describing the underlying dynamics of the international system. But that is neither here nor there.

Both Yan Xuetong and John are known for their focus in international relations on ‘realism’, and in fact John’s  writings identify what is known as ‘offensive realism’. And while the two differ to a degree in this encounter at Tsinghua in Beijing they both strongly endorse the notion that the system is driven by the need by states to maintain dominance in a current bipolar not multipolar world (You will note by the way that the quotes that follow have been slightly edited due at times to  imperfect transcription). As John describes the international system:

How do you survive the international system? The system is where there is no higher authority. The answer is very simple. You want to be very powerful. You want to maximize your power, you cannot be certain of the intentions of those other states. It pays to be really powerful, to pay to be a hegemon.

 

If you think more specifically, the argument is that you can only be a regional hegemon, number one. Number two, you want to make sure that no other state is a regional hegemon. The ideal situation is to be the only regional hegemony in the international system.

 

All of this is to say we are involved today, in an intense security competition. It shows no signs going away. And if anything will get worse with the passage of time. This is a tragic situation. It has nothing to do with Chinese culture or American culture. And many people in China blame the United States for this trouble. … So my argument is, it’s the system that has caused this intense security competition.

Yan Xuetong is even more direct. He states:

The new trend of global order is Counter-Globalization. Then certainly today, I think because today’s title is Global Order and US-China relationship, we have to talk about how the relationship between China and US impact the current global order, my understanding is that the China-US relationship just like John argued that it will be intensified in terms of conflicts.You cannot expect China and US suddenly find a way to set down those disputes become the partners. If that happens, it means our theories are wrong. And actually, why the China-US conflicts are increasing and intensifying. It’s because now we’re in a bipolar configuration. The power structure is not multipolar.

 

The power structure is not multipolar. The current power structure is bipolar. And in the IR community, we all agree the situation after the World War One was multipolar, and after World War Two is bipolar.

 

What I mean is that the historic experience tells us, today we still have to understand what the international configuration is. It is not multipolar, not unipolar, it is bipolar, because except China no other major powers have capability or national power that account for 1/3 of the United States. None of them, except China. I don’t know how exactly we can do the measurement, but at least China’s capability is larger than 1/3 of the United States, possibly I would say 2/3 of the US.

Well, I won’t go into the five scenarios at this point though they are worth reviewing. The point here is to raise concern over analyses that are largely driven by structure rather than dynamics generated by policy – security, economic and political. These are the drivers that shape international outcomes. It is difficult at this moment to determine whether the structure is slightly less hegemonic, or is already bipolar, or in fact has become multipolar. The real analytic need, however, is to focus on the leading states and their foreign policy determinations. Structure is there, of course, but it does not drive foreign policy action or outcomes.

This Post first appeared at my Substack, Alan’s Newsletter. All comments and free subscriptions are welcome

Image Credit: Clarence Gu

 

Is it Trade Policy or is it Security Policy?

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It is more than passingly odd that a lead spokesperson apparently for Biden, if not Harris’s, global economic policies comes from Jake Sullivan, the National Security Adviser. Now don’t get me wrong. Jake is a very bright fellow who I have known for a number of years. Still, his repeated statements for the current economic policy seem, well, somewhat weird.

In any case Jake just recently returned to the Brookings Institution – in fact just the other day to provide an update on his original talk titled: “Renewing American Economic Leadership”. This original talk was delivered by Jake on April 27, 2023. Now, again in the realm of strange, it seems to me odd to have Jake providing an update when we are less than two weeks out from a Presidential vote. And while the Democrat may win the presidency, it will not be Joe Biden. Yes, the Vice President was part of the preceding administration, but still. And it may be, of course, that Jake might well assume a prominent role in a new Harris administration, if she were to win. Still, I am sure that the next administration will seek to design and announce its own global trade and investment strategy. And that says nothing if the other guy wins.

In any case it was good to listen to Jake review his original proposals. When he spoke in 2023 Jake pointedly framed the changed global landscape. As he said:

After the Second World War, the United States led a fragmented world to build a new international economic order.  It lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.  It sustained thrilling technological revolutions.  And it helped the United States and many other nations around the world achieve new levels of prosperity.

But the last few decades revealed cracks in those foundations.  A shifting global economy left many working Americans and their communities behind. A financial crisis shook the middle class.  A pandemic exposed the fragility of our supply chains.  A changing climate threatened lives and livelihoods.  Russia’s invasion of Ukraine underscored the risks of overdependence.

“So this moment demands that we forge a new consensus.” In broad strokes then, Jake proceeded to describe the changed landscape:

That’s why the United States, under President Biden, is pursuing a modern industrial and innovation strategy—both at home and with partners around the world.  One that invests in the sources of our own economic and technological strength, that promotes diversified and resilient global supply chains, that sets high standards for everything from labor and the environment to trusted technology and good governance, and that deploys capital to deliver on public goods like climate and health.”

And what were the challenges that the early years of the Biden administration faced:

First, America’s industrial base had been hollowed out. …

 

The second challenge we faced was adapting to a new environment defined by geopolitical and security competition, with important economic impacts. …

 

The third challenge we faced was an accelerating climate crisis and the urgent need for a just and efficient energy transition. …

 

Finally, we faced the challenge of inequality and its damage to democracy.

According to Jake the administration knew what it had to do. As he declared:

When President Biden came to office, he knew the solution to each of these challenges was to restore an economic mentality that champions building.  And that is the core of our economic approach. To build.  To build capacity, to build resilience, to build inclusiveness, at home and with partners abroad.  The capacity to produce and innovate, and to deliver public goods like strong physical and digital infrastructure and clean energy at scale.  The resilience to withstand natural disasters and geopolitical shocks. And the inclusiveness to ensure a strong, vibrant American middle class and greater opportunity for working people around the world.

And you’ll not be surprised to hear that in his recently stated update the Biden administration has taken on these challenges and the policy initiatives are achieving results.

Now, I may well come back at a later moment to look at more of the Biden policy initiatives but I did want to examine at this time at least one of the challenges,  the concerted effort to move away from freer trade – reducing tariffs, and instead focusing on targeted actions against a China that in Jake’s words:

The project of the 2020s and the 2030s is different from the project of the 1990s.

 

We know the problems we need to solve today:  Creating diversified and resilient supply chains.   Mobilizing public and private investment for a just clean energy transition and sustainable economic growth.  Creating good jobs along the way, family-supporting jobs.  Ensuring trust, safety, and openness in our digital infrastructure.  Stopping a race-to-the-bottom in corporate taxation.  Enhancing protections for labor and the environment.

So Jake in the update reflects on the Biden administration efforts and their result:

Advancing fairness, creating high quality jobs and revitalizing American communities can’t be an afterthought. Which is why we’ve made them central to our approach. In fact, as a result of the incentives in the IRA to build in traditional energy communities, investment in those communities has doubled under President Joe Biden.

The determination to build out the middle class underlies Biden economic policy. But how has it worked? Well, here, there seems to be some serious doubt notwithstanding the upbeat portrayal by Jake. Why do I say this? Let me turn to Robert Z Lawrence, a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) and the Albert L. Williams Professor of Trade and Investment at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Lawrence recently reviewed Biden administration trade policy in a Report for PIIE: “Is the United States undergoing a manufacturing renaissance that will boost the middle class?”

Lawrence points out the continuing struggle to bring back manufacturing jobs to the United States:

The historic trend of the declining share of jobs in manufacturing in the United States has bedeviled politicians and policymakers over many years. Elected in 2020 in the wake of an economic downturn aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. made the goal of his economic policies to “build back better” and restore the middle class by reviving industrial jobs, especially in the Midwest, which he labeled “growing the economy from the bottom up and the middle out.

The emphasis on manufacturing was reinforced by an economic nationalist goal of returning jobs supposedly sent overseas back to US shores—“making and building it in America,” as the administration proclaimed.

Now Lawrence goes into some detail on Biden administration efforts that are probably worth reviewing:

This emphasis is reflected in the special incentives for US manufacturing in President Biden’s programs. He raised the threshold local content requirement for procurement by the US government. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (also referred to as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law) requires that all iron, steel, manufactured products, and construction materials used in its projects be made in America. The CHIPS and Science Act appropriates $24 billion in tax credits for manufacturing semiconductors in the United States and another $39 billion to provide incentives for investment in chip facilities and equipment in the United States. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) provides tax credits for clean energy investments and production and the purchase of electric vehicles (EVs) that are assembled in North America and have batteries that use minerals that are mined and refined in the United States or a country with which the United States has a free trade agreement.

Lawrence’s conclusion is stark and suggests an administration optimism that fails to match the desired growth hoped for:

The administration’s policies have expanded the base of manufacturing employment on the margins in recent years. But despite their appeal, these policies are unlikely to be the key to achieving middle class growth, because manufacturing no longer plays the role it played in the past in providing opportunities for workers without college degrees to join the middle class. Manufacturing can still help achieve other goals, such as providing hardware for the digital revolution; weapons for national security; and the EVs, wind turbines, and solar panels that are vital for decarbonization. But the sector is now too small to play a major role in reviving America’s depressed regions and providing significant opportunities for American workers.

The final conclusion is sobering:

Although it will spur rapid manufacturing employment growth in nontraditional locations, the Biden programs have not created a broad renaissance in US manufacturing, and they are unlikely to do so in the future. The effects of the programs on the Rust Belt states that experienced large manufacturing employment losses since 2000 are likely to be modest, and the impact will not significantly change the sectoral composition of the US labor market.

 

Manufacturing still has an important role to play in providing the goods necessary to rebuild US infrastructure, promote the digital revolution, and ease the transition to a decarbonized US economy. But because of its relatively small overall employment share—and the growing bias toward hiring more educated workers—the sector no longer provides non college workers with the opportunities it used to.

 

Although the Biden programs may achieve important social objectives, they are therefore unlikely to improve the opportunities for most workers without college degrees or help most of the country’s disadvantaged places.

To achieve a broad renaissance, obviously desired by the current administration, other tools are required. Greater targeted financial support and a concerted focus on training workers that in the past have proven difficult to develop in the US political and administrative context are required. It is a steep ask and difficult to achieve.

This Post originally appeared at my Substack Alan’s Newsletter – https://substack.com/home/post/p-150726560

Image Credit: Brookings Institution

 

 

Reshaping the US Global Order Role

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It is not a surprise with a month to go till the US election that ‘folks’ are assessing where the US global order role is, where it should be, or needs or can be, as we look towards a new administration. I have no crystal ball to tell me who is about to win the election and I am not about to contemplate the return of Trump. But I will look, however, at a possible Harris administration and it appears evident that observers and experts are with a month to go reflecting on what’s next for US global leadership.

Let’s start with one who has had responsibility in the near past for US foreign policy. Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently penned an assessment of ‘his’ foreign policy in FA, titled, “America’s Strategy of Renewal: Rebuilding Leadership for a New World”. Now you’ll not be surprised that the piece is a narrative and strong expression of policy gone right:

President Biden and Vice President Harris pursued a strategy of renewal, pairing historic investments in competitiveness at home with an intensive diplomatic campaign to revitalize partnerships abroad.

This twin-pillared strategy, they believed, was the best way to disabuse competitors of their assumptions that the United States was declining and diffident.

Blinken acknowledges that US leadership and action was required to meet the challenge of these revisionist powers that appeared to be determined to reshape leadership and the principles of the current global order:

A fierce competition is underway to define a new age in international affairs. A small number of countries—principally Russia, with the partnership of Iran and North Korea, as well as China—are determined to alter the foundational principles of the international system. While their forms of governance, ideologies, interests, and capabilities differ, these revisionist powers all want to entrench autocratic rule at home and assert spheres of influence abroad.

 

They all wish to resolve territorial disputes by coercion or force and weaponize other countries’ economic and energy dependence. And they all seek to erode the foundations of the United States’ strength: its military and technological superiority, its dominant currency, and its unmatched network of alliances and partnerships. While these countries are not an axis, and the administration has been clear that it does not seek bloc confrontation, choices these revisionist powers are making mean we need to act decisively to prevent that outcome.

Implicitly and explicitly Blinken describes what he believes to be a very successful competitive policy with these revisionist actors and most particularly China. As Blinken describes Biden administration policy efforts:

The Biden administration’s commitment to compete vigorously yet responsibly along these lines took away the revisionists’ pretext that the United States was the obstacle to maintaining international peace and stability. It also earned the United States greater trust from its friends—and, along with it, stronger partnerships.

 

Second, we infused U.S. alliances and partnerships with new purpose.We elevated the Quad—the partnership with Australia, India, and Japan—and took concrete steps to realize a shared vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific, from enhancing maritime security to manufacturing safe, effective vaccines. We launched the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council, marshaling the world’s biggest economic partnership to shape global standards for emerging technologies and protect the United States’ and Europe’s most sensitive innovations.

To Blinken the alliances and partnerships that the US renewed or built were the keys to Biden administration success in a highly competitive world:

From day one, President Biden and Vice President Harris made a foundational choice that in a more competitive and combustible world, the United States cannot go it alone. If America wants to protect its security and create opportunities for its people, it must stand with those who have a stake in a free, open, secure, and prosperous world and stand up to those who threaten that world.

Notwithstanding then the revisionist power efforts to alter the global order, the US and its partners have been able to maintain the free and open global order and limit revisionist efforts to undermine the opportunities for the US and its partners:

The choices the United States makes in the second half of this decisive decade will determine whether this moment of testing remains a time of renewal or returns to a time of regression—whether Washington and its allies can continue to outcompete the forces of revisionism or allow their vision to define the twenty-first century.

Clearly Blinken is referencing the possibility of  a return to Trump. Otherwise Blinken seems to show some content with the actions of the Biden administration. That satisfaction is not shared by all. From the outside today but with experience of serving in the Biden administration another distinct point of you is expressed by a colleague, Jessica Chen Weiss. Jessica was from 2021 to 2022 a senior advisor to the policy planning staff at the U.S. Department of State on a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellowship for Tenured IR Scholars (IAF-TIRS). Jessica just recently took up a new academic appointment as the David M. Lampton Professor of China Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. and a nonresident senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute Center for China Analysis. Once again in FA, Jessica examines Biden administration foreign policy in a piece titled, “The Case Against the China Consensus”. Jessica does not fall in line with Blinken’s description and actions of recent US foreign policy – its successful competition with the revisionist powers, most notably China. As Jessica describes recent Biden administration actions:

Washington faces growing criticism for pursuing open-ended competition with China without defining what success would look like. Even as China’s coercive capabilities and threatening behavior have rightly focused U.S. attention on the risks to American interests, the absence of clear metrics for success leaves the door open for partisan aspersions of the Biden administration’s approach.

With that Jessica strikes out toward an improved US-China relationship. As she describes it:

Yet beneath this charged atmosphere, ample space for debate and discernment remains. The apparent hardening of a U.S. consensus on China is shallower and wobblier than it appears. In this fluid environment, there is an opportunity for the next presidential administration to develop a more affirmative, less reactive approach, one that dials down the heat and focuses on reducing the risks while preserving the benefits of the vast web of ties that connect the United States and China.

Now it is clear from Jessica’s analysis the current administration has taken steps to at least maintain a balance with China:

The Biden administration, by contrast, has rightly invoked a sense of shared purpose, underlining the urgency of defending an international order in which might does not make right and working with governments of different persuasions to tackle problems that respect no borders or walls.

Still the emphasis from the current administration to compete successfully with China is dominant and leads to significant persistent competition with China that can, unfortunately lead to conflict:

But in the broader U.S. public and policy conversation, the impulse to thwart China often overwhelms efforts to work toward common objectives and advance U.S. interests. Rhetoric about winning the twenty first century reinforces the idea that competition is zero-sum, accelerating a rush on both sides of the Pacific to prepare for conflict and making it all too easy for critics in both societies to deride ordinary forms of diplomatic, commercial, and scientific interaction as naive at best and appeasement at worst. This emphasis on preparing for worst-case scenarios prevails in both countries.

For Jessica, then, the current policy posture is inadequate and maintains a dangerous locked in competition:

To halt this spiral, Beijing and Washington will need to identify the outcomes they wish to see, avoiding measures of success that are defined by slowing down or one-upping the other. Pursuing resilience and deterrence, not primacy or hegemony, would set them on a more stable course. Post–Cold War U.S. unipolarity in global politics was the exception, not the rule. Today, neither China nor the United States can aspire to dominance across every sector and every technology.

Resilience and deterrence, then is the goal. And here is some of what the US and presumably China must do:

It is therefore imperative that China and the United States maintain a degree of integration in order to detect and learn from new advances. If the technological leaders in a given sector are Chinese, Washington should want U.S. firms to have access to the latest innovation. Right now, Chinese manufacturers are far in front in solar, battery, and electric vehicle production. Licensing Chinese technology to construct an electric vehicle factory in the United States, for example, would build domestic expertise and help U.S. automakers transition more quickly with top-of-the-line technology.

Yet it is not clear that within the current US-China competition, and the efforts by this administration to stabilize the relationship – high level discussions including military-to-military discussions – that the US  is not seeking to maintain the economic integration that Jessica suggests is vital. There seems to be in her analysis a hint at least that what is required is the end of competition:

Diversification is healthy, but the United States needs to establish limits on decoupling and “derisking.” …

 

Right now, much of the U.S. public and policy conversation is consumed by how to counter China and defend American workers, infrastructure, technology, and intellectual property against foreign threats. This focus downplays the domestic harms that measures ostensibly aimed at strengthening U.S. national security can have on the health and vibrancy of the United States’ democracy, society, and innovation ecosystem. Getting China right is critical to the United States’ success, both under the next president and for years beyond.

Now positively Jessica does prompt a close look at the state of US-China competition. A closer look at the state of global economic competition is needed and worth engaging but for the moment it would not seem likely that a Harris administration, if she were to win the presidency, would abandon, or at least dramatically diminish political and economic competition between the US and China. And without greater understanding of the goals each seeks, the US and China that is, there is not a strong logic to acting unilaterally.

A close examination, and strong dialogue might provide insight in constructing an altered foreign policy that is in part driven by competition but with much greater bilateral and multilateral actions better able to contain the US-China competition and engage in policies that stabilize the relationship. Deterrence for sure but stronger two-way assurances that lowers the heat on several fronts including: Taiwan, the Indo-Pacific, the South China Sea, nuclear policies and more. We all would benefit from that.

This blog first appeared on my Substack at Alan’s Newsletter

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The Enduring Weakness of Multilateralism: An Aspect

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Though it was heartening to see the Presidential debate this past week with a strong performance by Vice President Kamala Harris, it was disheartening to see that Donald Trump remains a major force in US politics and still a strong contender notwithstanding some of his wild statements and his conspiracy theory assertions. While the event highlighted the ‘weirdness’ of Donald J Trump, the candidate, the game is not yet won. We may yet see him reoccupy the White House. Such an outcome would threaten the alliance(s) system, global trade and continuing US presence in the current multilateral system driven by Trump’s transactional model of US foreign policy behavior.

Trump’s return would likely drive current US foreign policy ‘over the cliff’. But changes have been underway for some time and many of them are weakening the multilateral system built over many decades. Many foreign policy analysts have focused on the structural elements – notably the decline in the international measures of power of the United States and its impact as a result on the global order. I was struck by a letter titled, “Muster Global Majorities”  prepared by Mark Malloch-Brown. This is just one of nine requested by FP to greet a new US president. Now, Malloch-Brown was the former deputy secretary-general of the UN well aware of the multilateral system and he targeted the decline of the US:

But whoever prevails on Nov. 5—and congratulations, by the way—this will not change the much deeper shifts underway in the distribution of global power and values alignment that are now surfacing at the U.N. and its Bretton Woods cousins, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). They have seen an approximate quadrupling of membership since their post-World War II founding; a more than tripling of global population; and a global GDP that is more than 10 times bigger.

 

But you must see there is a global shift underway, and the United States, more than ever, is not an unchallenged No. 1 but rather a precarious first among equals in a multilateral system and which in responding to wider intellectual and political change in the world resents any claim to monopoly leadership. As Shakespeare observed in his great play on succession and power, Henry IV, Part 2: “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”

Malloch-Brown in his letter, in fact, is pointing to two evident declines: the decline in power of the US in the context of the global system, the structural elements with the rise of China and with the emergence of a number of the Large Emerging Powers, the likes of India, Brazil, Indonesia and more.  But the decline is also evident from a diminishment in US leadership in the global order, the behavioral aspect of any analysis.

While there is a relative decline in the power dimensions for the United States, it is the decline in policy leadership that is in some ways most evident. Take trade. As Alan Beattie has written just recently in the FT article entitled, “Can Globalization Survive the US-China Rift”:

Multilateralism is weak. The US is undermining the WTO by citing a national security loophole to break rules at will. The EU won a case against Indonesia over its nickel export ban, but the WTO’s dysfunctional dispute settlement system has delayed compliance.

 

But this does not mean regional or geopolitical trading blocs will start setting the rules of trade instead. The US talks a good game about building alliances, but the political toxicity of trade deals in Washington stops it offering market access to incentivise countries to join. The Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, the US’s main initiative in the Asia-Pacific, is widely regarded as all stick and no carrot.

Rather than a continued reliance on the multilateral rules and the WTO, the multilateral trade institution – of which the US is one of the primary creators –  responsible for managing trade and trade friction, the United States has chosen to neuter the global trade rules by collapsing the trade dispute mechanism of the WTO. The US has turned away as well from promoting freer trade and free trade agreements and has come to rely more and more on protectionism. As pointed out by Bob Davis in his FT piece, “How Washington Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace Protectionism”, he described the US turn to protectionism:

… the president [Biden] made a decision that upended decades of Democratic White House rule. He ordered heavy new tariffs on Chinese imports of high-tech items and continued the massive tariffs he inherited from his Republican predecessor.

 

The significance of the moves—and the challenge that it presents to Biden’s successor—was obscured by the roller-coaster news cycle. But it bears noting: The Biden administration is the first since at least President John F. Kennedy’s time to fail to negotiate a major free trade deal, instead embracing tariffs. Even Trump, the self-proclaimed “Tariff Man,” concluded a significant free trade pact when he replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement with a U.S.-Mexico-Canada deal (USMCA), which toughened rules on auto imports but established liberal rules on digital trade. He also negotiated a smaller digital agreement with Japan.

 

The turnabout is emblematic of a broader change in the U.S. economic and political thinking that is unlikely to be reversed under either a President Trump or Harris. The era of hyperglobalization, which began around 1990 and saw global trade jump by 60 percent in 20 years as supply chains spread across the earth like spiderwebs, has come to an end. We are now in an era of growing protectionism, and as trade growth has stalled, the United States and many other advanced economies have hiked tariffs and begun subsidizing industries that they view as critical to their well-being.

The turnabout with an increasing reliance on tariffs and a more full throated rise of US protectionism in fact ties the US, that is US economic policy to its political-security policy and actions. Davis makes the pointed linkage today between the two for US policy action:

Peter Harrell, the White House’s former senior director for international economics, said the change marks a fundamental rethinking of U.S. trade policy. “We are in an era of geopolitical competition with China,” he said. “That means we aren’t going to accord China the same trading privileges and rights” accorded to allies—despite World Trade Organization requirements to treat members equally.

 

It boils down to the fact that the economic juice [from cutting tariffs] was not worth the political squeeze,” said Evan Medeiros, a Georgetown University China expert who had been an official on Obama’s National Security Council.

 

In the second part of its decision, the administration ramped up some tariffs to block Chinese imports in areas where the United States was spending billions of dollars on subsidies to create or strengthen a domestic industry.

Tariffs were quadrupled to 100 percent on Chinese electric vehicles this year, as [Lael] Brainard had advocated, doubled to 50 percent on Chinese semiconductors and solar cells, either this year or next, and tripled to 25 percent on EV batteries this year. Even low-tech Chinese syringes, which had previously been shipped duty-free, now face 50 percent tariffs as a spur to boost domestic production.

 

The primary reason for the U.S. turn to protectionism is the growing economic and military challenge from China. But it also reflects a profound change in ideology: The gains from trade—lower prices, overall improvements in living standards, greater competition—are no longer seen by many political leaders as worth the downsides in the loss of manufacturing jobs, dependence on imports from adversaries such as China and Russia, and political polarization. The Trump administration, packed with anti-free traders, gave a big push to this neo-protectionism; the Biden administration has confirmed and deepened the shift.

The bottom line is that geopolitical tensions, particularly the deep US-China competition, has undermined US commitment to a multilateral system that the US was a principal architect in creating and maintaining over many decades. This outcome to date is deeply troubling.

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US Tensions Over a Leading Role

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So, I was ruminating a bit on the question of US diplomacy coming off of the previous Substack Post and particularly the Jessica Matthews’s targeting of Biden foreign policy in the upcoming Foreign Affairs article “What Was the Biden Doctrine? Leadership Without Hegemony”. As a reminder, this is what she wrote and I quoted in last week’s Substack:

 

But he [Joe Biden] has carried out a crucial task: shifting the basis of American foreign policy from an unhealthy reliance on military intervention to the active pursuit of diplomacy backed by strength.

 

He has won back the trust of friends and allies, built and begun to institutionalize a deep American presence in Asia, restored the United States’ role in essential multilateral organizations and agreements, and ended the longest of the country’s “forever wars”—a step none of his three predecessors had the courage to take.

 

All of this happened in the face of grievous new threats from China and Russia, two great powers newly allied around the goal of ending American primacy. Biden’s response to the most pressing emergency of his term—Russia’s brutal full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022—has been both skillful and innovative, demonstrating a grasp of the traditional elements of statecraft along with a willingness to take a few unconventional steps. … But he has carried out a crucial task: shifting the basis of American foreign policy from an unhealthy reliance on military intervention to the active pursuit of diplomacy backed by strength.

Now I concluded that analysis with a Matthews’s quote with my concluding remark: “Now it seems to me there are questions over the effective use of diplomacy of this Administration but that is for another day.” Well this is another day and I want to focus a little on the current effectiveness of US diplomatic policy.

There appears to be a growing split over whether the US has had, or should I say, will choose to move forward with sharper diplomatic policies and initiatives rather than, if I can put it bluntly, ‘Reach for the Gun’. In fact, in the end, there are questions of whether the US will involve itself at all in serious but distant conflicts especially in the face of seriously weakened multilateral institutions. The foreign policy question is actually two questions then: will a Harris Administration respond to foreign policy crises with sharp diplomacy or resort to force and even more dramatically not only how the US may engage but whether it will engage at all.

Shortly after Harris and Waltz assumed the mantle of leadership of the Democratic Party that a strong positive view was identified. For instance Mark Hannah and Rachel Rizzo wrote the following in FP:

When applied to foreign policy, it could inform a pragmatic, forward-looking realism that’s all too rare in Washington. This sentiment aligns with a growing expert consensus.

 

A recent Carnegie Endowment for International Peace study concluded that the United States’ current approach to the world is “poorly adapted to the challenges of today and tomorrow.” It also noted a widespread demand among analysts for “a major strategic reorientation.” This reorientation could be from an everything-everywhere-all-at-once approach to a more judicious and strategic use of American might.

Let’s start with what appears to be the positive efforts of the current Biden policy efforts and conjure it  as a likely course of action for a new Harris Administration.  The immediate diplomatic approach is the recent Biden actions focused on its key geopolitical concern – that is its perceived strategic competitor and threat – its biggest rival – China. Notwithstanding the tough back and forth the two have undertaken recent discussions that appear to be designed to stabilize this most difficult bilateral relationship. The evidence for this is the recently concluded visit of National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan to China. This most recent meeting with Wang Yi who is the chief Chinese foreign affairs official for President Xi was not the first. For Sullivan and Wang this was one of a series of interactions as described by Demetri Sevastopulo in the FT:

It was the first of several secret rendezvous around the world, including Malta and Thailand, now called the “strategic channel”. Sullivan will arrive in Beijing on Tuesday [August 27th] for another round of talks with Wang in what will be his first visit to China as US national security adviser.

 

While the backchannel has not resolved the fundamental issues between the rival superpowers, says Rorry Daniels, a China expert at the Asia Society Policy Institute, it has aided each’s understanding of the other. “It’s been very successful in short-term stabilisation, communicating red lines and previewing actions that might be seen as damaging to the other side,” she says.

The two leading powers do not see ‘eye-to-eye’ on the role of diplomatic interactions.  China in particular does not accept the framework of stabilization in the context of competition – the US view. Still, there does appear to be a certain diplomatic stabilization as described by Sevastopulo leading up to this most recent series of meetings in Beijing:

Sullivan strived to get Wang to understand the new reality — that the nations were in a competition but one that should not preclude co-operation. “That was a really hard jump for the Chinese,” says the second US official. “They wanted to define the relationship neatly [as] we’re either partners or we’re competitors.”

 

The Chinese official said China did not accept the argument. “Wang Yi explained very clearly that you cannot have co-operation, dialogue and communication . . . and at the same time undercut China’s interests.

 

They discussed possible deals for a summit, including a compromise that would involve the US lifting sanctions on a Chinese government forensic science institute in return for China cracking down on the export of chemicals used to make fentanyl. They also talked about resurrecting the military-to-military communication channels China had shut after Pelosi visited Taiwan. And they discussed creating an artificial intelligence dialogue.

 

Rush Doshi, a former NSC official who attended the meetings with Wang, says it was important to explain to China what the US was doing — and not doing. “Diplomacy is how you clear up misperception and avoid escalation and manage competition. It’s actually not at odds with competition but part of any sustainable competitive strategy.

And in this most recent set of meetings in Beijing, Sullivan was able to meet not just President Xi, important in and of itself,  but critically a meeting with General Zhang Youxia:

Mr. Sullivan’s meeting with Gen. Zhang Youxia, vice chairman of China’s Central Military Commission, was the first in years between a senior American official and a vice chair of the commission, which oversees China’s armed forces and is chaired by Mr. Xi.

The Biden Administration regarded the Beijing meetings, therefore, as important diplomatic effort in stabilizing great power relations:

Sullivan tells the FT that he was under no illusions that the channel would convince China to change its policies, but he stressed that it had played an instrumental role in helping to shift the dynamic in US-China relations.

All you can do is take their policy, our policy, and then try to manage it so that we can take the actions we need to take and maintain stability in the relationship,” Sullivan says. “We have been able to accomplish both of those things.”

If managing great power relations was the US diplomatic goal, that seems to be successfully achieved for the moment. But that positive framing is not replicated in wider global order relations and the US efforts or lack thereof. Thus, the assessment of wider US diplomatic efforts is not nearly as upbeat. This is the message of Alexander Clarkson,  a lecturer in European studies at King’s College London in his analysis of US foreign policy in his WPR article titled: “For Much of the World, the Post-American Order Is Already Here”:

This gradual waning of American influence outside of core areas of strategic focus rarely features in ferocious debates in Washington between those who believe that the U.S. should remain deeply involved in global affairs and the so-called Restrainers on the left and MAGA Republicans on the right who are skeptical of security commitments outside U.S. borders.

 

The limits of the United States’ ability to influence developments on the ground in destabilizing conflicts, or the responses of states engaged in them, have been particularly visible with civil wars in Myanmar and Sudan that barely feature in domestic American news cycles. In both cases, U.S. policymakers distracted by developments elsewhere failed to anticipate emerging escalation dynamics and then failed to develop the strategic leverage needed to rein in brutal armies and militias whose backing from other states rapidly widened devastating wars.

 

Washington’s flailing in the face of conflicts within Myanmar and Sudan that have now become wider geopolitical crises is a product of long-term shifts in the global balance of power. While Washington will continue to play a decisive role in managing conflicts that involve great power competition, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the tensions between Israel and Iran and China’s strategic assertiveness under Xi Jinping, in many other parts of the world the U.S. impact will be limited to diplomatic press releases expressing grave concern.

Clarkson sees US actions and inactions as a reshaping of the global balance of power. But I suspect it is an unwillingness to exercise direct diplomatic action to what is seen to be a distant conflict. It is also an evident result of the undermining, including by the United States, of effective diplomatic action by the UN. The weakening of the formal institutions – the WTO in trade policy and the UN in security and peace efforts – is now ‘coming home to roost’ at the US doorstep. US inaction is matched by the inability of these and other formal institutions to take on, stabilize and hopefully resolve difficult and potentially threatening conflicts.

The Harris Administration, if it wins, needs to address the manner of engagement but in too many instances the likely failure of foreign policy engagement at all. Much is currently wanting in US foreign policy. It is unclear if a Harris Administration is likely to tackle, and if so, how, these difficult foreign policy questions.

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This Post was originally posted at Alan’s Newsletter. Your comments are welcome as well as free subscriptions to Alan’s Newsletter

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Contemplating in these Early Days a Harris Foreign Policy

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With just over 70 days until the US election, and with the certainty now of a new 47th President – either Harris or former President Trump – it is not surprising that analysts are scrambling to assess the current US foreign policy course and eyeing its new possible directions.

Obviously, the impact of a return to Trump freezes one’s mind with its MAGA trumpeting, its distaste for allies, and its cozying up to autocrats whether in Russia or North Korea. I’m not going to go there for the moment: the consequences are too depressing to dwell on at this moment in the election cycle. While we may be driven to come back to this depending, of course, on the course of the next 70 days. But for the moment, and just coming out of the Chicago Convention, let’s focus on where we have recently been with a Biden Administration and what direction we might be pointed toward with a Harris win.

A number of folk, including some former Democratic officials, have put their ‘thinking caps on’ already and are analyzing the Biden foreign policy and extending it to a possible new Democratic Administration. It particularly has resonance as Harris has been involved in this Biden Administration.

We start with the current state of play of globalization. Many examining its immediate health focus in particular on US export controls on technology and the maintenance of tariffs against China by the Biden Administration. Analysts also focus on the dramatic increase in sanctions against Russia and those aiding Russia’s war against Ukraine. My colleague Dan Drezner from Drezner’s World focused in a recent Post on the immediate state of global economic integration:

There comes a point when one has to question the resiliency of globalization as we know it. The question is whether that point is right now. For example, the IMF recently noted that despite widespread perceptions, the current global economy is more globalized than a generation ago: “A global increase in the foreign value-added content of exports from about 19 percent in the mid-1990s to 28 percent in 2022 points to continued deepening of trade integration. Meanwhile, services are able to flow more easily across borders thanks to the rise of digital technology.

 

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World tends to be more sanguine about globalization persisting despite loud pronouncements that it has come to an end. Great power governments and violent non-state actors have done their darndest to push the world towards economic segmentation, and it just ain’t happening. Improvements in information and communication technologies have lowered the costs of cross-border flows. Even if states are erecting higher cross-border barriers, that has been counteracted by declining costs more generally. … I think analysts have to stop being surprised that global economic flows keep rising despite all the geopolitical shocks. Economic globalization continues to be the Economic Engine that Could.

So globalization is still in place. Now let’s turn to the Biden framing of foreign policy recognizing that the Vice President, and now the Democratic candidate for President has played a role in the foreign policy of this current Biden Administration. I was interested in the article by Ben Rhodes in Foreign Affairs, titled ““A Foreign Policy for the World as It Is: Biden and the Search for a New American Strategy”. Rhodes, by the way, served as U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting in the Obama administration from 2009 to 2017. Ben underscored how difficult it has been to continue to lead, which it seems remained a Biden foreign policy goal:

It also suggested [the start of the Biden presidency] that the United States could reclaim its self-conception as a virtuous hegemon, that it could make the rules-based international order great again. Yet even though a return to competent normalcy was in order, the Biden administration’s mindset of restoration has occasionally struggled against the currents of our disordered times.

The shadow of Trump left this current Administration struggling to maintain a relatively benign leadership. But in addition, as Ben argues:

Second, the old rules-based international order doesn’t really exist anymore. Sure, the laws, structures, and summits remain in place.

 

But core institutions such as the UN Security Council and the World Trade Organization are tied in knots by disagreements among their members. Russia is committed to disrupting U.S.-fortified norms. China is committed to building its own alternative order. On trade and industrial policy, even Washington is moving away from core tenets of post–Cold War globalization.

Possibly most damaging  to the order – and US leadership – is US commitment to the maintenance of the international rule of law. Most pointedly in this regard is the failure of the Biden Administration to more forcefully insist with the current Israeli government that it cease and desist from Israel’s destructive actions against the civilian populations in Gaza in its quest to dismantle Hamas. Such a failure undermines claims to a benign leadership of the global order, if such is in fact possible.

Yet a number of notable analysts remain convinced that the Biden Administration has successfully navigated toward a more stable global order with strong US leadership. Take the example of Jessica Matthews who is currently Distinguished Fellow of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and is the former President of CEIP. In her recent article for Foreign Affairs for its forthcoming September/October issue, titled, “What Was the Biden Doctrine?: Leadership Without Hegemony” Matthew praises US foreign policy action even in the face of major power opposition. And Matthews writes:

But he has carried out a crucial task: shifting the basis of American foreign policy from an unhealthy reliance on military intervention to the active pursuit of diplomacy backed by strength.

 

He has won back the trust of friends and allies, built and begun to institutionalize a deep American presence in Asia, restored the United States’ role in essential multilateral organizations and agreements, and ended the longest of the country’s “forever wars”—a step none of his three predecessors had the courage to take.

 

All of this happened in the face of grievous new threats from China and Russia, two great powers newly allied around the goal of ending American primacy. Biden’s response to the most pressing emergency of his term—Russia’s brutal full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022—has been both skillful and innovative, demonstrating a grasp of the traditional elements of statecraft along with a willingness to take a few unconventional steps.

 

Biden’s approach to Beijing has occasionally reflected a disappointing degree of continuity with that of Trump and has fostered uncertainty over Taiwan, the most sensitive issue in U.S.-Chinese relations. But unlike the former president, Biden has embedded his China policy in a vigorous matrix of new and restored alliances across Asia. He has arguably pulled off the long-sought U.S. “pivot” to the region, without using that term.

 

Yet his legacy to date suggests the lineaments of a new approach well suited to today’s world. Most important among them is a resolve to eschew wars to remake other countries and to restore diplomacy as the central tool of foreign policy.

Matthews is strongly upbeat and concludes with this paean to Biden foreign policy:

No matter the answers, and despite the symptoms of debilitating political polarization at home, Biden has made profound changes in foreign policy—not to accommodate American decline but to reflect the country’s inherent strength.

Now it seems to me there are questions over the effective use of diplomacy of this Administration but that is for another day. In the current moment this upbeat assessment is carried forward by: the early days following the Harris nomination and in light of her initial positioning set out in her acceptance speech at coming out of Chicago. It appears that the general reaction to her speech was positive including her statements on foreign policy that seemed to position her as forceful on human rights but also on defense and the US security alliances.  From folks at Brookings, specifically Elaine Kamarck, a Senior Fellow of Governance Studies and William A. Galston, a Senior Fellow of Governance Studies, came the following analysis:

Surprising some observers, Harris laid out a tough agenda on defense and foreign policy, promising to maintain the strongest and most lethal fighting force in the world, retain our leading position in NATO, defend Ukraine against Russian aggression, stand up against Iran and North Korea, and take democracy’s side in the struggle with tyranny. She articulated a firm pro-Israel stance while mentioning the suffering of Gaza’s inhabitants and endorsing Palestinians’ right to dignity and self-determination.

 

Taken as a whole, Harris’s acceptance speech positioned her as a center-left Democrat in the mold of Joe Biden rather than Bernie Sanders. It embraced what she termed the pride and privilege of being an American. And, as if to show that Republicans have not cornered the market on patriotism and American exceptionalism, she told her audience that together, they had the opportunity to write the next chapter of the most extraordinary story ever told. She ended her speech in the most traditional way imaginable, by asking God to bless the United States of America.

And, finally, there is this slightly surprising insight from Michael Hirsh from FP where he describes a view that Harris brought great understanding of new technologies and the threats that such technologies bring to foreign policy:

There is not much time to know a great deal more about her approach to foreign policy. But it’s also clear that Harris has created her own path on foreign policy—and that she represents the next generation of national security experts steeped in newer, high-tech threats that the Cold War generation represented by Biden is less familiar with. These encompass an array of ​​cyber threats, including election hacking and surveillance from abroad, allegedly including from state-run companies such as China’s Huawei; threats from space, such as reported Russian or Chinese plots to disable GPS systems; and over-the-horizon risks from artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

In her speech at the Democratic National Convention accepting the nomination Thursday night, Harris briefly mentioned the high-tech threat while affirming that she would prove a tough commander in chief who would “ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”

I will make sure that we lead the world into the future on space and artificial intelligence; that America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century, and that we strengthen, not abdicate, our global leadership,” she said.

We may need to wait till she becomes President –  if that occurs – with November 5th. But we will continue to monitor what she says about a Harris foreign policy.

Image Credit: Vox

This Post originally appeared at my Substack, Alan’s Newsletter.

https://globalsummitryproject.substack.com/p/contemplating-in-these-early-days

The Troubles with Multilateralism: Two

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So this week’s Post may be ‘a bit lighter’ than usual. But I have an excuse: there is a celebration afoot in the family this weekend – my younger daughter is getting married – much activity is planned. Still here is this week’s thinking on global order matters on ‘Alan’s Newsletter’.

Now, where were we?  Ah yes, focusing on diplomacy and the difficulties of multilateralism, especially among the Formals. Now Richard Gowan recently wrote a piece examining the UN, especially in the light of the upcoming September UN Summit of the Future. Richard oversees the International Crisis Group’s advocacy work at the United Nations, liaising with diplomats and UN officials in New York. Richard also is a Research Associate and Associate Director for Policy at the Center on International Cooperation at NYU.

As Richard describes it in his article, “Redefining the UN’s Prime Purpose” there is a growing sentiment to diminish the UN’s role in peace and security matters. This seems to go all the way to the top of the UN chain. As Richard writes:

Even some of the organization’s leaders appear to think that the UN may be wise to take a lower profile on security concerns and focus its energies elsewhere. … In 2021, he [Antonio Guterres] published a report on the future of multilateralism entitled ‘Our Common Agenda’… In 2023, Guterres released a fuller New Agenda for Peace. This contained a frank assessment of the poor state of international relations, and urged states to reinvest in diplomacy. It included interesting passages on the security challenges posed by AI, new biotechnologies, and other scientific advances. Yet the document struck a humble note, emphasizing that the UN’s ability to address many conflicts is limited and that international interventions often backfire. Instead, one of its themes is that states should invest more in their domestic conflict prevention efforts.

And the bottom line, according to Richard, is reducing the UN role:

In line with the Common Agenda, the Secretary General has portrayed the summit as an opportunity for presidents and prime ministers to launch new ideas about global governance. Diplomatic discussions about the summit – and a Pact for the Future that is meant to come out of it – have further highlighted the difficulties of talking about security at the UN.

This stepping away from conflict abatement efforts seems to extend through a significant number of UN Members and somewhat surprisingly, or maybe not, depending on your point of view, it appears to be expressed by Members of the Global South. Richard has in fact picked up on this thread of thinking from the Global South:

Many UN members from the so-called Global South have made it clear that the summit and pact should focus on the economic problems that they face today. Scores of developing countries are now carrying unsupportable debt burdens, and want the summit to help them unlock affordable financing.

Many of these UN members from the Global South – what used to be referred to in the past as the Third World, or the developing world, or even as the NAM, the ‘Nonaligned Movement’  have made it clear that the upcoming Summit of the Future and the Pact for the Future should focus on their economic problems, especially in the light of significant and growing debt but also in financing the green transition that they all face today.

The dilemma of course is, if the UN backs away from conflict suppression, then who, or what, can the global order rely on. It is evident that there is a hard limit on what the UN can do in the face of great power conflict for the moment but there are many conflicts where the UN is, and has played a role in limiting, and in some instances ending, conflict. The problem has been that the efforts are slow and too often barely effective and these peace efforts can extend for far too many years. So new approaches are called for and likely include stronger immediate pressure and serious diplomatic actions backed possibly by strong sanctions and in some limited cases early intervention. As Richard concludes:

Even if the UN’s narrowly defined security role is shrinking, multilateral cooperation is still essential to addressing the security of states and individuals in a wider sense. So it is possible that the UN will see its traditional mediation and peacekeeping roles shrink, while still contributing to making the world a safer place through other strands of work.

Reliance on more active diplomacy needs to be considered especially in  a world where there is a growing threat of conflict, violent conflicts such as Ukraine and the Gaza wars. But there also needs to be a shift in thinking how, and when, to turn to force is warranted. Dan Drezner from Drezner’s World, and Tufts, and other things, points to the weakness of diplomatic thinking and action. In the case he discusses this is on the part of one of the leading powers, the United States. As Dan in this Foreign Affairs article titled, “How Everything Became National Security: And National Security Became Everything” points to US thinking and action in foreign policy and how it has become dominated for far too long by an overweening national security mindset:

Consider the history of the National Security Strategy, the report on current threats that the president is supposed to deliver to Congress annually, although in practice it is usually released less often. A review of post-1990 reports reveals a steady expansion of qualifying concerns: energy security, nuclear proliferation, drug trafficking, and terrorism, among many others.

 

In the 70 years since, the definition of national security has been stretched almost beyond recognition. New technologies have multiplied the vectors through which external forces can threaten the United States. Furthermore, because security issues command greater staffs and budgets, policy entrepreneurs have strong incentives to frame their interests as matters of national security. The forces that push issues into the national security queue are far more powerful than the forces that lead policymakers to exclude them. Nevertheless,even with this expansion, the United States has been blindsided by events: 9/11, the COVID-19 pandemic, the October 7 attacks. Simply having a longer list of threats hasn’t really helped prepare for the unexpected.

The need for strategic recalculation by the US and among the major powers is all too apparent today. What that recalculation is, and how to implement that, is a discussion for another day.

This Post was first posted at my Substack Alan’s Newsletter https://open.substack.com/pub/globalsummitryproject/p/the-troubles-with-multilateralism?r=bj&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Comments are welcome as are the free subscriptions

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The Intensity of the US Presidency – and the Race

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So many eventful happenings again this past week. As a consequence this Post will be a quick ‘dip and serve’ of several consequential matters. First from my international law colleague, Ooa Hathaway from Yale Law School and the Department of Political Science at Yale. She is one of the best. She and her colleague, Scott Shapiro wrote a terrific book in 2017, The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World. And it was interesting to see this past week that her piece on the Presidential Immunity case, Trump v the United States, appeared in Foreign Affairs, the journal not particularly notable for publishing international law issues. Nevertheless, the piece is quite interesting by pointing out that this examination of Presidential Immunity domestically has long been examined internationally – and the consequences have not been good. As Oona writes: 

What most analysts have failed to note, however, is that this lack of legal accountability for decisions by the U.S. president, including decisions to direct the military to use lethal force, is nothing new. It has long been the reality for most of the world outside the United States.

As Oona points out there has been a long effort to reign in such ‘extra-legal’ Presidential behavior:

What most analysts have failed to note, however, is that this lack of legal accountability for decisions by the U.S. president, including decisions to direct the military to use lethal force, is nothing new. It has long been the reality for most of the world outside the United States.

 

For years, attempts have been made to hold the United States accountable for its unsanctioned violence. Lawyers in the United States and overseas have filed case after case challenging U.S. military and CIA operations abroad, but few have made it past procedural and jurisdictional hurdles. As a result, the U.S. president has long been a “king above the law” when it comes to actions outside the United States.

As Oona, perhaps, vainly concludes: 

The problem of presidential immunity—and the capacity of the president to act outside the law—was not created by the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States. It was simply exposed and expanded by it. Outside the United States, American presidents have long been able to violate the law with impunity, inflicting death and property destruction on civilians in the process. Now that this is also true in the United States, perhaps there will be the will to do something about it.

The acknowledgement of some immunity for ‘official acts’ – still to be determined of course, is just one aspect of presidential intensity that I recognized in the past week. The obvious other matter is the gathering US presidential race. It has been a whirlwind of change for the Democrats of course, but it seems for the Republicans and the Trump campaign as well. 

First was the incredibly speedy replacement of President Biden with his Vice-President, Kamala Harris. The ultra speedy consolidation of her position as the presumptive nominee for the Democrats was startling and indeed head spinning.  As Shane Goldmacher described in his recent NYT piece, titled, “How Kamala Harris Took Command of the De​​mocratic Party in 48 Hours”:

Time was of the essence. A sprawling call list of the most important Democrats to reach had been prepared in advance, according to two people with knowledge of the situation. The vice president, in sneakers and a sweatshirt, began methodically dialing Democratic power brokers.

 

I wasn’t going to let this day go by without you hearing from me,” Ms. Harris had said over and over, as day turned to night, according to five people who received her calls or were briefed on them.

 

The blitz demonstrated exactly the kind of vigor and energy that Mr. Biden had lacked in recent weeks. Mr. Biden had reportedly made 20 calls to congressional Democrats in the first 10 or so days after the debate, while his candidacy hung in the balance. Ms. Harris made 100 calls in 10 hours.

 

Within 48 hours, Ms. Harris had functionally cleared the Democratic field of every serious rival, clinched the support of more delegates than needed to secure the party nomination, raised more than $100 million and delivered a crisper message against former President Donald J. Trump than Mr. Biden had mustered in months.

The speed and impact on the Democratic Party of Harris assuming leadership, and the invidious comparison with Biden and his now ended campaign appears quite stark. As described by Goldmacher:

Even some at the White House and the newly transformed Harris campaign in Wilmington, Del., privately confided that the vice president’s energetic early appearances were a refreshing change from those of the 81-year-old president, whose verbal stumbles were constant fodder on the right.

The heaviness and distress of the prior campaign was only underlined by the President’s ‘stepping aside’ Oval Office appearance and statement this last Wednesday. It was quite the downer and it certainly lacked insight and explanation. Susan B. Glasser of TheNewYorker did a good job of describing the very short Biden speech: 

The short, awkward speech—a mere eleven minutes, though it felt longer than that, listening to Biden’s painful communion with the ghosts of Presidents past as he justified his decision to step aside a few months before the election—served as yet another reminder of why Democratic officials had felt such an urgency to act. … Lyndon B. Johnson was the only other modern President to choose not to run again for a second term, and, in the address he gave to the nation making his surprise announcement, in March of 1968, the trauma of Vietnam that prompted his decision did not seem at all comparable to Biden’s quieter tragedy of an octogenarian in decline and denial.

 

Years from now, I suspect it will not be Biden’s speech that I’ll remember so much as the few heady days of pure political joy among Democrats that preceded it: the race against Trump, practically given up for lost, suddenly looked winnable again.

That sudden energy and excitement that appeared to surge through the Democratic Party seemed very evident if not palatable. Now, let’s be clear, it is far too early to tell if the Harris ascension has in fact altered the trajectory of the race. And it will take some time to get some electoral evidence impact. Any numbers at the current moment can only be received with restraint if not outright skepticism. Still, here is just an early dip into the electoral waters at this very early stage by folks at the NYT under the heading: “Harris Narrows Gap Against Trump, Times/Siena Poll Finds” : 

Overall, Mr. Trump leads Ms. Harris 48 percent to 47 percent among likely voters in a head-to-head match. That is a marked improvement for Democrats when compared to the Times/Siena poll in early July that showed Mr. Biden behind by six percentage points, in the aftermath of the poor debate performance that eventually drove him from the race.” … Because the survey was of voters nationwide, the impact of Ms. Harris’s candidacy in particular battleground states was not immediately clear.

And my colleague Dan Drezner from Drezner’s World,  a noted Substack provider not to mention a Distinguished Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School  of Tufts University set out ‘Ten Things I Think I Think About the 2024 Presidential Race After Joe Biden’s Exit’. Here just one point:

Until then, [the Convention] I have ten thoughts — some of which are pretty banal but nonetheless worthy of mention:

 

2. Despite all the shocks, the race remains mostly unchanged. In the past ten days there has been an assassination attempt, multiple court rulings favorable to Trump, his choice of J.D. Vance to be his vice president candidate, and the pageantry of the Republican National Convention. Despite all that, Trump has not received much of a bump. To be sure, he’s in the lead, which is something. Still, despite a month’s worth of good news, it’s still a pretty tight race. That is mostly because Trump is a historically unpopular politician. Never forget that although Trump has a high floor of support, he also has an incredibly low ceiling.

 It is clearly, at this moment, a real contest again. Phew! And, enjoy the Olympics!

Image Credit: CNBC 

Violence and Political Disorder in the United States

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It’s rather foolish to believe that even a ‘bullet wound’ would alter Donald Trump. His speech accepting the nomination for the Republican Party on Thursday night – over 90 minutes – proved that.  What you see is what you get. But let me reflect for a moment on the consequences for Trump, and the political system, of this attempt on his life.  Its impact it seems on American politics, and more particularly on the Trump third presidential run – well, at least for the moment, appears rather negligible. As Susan B. Glasser of The NewYorker wrote:

Trump’s supposed pivot to the center was silly spin, and yet all week long I marvelled at the collective susceptibility to this narrative, so seductive, so absurd. … Soon enough on Thursday night, the audience was back to its comfort zone, booing as Trump criticized “crazy Nancy Pelosi” and warned that the hated Democrats were “destroying our country,” cheering him on as he demanded the firing of union leaders and rambled about the “China virus” and the “plunder” of our nation by rapacious foreigners. The second coming of George Herbert Walker Bush this was not.

He may have had a brush with death but he has not been reborn. He is the same Trump, only four years older, angrier, and far, far more incoherent than anyone who has any business being President of the United States. If Biden can’t beat him, then surely someone else can—and must.

Okay, so it was, I suspect, a rather a vain hope. But it is worth reflecting here on the incident and what it says about American political violence. It certainly appears that many view the shooting – public and commentators alike – as being strongly linked to political violence in the United States. Numerous commentators reprised repeated views and analysis that first reflected on heightened political polarization in the US body politic and then suggesting the tie to instances of political violence. Foreign Affairs reflected on this causal chain with an interview with Robert Lieberman, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins,  who with his colleague from Cornell, Suzanne Mettler in 2020 had written an FA piece titled, “The Fragile Republic: American Democracy Has Never Faced So Many Threats All at Once”. In that piece the two argued:

Polarization is not a static state but a process that feeds on itself and creates a cascade of worsening outcomes. Over time, those who exploit it may find it difficult to control, as members of the party base become less and less trustful of elites and believe that none is sufficiently devoted to their core values.

The culmination of polarization can endanger democracy itself. If members of one political group come to view their opponents as an existential threat to their core values, they may seek to defeat them at all costs, even if it undermines normal democratic procedures. They may cease to view the opposition as legitimate and seek permanent ways to prevent it from gaining power, such as by stacking the deck in their own favor. They may become convinced that it is justifiable to circumvent the rule of law and defy checks and balances or to scale back voting rights, civil liberties, or civil rights for the sake of preserving or protecting the country as they see fit.

And then as Lieberman reflects in his very recent interview on the current political landscape that we face in the aftermath of the shooting:

There are four features that help cause democratic crises. The first is political polarization, the second is conflict over who belongs in the political community, the third is high and growing economic inequality, and the fourth is excessive executive power. At least one of these forces has been present at every moment of democratic turmoil in U.S. history.

What makes the last four years different is that all of them are present. They helped fuel Trump’s rise and were part of why the country was vulnerable to an incident like the storming of the Capitol on January 6. And unfortunately, every such event only further weakens the country’s democracy. It makes the Trump shooting even more dangerous and provocative than it otherwise would be.

So I really worry that if Trump and his people start talking about this in an inflammatory way, you could see not just sporadic attacks—which is what this shooting seems to have been—but more collective and organized forms of violence.

What is interesting is that  a number of current commentators draw the link between the current instability and then tie it back to the origins of the political community. Here is Nick Bryant, the former reporter for the BBC in New York reflecting in FP:

Now, though, I would amend my advice. I would urge young reporters to reach back even further into history. The roots of modern-day polarization, and even the origins of former President Donald Trump, can be located in the country’s troubled birth. Division has always been the default setting.

So many contemporary problems can be traced back to those founding days. U.S. democracy has become so diseased because for most of the country’s history, it has not been that healthy. “We the People,” the rousing words that opened the preamble to the Constitution, was not conceived of as an inclusive statement or catchall for mass democracy. Rather, this ill-defined term referred to what in modern terminology might be called the body politic.

So there are multiple explanations for this instance of political violence, some anchored to the founding of the nation, but most tethered to deep political polarization and dire concerns of immediate political consequences. But there is a particular difficulty, in my mind, in understanding the current circumstances and its political consequences. And to me this understanding the motivation for the shooting by Thomas Crooks. Though much scrutiny has occurred, and I am sure there is likely more to come, there does not appear to be a political motivation involved. In the most recent inquiry by a number of NYT reporters concluding 60 interviews with classmates, teachers, neighbors and officials in Bethel Park, Pa., and reviewed law enforcement bulletins and extensive school records for the article, there is no evidence to date of a political motive:

Experts who study the histories of gunmen said the emerging picture of Mr. Crooks looked more like a 21st-century school shooter than a John Wilkes Booth.

“When somebody attacks a president, our gut instinct is to say, ‘That must be politically motivated,’” said James Densley, a founder of the Violence Project, which has compiled a comprehensive database of mass shootings. “What we might be seeing here is: This was somebody intent on perpetrating mass violence, and they happened to pick a political rally.”

From the near outside – which is where I am situated, it is perplexing that so few commentators reflect on the obvious – the dramatic presence in the United States of too many guns in the country. Not ignoring this, however – and what appears to me to be the obvious as well, is the reflection by Opinion Writer for NYT, David Wallace-Wells. And he writes:

But many others were not so obviously motivated by ideology or a sense of political crusade, including the country’s deadliest attack, in Las Vegas. In Connecticut, Adam Lanza left no manifesto before marching into Sandy Hook Elementary School, and though Virginia Tech’s Seung-Hui Cho left an epic paper trail, it primarily documented deep social resentment and incel-style sexual frustration like that which pushed Elliot Rodger toward violence in the 2014 Isla Vista killings. Other rampages — including in Uvalde, Lewiston and Aurora — have been rendered in national memory not just as horrifying acts of spectacular violence but enigmatic ones, too, with inscrutable motivations.

In the aftermath of the shooting at Trump’s rally, it seems everyone had a story to tell or an argument to make about it. But conspicuously absent was the subject that often takes center stage in the wake of a shooting: guns.

Everyone knows this country is an unusually violent place, but few appreciate just how unusually so. Our gun homicide rate is 22 times as high as it is in the European Union; this means that, on a per-capita basis, for every European who is killed by a gun every year, 22 Americans are. One conservative estimate put the number of guns in America at almost 378 million, increasingly concentrated in a smaller number of households. Perhaps 44 million are AR-15-style rifles.

And while American murder rates are in long-term decline, mass shootings, though only a tiny fraction of the total, are becoming only more common. About a decade ago, it was sometimes pointed out that, contrary to the public narrative, mass shootings hadn’t meaningfully increased in America; instead, they had simply become more salient in an age of, first, cable news and, then, social media. But if you define “mass shooting” as an attack with four or more victims, killed or injured, the number more than doubled between 2014 and 2023.

Experts, analysts and opinion writers need to face these very striking figures. And, if necessary, ignore the politics.

Image Credit: The New York Times