Well, hello, we’re back! I do hope the holidays proved to be a warm time and filled with family and friends. Now, I was ‘chomping at the bit’ to return to Alan’s Newsletter before the end of the Biden administration and the return of Donald J Trump. We are looking at the transition of administrations – focusing on foreign policy.

So where we left Alan’s Newsletter at this first Post of ‘What Can We Expect’ – the last Post of the year 2024, was me actually looking at the end of the Biden administration – and, as I said: “… trying to focus on the end of the Biden administration: what folks conclude about the Biden initiatives and where that then leads, possibly,  for the upcoming Trump administration”, especially targeting US-China policy. 

In this earlier Post I looked primarily at trade and technology policies – and there seemed to be much to be desired – though it was interesting to get Biden’s last words on his own assessment of his administration’s efforts. But now I want to extend the analysis by turning to national security. Interestingly, and as I noted in the earlier Post I was keen to review, none other than Senator McConnell, a dominant Republican figure over several decades in Congress and the Republican majority leader from 2015 to 2021, making him the longest-serving Senate party leader in U.S. history. And for the moment he remains in the Senate and an influence on some at least. But to get there – to McConnell that is,  I thought it worthwhile to first look at Fareed Zakaria’s early 2024 FA article, “The Self-Doubting Superpower: America Shouldn’t Give Up on the World It Made” Fareed has a large public role in assessing US international politics as the host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS and he also writes a weekly column for The Washington Post. Fareed starts out acknowledging the Biden administration’s turn – and not for the better – in international economic policy making: 

“And yet, much of his governing strategy has been predicated on the notion that the country has been following the wrong course, even under Democratic presidents, even during the Obama-Biden administration. In an April 2023 speech, Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, criticized “much of the international economic policy of the last few decades,” blaming globalization and liberalization for hollowing out the country’s industrial base, exporting American jobs, and weakening some core industries.”

Now, I remain rather sceptical of the consequences these folks assign to trade policy but it continues to be a ‘warm blanket’ for many analysts and politicians. Fareed acknowledges it, it but then situates the US in the global order as still a dominant presence: 

“On measure after measure, the United States remains in a commanding position compared with its major competitors and rivals. Yet it does confront a very different international landscape. Many powers across the globe have risen in strength and confidence. They will not meekly assent to American directives. Some of them actively seek to challenge the United States’ dominant position and the order that has been built around it. … The challenge for Washington is to run fast but not run scared. Today, however, it remains gripped by panic and self doubt.” 

Fareed raises the real prospect that the US will quail from continued leadership in the global economy but in fact even beyond that to global order and national security relations as well: 

“The most worrying challenge to the rules-based international order does not come from China, Russia, or Iran. It comes from the United States. If America, consumed by exaggerated fears of its own decline, retreats from its leading role in world affairs, it will open up power vacuums across the globe and encourage a variety of powers and players to try to step into the disarray.” 

 

“Since 1945, America has debated the nature of its engagement with the world, but not whether it should be engaged to begin with. Were the country to truly turn inward, it would mark a retreat for the forces of order and progress. Washington can still set the agenda, build alliances, help solve global problems, and deter aggression while using limited resources—well below the levels that it spent during the Cold War. It would have to pay a far higher price if order collapsed, rogue powers rose, and the open world economy fractured or closed.”

Now the actions by the departing Biden administration may have already done some real damage to relations with allies – this the determination by Biden to kill the Nippon-US Steel deal. As Alan Beattie described it in his FT ‘Trade Secrets’ column:

“Still, some of us were also moderately hopeful that Biden’s long history as an alliance-builder in international relations might weigh reasonably heavily in the balance. That’s where we were largely wrong. When it came down to it, steelmakers were prioritised above all. As a unionised industry located in electoral swing states (Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) with tariff protection inherited from Donald Trump and national security and environmental rationales, however specious, they ticked too many boxes to ignore.” 

 

“All politics is local, including trade politics, but the politics here is quite weird. It’s surreal that the geopolitically important practice of friendshoring is being sabotaged by a USTR with no specialism in national security and a union leader both acting in defiance of colleagues who are closer to the issues at hand. Tai’s obsession with the steel industry has extended to sending groups of USTR officials on tourist trips to do photo-ops with steelworkers. This is vibes-based trade policy backed up by show-and-tell.” 

So, the focus on allies and partners in firming trade relations and building resilient supply chains with them is, in this instance, revealed as hollow: 

“When it came to it, it wasn’t the substance but the vibe of protecting the steel industry that prevented the Biden administration giving friendshoring a fair go. It’s a sad end for a respectable but ultimately unloved idea.” 

And, it suggests that the US under Biden is not ‘walking the walk’ when it comes to friendshoring but also undermining trust with, in this case, one of its closest allies in the Indo-Pacific, Japan.

All right then, focusing more directly on national security, let me turn to Rush Doshi who is a colleague – an assistant professor of security studies at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He is also senior fellow for China and director of the Initiative on China Strategy at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and importantly he served the Biden White House at the National Security Council (NSC) as the Director and later Deputy Senior Director for China and Taiwan from 2021 to March 2024. So involved with Biden national security. Having just emerged from the Biden administration, how does he now view the requirements of US national security policy today? Well, Rush assists us in a FA article produced in late November. There he wrote: 

“Without corrective action, the United States faced a growing risk of being surpassed by China technologically, dependent on it economically, and defeated militarily in the South China Sea or Taiwan Strait.” 

 

“The Biden administration focused on rebuilding American strength by focusing on its foundations at home and its relationships with partners abroad, an approach summed up in its “invest, align, compete” tagline.

 

“That formula can also serve as a way to fulfill the Trump administration’s vision of “peace through strength.” But rebuilding American power will require the Trump administration to undertake new efforts, too, that depend on bipartisan congressional support and the buy in of the American public.”

 

“But the foundations of that strength have atrophied, especially since the end of the Cold War. The administration will need to undertake significant structural reforms to remedy these weaknesses.”

 

“The United States needs to fix its defense industrial base to rapidly deter China and, if necessary, defeat it in a potential conflict. At present, the United States would expend all its munitions within a week of sustained fighting and would struggle to rebuild surface vessels after they were sunk, with a national shipbuilding capacity less than that of one of China’s larger shipyards.”

 

“Washington also needs to protect its critical infrastructure from cyberattack. China has compromised U.S. critical infrastructure upon which millions of Americans rely, including water and gas, transportation, and telecommunications systems, with the aim of inciting chaos, sowing panic, and reducing U.S. will in a conflict scenario.” 

 

“Finally, the United States needs to invest in reindustrialization and technological leadership. China already accounts for more than 30 percent of global manufacturing, can innovate successfully, increasingly leads in the sectors of tomorrow, and is redirecting massive amounts of capital into manufacturing as its housing market stagnates. The result, a second “China shock” akin to the one that flooded U.S. markets with cheap Chinese goods at the beginning of this century, will threaten the United States’ future as an industrial power and leave it more dependent on China than China is on the United States. 

 

“National security is not just about foreign policy. Trump’s team should remember that the key to this decisive decade is not just what the United States does abroad. What it does at home to improve its competitive position may be even more important.” 

What is more than interesting is that Rush urges these major efforts after just emerging from several years at the Biden administration. Now what does that say about the Biden years. 

So, finally, let’s turn to what I promised you above Mitch McConnell. Now McConnell is more than willing to attack the Biden administration for what he describes as a weak national security effort. But it also urges Trump to avoid just focusing on China and in doing so ignore the real threat to Europe – and to the US obviously, from Russia’s Ukraine efforts. As McConnell describes:

“Trump would be wise to build his foreign policy on the enduring cornerstone of U.S. leadership: hard power.” 

 

“To pretend that the United States can focus on just one threat at a time, that its credibility is divisible, or that it can afford to shrug off faraway chaos as irrelevant is to ignore its global interests and its adversaries’ global designs.”

 

“China poses the gravest long-term challenge to U.S. interests. But although successive presidents have acknowledged this reality, their actual policies have been inconsistent.”

 

“In so doing, it [Trump] must not repeat the mistakes of President Barack Obama’s so-called pivot to Asia. The Obama administration failed to back up its policy with sufficient investments in U.S. military power.” 

Against the grain I suspect of many of the MAGA Republicans including, possibly Donald Trump, McConnell urges: 

“The United States needs a military that can handle multiple increasingly coordinated threats at once. Without one, a president will likely hesitate to expend limited resources on one threat at the expense of others, thereby ceding initiative or victory to an adversary.The United States must get back to budgets that are informed by strategy and a force-planning construct that imagines fighting more than one war at once.”

 

“The United States’ security and prosperity are rooted in military primacy. Preserving that decisive superiority is costly, but neglecting it comes with far steeper costs.”

For McConnell, then, there is a real need to underpin current US economic strength with policy initiatives: 

“I am not naive about the downsides of international trade, but there is no question that free markets and free trade have been responsible for much of the United States’ prosperity.”

 

“That’s why the United States and like-minded free-market economies must work together to reform the international trading system to protect U.S. interests from predatory trade practices—not abandon the system entirely.  Without U.S. leadership in this area, there is little question that Beijing will be able to rewrite the rules of trade on its own terms.”

Finally, there is a real abiding requirement, from this side of the Republican Congressional majority – directed to the MAGA Republicans and urging  this critical need for the incoming Trump administration:

“Trump will no doubt hear from some that he should prioritize a single theater and downgrade U.S. interests and commitments elsewhere. Most of these voices will argue for focusing on Asia at the expense of interests in Europe or the Middle East.  Such thinking is commonplace among both isolationist conservatives who indulge the fantasy of “Fortress America” and progressive liberals who mistake internationalism for an end in itself.”

 

“Neither camp has committed to maintaining the military superiority or sustaining the alliances needed to contest revisionist powers.” 

So, there you are. McConnell is urging ‘a full court press’ to maintain a dominant US military position and global leadership. Will Trump and his MAGA Republicans in Congress follow through. I have my doubts. 

Image Credit: Getty Images

This Post first appeared as a Substack Post at Alan’s Newsletter –

https://open.substack.com/pub/globalsummitryproject/p/what-can-we-expect-a-second-look?r=bj&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true