Tag Archives: Trump Foreign Policy

In a Trump World, ‘Widening the Who’ in the Global Order

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Now we are out a bit early. But that’s not surprising because of the US national elections on Tuesday night. So a few thoughts on that and then a redirection to the, “what do we do about the global order in the light of Trump’s return, including many of his former advisers, to the White House”

The electoral equation in the end proved to be rather simple if also somber. Harris lost too many non-college and latino men and she won women – but not by nearly enough. With the Latinos, Trump won 32 percent in 2020; in 2024 Trump won about 45 percent.  Harris,  on women, won 54 percent but Biden in 2020 won 57 percent. The Harris statistic on women is dismaying.

Now I am not one to focus and comment on US elections – other than as a ‘somewhat informed’ but non-expert – but it does seem to me that the Harris campaign did not strategically break through with a host of electoral groups with her message. And she needed to to secure the Presidency. As Michael Hirsh described in FP: 

Despite overpowering Trump in their only debate on Sept. 10 and raising more than $1 billion in donations in just three months—a new record—Harris often floundered when challenged to deliver a convincing summary of her agenda on critical issues such as the economy and immigration. She also fumbled badly in explaining her flip-flops on issues such as fracking (which she once opposed and later supported, but without pointing out the simple fact that improved technology had made it environmentally safer). That led Wall Street Journal commentator Peggy Noonan to label Harris an “artless dodger.”

Worse, possibly, was the view expressed by Opinion Writer Peter Baker who suggests that Trump represents a significant current of American thinking. As he wrote in the NYT:

The assumption that Mr. Trump represented an anomaly who would at last be consigned to the ash heap of history was washed away on Tuesday night by a red current that swept through battleground states — and swept away the understanding of America long nurtured by its ruling elite of both parties. … With his comeback victory to reclaim the presidency, Mr. Trump has now established himself as a transformational force reshaping the United States in his own image.

 

No longer can the political establishment write off Mr. Trump as a temporary break from the long march of progress, a fluke who somehow sneaked into the White House in a quirky, one-off Electoral College win eight years ago. With his comeback victory to reclaim the presidency, Mr. Trump has now established himself as a transformational force reshaping the United States in his own image.

 

Populist disenchantment with the nation’s direction and resentment against elites proved to be deeper and more profound than many in both parties had recognized. Mr. Trump’s testosterone-driven campaign capitalized on resistance to electing the first woman president.

In fact, according to Baker, Trump was appreciated for all his effrontery and racism:

Rather than be turned off by Mr. Trump’s flagrant, anger-based appeals along lines of race, gender, religion, national origin and especially transgender identity, many Americans found them bracing. Rather than be offended by his brazen lies and wild conspiracy theories, many found him authentic.

So with Trump in the White House and his people in the Administration where do we go? On the immediate geopolitical front we are very likely to see rising tensions with China – though I believe there is a path to less tension. We are very likely to see pressure on Ukraine to halt the conflict with Putin even at the cost of transferring Ukrainian lands to Russia – a real cost and speaking of costs we are likely to see a blizzard of tariffs on Chinese goods and possibly beyond. But it is a bit early to fill in the contours of Trump 2.0 foreign policy.

But, instead, let me look at the outline of the direction we saw coming from Democrat and Democrat-leaning experts and operatives. In particular let me look briefly at the design described by Anne-Marie Slaughter in a recent Foreign Affairs piece titled: “How America Can Succeed in a Multialigned World: The Importance of Building Truly Global Partnerships”. Anne-Marie is currently CEO of the think tank New America. From 2002 to 2009, she was Bert G. Kerstetter ‘66 University Professor of Politics and International Affairs and Dean of the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. In 2009 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appointed her as the first woman Director of Policy Planning in the U.S. State Department. She has been a ‘close in’ Democratic voice and it is why I refer to this article to give an inside possible glimpse at where the Harris administration might have moved had she been elected and indeed the possibility of Anne-Marie’s very real likely participation.

Anne-Marie is quite aware that there are two challenges this Biden administration faced and would be front and center for a Harris administration – the rising geopolitical tensions with Russia, and with China and with Iran, but also the existential global governance threats, climate, finance and weakened multilateralism and the institutions that no longer served global order purposes. Anne-Marie moved back to gaze at the Biden administration and its effort to build not just an alliance system but beyond that to a ‘multipartner world’. As Anne-Marie declared:

It [the Biden administration] has reanimated and expanded traditional alliances such as NATO and strengthened and created a host of new diplomatic and security partnerships. Secretary of State Antony Blinken described in Foreign Affairs a network of “partners in peace,” the result of an intense diplomatic strategy to safeguard U.S. interests abroad while rebuilding competitiveness at home.

Yet as she described the effort:

 These partnerships are important and valuable. Still, the Biden strategy overall has tilted too far in the direction of geopolitical competition over global cooperation, even as it tries to do both at once. To strike the right balance, the next administration must partner with a wider variety of global actors, focus those partnerships more on existential global threats, and accept a more decentralized, messier world that welcomes leadership from many different quarters.

 

The concept of “multistakeholder governance” holds that all actors who have a stake in the outcome of a specific decision, whether a state, an international institution, a corporation, or a municipality, find a place at the table at some point in the decision-making process.

So the future of multipartnering was just not just constructed on state, regional and international organizations but extending to non-state and substate actors. As Anne-Marie argues:

The concept of “multistakeholder governance” holds that all actors who have a stake in the outcome of a specific decision, whether a state, an international institution, a corporation, or a municipality, find a place at the table at some point in the decision-making process.

Her conclusion for this multipartner approach is as follows:

A national security strategy dedicated to building a multipartner world will still leave plenty of room for the United States to lead on the global stage. Moreover, embracing multisector partnerships gives open societies such as that of the United States a leg up in in geopolitical competition, given the autonomy and energy of American civic, corporate, philanthropic, technological, scientific, and educational institutions.

This wide multipartner approach, as described in part by Anne-Marie Slaughter, is unlikely to be captured and furthered by the incoming Trump administration. But it is worth keeping in mind and may well be an approach that will be valuable for many national, regional and international actors in the near future, even if not for a Trump America.

Meanwhile, another piece in a multipartner world is a possibility. And we at the China-West Dialogue (CWD) are keenly examining the role today of Middle Powers in furthering efforts to meet the challenge of global threats and to diminish the ratcheting up of geopolitical tensions. We are currently examining with colleagues across the globe the potential for Middle Power Diplomacy (MPD)  to tackle global threats and stabilize the global governance environment. As the lead co-chair of the CWD, Colin Bradford has written:

Global pluralism, developed in 2020-2023, posits the existence already of “autonomous” strategies and independence in foreign policies as a “global political dynamic” in global relations.  Pluralism is a core concept for CWD, in that it leads to the “pluralization” of relations with China as an “alternative framework” to address the toxic tension in the bilateral China-US relationship in recent years. This has been the goal of CWD from its foundation.

 

In the last year of CWD exchanges, the importance of Middle Powers and Middle Power Diplomacy has arisen as the domestic driver of pluralism.  This new CWD series seeks to elucidate the factors enabling countries to be Middle Powers and the features of their international behaviors which are effective in addressing global systemic challenges.

 

A better understanding of these factors and features could facilitate proactive national efforts to deliberately contribute to global pluralism by “punching above their weight” and to influence global governance outcomes that include China and the US but which “globalize” those outcomes, rather than narrow them by allowing great power dominance to prevail.

We have examined with colleagues globally, and always with our colleagues from China in the CWD process, Middle Power actions from Japan and Latin America, especially Brazil, and Korea shortly with Turkey, Indonesia and the ASEAN to come and also with examinations of Europe and the US and China and MPD.

Trump America with its hypernationalist focus and its likely transactional initiatives fails to promote any kind of global order optimism; but there are other pathways. We need to explore these further and promote those that appear promising.

This was first posted as a Substack POst at Alan’s Newsletter. All comments and free subscriptions are welcome

https://open.substack.com/pub/globalsummitryproject/p/in-a-trump-world-widening-the-who?r=bj&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Image Credit: ABC News

 

 

 

Exploring the Many Recent International Arrangements – Multilateralism, Plurilateralism, Alliances, Bipolarity and More

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Multilateralism, plurilateralism,  bipolarity, multipolarity, alliances and alignments have all become subjects of serious inquiry in policy and political communities. The discussion and questioning of various international governing arrangements has grown ever louder with the final year, as it turns out, of the Trump Presidency. And, now, also, with the successor to Trump, President-elect, Joe Biden.

The outgoing President scorned long standing alliances and alignments and trumpeted (no pun intended) ‘America First’ attacking these traditional relationships. He fawned over authoritarian leaders and spurned allied ones. Rather than multilateral trade action, he targeted Chinese trade practices imposing broad-based tariffs that brought costs to American producers and consumers. All these many actions seemed determined to undermine the rules-based order.

Meanwhile, Biden, in marked contrast to Trump, announced soon after his election, the return of US global order leadership. This seemed to reflect what colleague Thomas Wright (2020) described in The Atlantic as a ‘restorationist approach’ to American foreign policy.  President-elect Biden presenting his national security team on November 24th declared (2020):

And it’s a team that reflects the fact that America is back, ready to lead the world, not retreat from it. Once again, sit at the head of the table.

What arrangements do Biden and his team envisage – what relationships do they target? Will they seek to: revitalize alliances, encourage multilateralism, avoid rising bipolar tensions between the United States and China and tackle the many global governance challenges. Is the Biden foreign policy willing to relax relations and lower tensions with China and broadly take the steps that reestablish American leadership and to refocus on a multilateral rules-based order? 

Over the next few posts I hope to delve and deliver, with friends, the many forms of global order relations – multilateralism, plurilateralism, multipolarity, alliances, alignments and more. The hope is to reflect on the diversity of these arrangements, determine their individual and collective effectiveness and to examine these arrangements in the context of a new US Administration and its goals. And we hope to uncover those structures and arrangements most likely to stabilize the international system and further global governance efforts.

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Declaring Engagement Dead!

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Opinion and analysis writing often seems to come forward in ‘waves’. It is almost never just one piece but a veritable series of similar narrations that seeks to identify the trends.  This wave-like writing certainly is evident when it comes to US foreign policy making and in particular the rising tensions between the two leading powers – the United States and China. There was a first wave of  ‘New Cold War’ articles, that as I suggested along with some of my V20 colleagues seemingly impacted partisans of both Parties in the United States. Then, there was the wave US-China trade war tensions. And now we see the current wave in the ‘Rising US-China’ tensions and the return to a view that this may indeed be a new sorta ‘Cold War’ and dire predictions of decoupling between the two leading economies and the ‘deer in the headlights’ of US allies trying to avoid choices between the two.

This newest wave of US-China tensions has been orchestrated in part by the Trump Administration with speeches from senior officials William Barr, the Attorney General,  Robert C. O’Brien, National Security Advisor,  Christopher Wray, the Director of the FBI, Mark Esper Secretary of Defense and, finally with the icing on the cake the speech by  Michael Pompeo the  current Secretary of State at a highly significant location – the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum at Yorba Lind, California.

It is interesting that these declarative words all began with the Donald Trump’s actions – the chaos, the denigration of multilateralism, the strong-arming of allies and the threats to end key alliance relations of the liberal order – NATO, US- Japan and US-Korea security treaties. While these initiatives and threats heralded Trump’s America First policy they have been superseded most recently with the targeting of China. It reflects, one suspects, the ‘Hail Mary’ approach that Trump seems to have chosen with falling numbers on his reelection. It is China ‘all the time’, by these officials, attacks on the Communist Party of China and even the targeting of regime change by these US officials.  Additionally, and I don’t think prematurely US foreign policy analysts are at the same time attempting to anticipate a foreign policy under a Biden Administration. But we’ll save that examination for another moment.

Meanwhile the language is barely restrained . As my CSIS colleagues Scott Kennedy and Matthew Goodman conclude in a recent post:

Through a series of speeches and tough actions, the Trump administration has clearly signaled that it views a Xi Jinping-led China as an existential threat to the West, and hence, is trying to mobilize its friends and allies to form a united front against Beijing.

Here is William Barr, the Attorney General of the United States describing China and its current ambitions in a speech he delivered on July 16th:

… that is, the United States’ response to the global ambitions of the Chinese Communist Party.  The CCP rules with an iron fist over one of the great ancient civilizations of the world.  It seeks to leverage the immense power, productivity, and ingenuity of the Chinese people to overthrow the rules-based international system and to make the world safe for dictatorship.

The objective is according to Barr, clear:

The People’s Republic of China is now engaged in an economic blitzkrieg—an aggressive, orchestrated, whole-of-government (indeed, whole-of-society) campaign to seize the commanding heights of the global economy and to surpass the United States as the world’s preeminent superpower.

And, the dire views of Barr are only amplified, indeed ‘accelerated’ a now favored term in this ‘Age of the pandemic’ by Mike Pompeo:

But I have faith we can do it. I have faith because we’ve done it before. We know how this goes. I have faith because the CCP is repeating some of the same mistakes that the Soviet Union made – alienating potential allies, breaking trust at home and abroad, rejecting property rights and predictable rule of law.

And as pointed up above the location of the Pompeo speech was no accident. It is the Nixon library – the archive of the President that set in motion along with his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, the dramatic alteration of US policy toward Mao’s China – one of the seminal diplomatic events of any President in the post WWII period. And why deliver the speech there? Well, to pronounce that policy a dramatic mistake:

As time went on, American policymakers increasingly presumed that as China became more prosperous, it would open up, it would become freer at home, and indeed present less of a threat abroad, it’d be friendlier. It all seemed, I am sure, so inevitable.  But that age of inevitability is over. The kind of engagement we have been pursuing has not brought the kind of change inside of China that President Nixon had hoped to induce.

This puts the end of the decades long engagement. ‘Engagement is dead’.

But is it?

Image Credit: Erin Schaff/The New York Times

What Comes Next for the Global Order?

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Much hurried prediction, or more correctly, should I say speculation has been expressed by IR experts over the  impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the current global order. One of IR’s leading lights, Richard Haass, President of CFR has been ‘front and center’  in painting a post Covid global order. It’s not very pretty, nor much of an order. In an April article in Foreign Affairs  he describes the future global order in quite ‘downbeat’ terms:

Yet the world that will emerge from the crisis will be recognizable. Waning American leadership, faltering global cooperation, great-power discord: all of these characterized the international environment before the appearance of COVID-19, and the pandemic has brought them into sharper-than-ever relief. They are likely to be even more prominent features of the world that follows.

He suggest further that even were Biden to be elected the effort to  bring a more traditional global governance system would be stymied:

Even if a foreign policy “traditionalist” such as former Vice President Joseph Biden wins the November presidential election, resistance from Congress and the public will prevent the full-scale return of an expansive U.S. role in the world. And no other country, not China or anyone else, has both the desire and the ability to fill the void the United States has created.

Given this rather grim near future I was caught by the Foreign Policy article by Oona Hathaway and her Yale Law School colleague, Scott Shapiro:

The crisis offers the opportunity to transform the global order from one dominated by a single state, or a small number of them, to a more equal system of global governance. It’s time to stop waiting for a hegemon to come to the rescue and instead try to address more of our global problems through independently organized global clubs.

So, no more hegemon – no US; no China. Instead moving forward and in a position to tackle global governance challenges will be ‘global clubs’.  The characteristics of such club membership – that is excluding members who fail to adhere to the agreed rules – make such clubs reasonable, in fact highly useful  where great power leadership has receded. As the authors suggest:

The idea of decentralizing global governance to shifting alliances of like-minded nations is not entirely new. Much of international law already operates on precisely this principle of shared interests and decentralized enforcement. But unmooring global governance from reliance on a hegemonic actor, and from the global institutions we’ve known since the end of World War II, could become reality in part because of the conditions created by the pandemic.

As they conclude: 

The club rules are enforced not by a hegemon but by members directly by denying the benefits of membership to bad actors. One advantage of such decentralized governance is that any state can start a club. It doesn’t take a hegemon; it just takes a good idea.

These global clubs certainly bring a shift in global governance leadership and policymaking. Their global club thinking may be just the ‘tonic’ needed for what we’ve identified – that is the Vision20 principals, Colin Bradford, Yves Tiberghien and myself – as ‘effective multilateralism. We have described effective multilateralism, at least with  respect to the G20 leaders as “the elective, targeted, and purposeful actions with varied coalitions. We believe encouraging effective multilateralism is a vital tool in meeting the challenges the G20 and the international system face.” 

What Hathaway and Shapiro have offered possibly is a logic for organizing such coalitions. While we have witnessed various multilateralism initiatives, note the ‘Alliance for Multilateralism‘ offered up initially by the foreign ministers of France and Germany. What we haven’t seen is action.

Now is the time.

Image Credit: picture-alliance/AP/photo/T. Camus