Tag Archive for: US Foreign Policy

The shape of Biden’s foreign policy

Joe Biden has been president of the United States for just a few weeks, but the central elements of his approach to the world are already clear: rebuilding at home, working with allies, embracing diplomacy, participating in international institutions and advocating for democracy. All of this puts him squarely in the largely successful post–World War II American foreign policy tradition repudiated by his predecessor, Donald Trump.

Delivering his first address on foreign policy from the State Department on 4 February, Biden declared, ‘America is back.’ He emphasised that Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks for him and went to great lengths to support both America’s diplomats and diplomacy.

Biden also declared that he would stop any withdrawal of US armed forces from Germany, as Trump had ordered, presumably to help restore NATO members’ confidence in US security guarantees and to signal to Russian President Vladimir Putin that he shouldn’t try to use foreign adventurism to distract attention from domestic protests.

On Saudi Arabia, Biden walked a fine line. He distanced the US from military and intelligence support for the war in Yemen, explaining how US involvement henceforth would be diplomatic and humanitarian. At the same time, he made clear that the Saudis weren’t on their own in facing Iran. Squaring this circle will be far from easy, especially given the added complication of US disagreements with Saudi leaders over their poor human rights record.

Biden’s ability to succeed in the world will be limited by several factors, many inherited. America’s capacity to be an effective advocate for democracy is much diminished in the aftermath of the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol, and in view of the country’s polarised politics, endemic racism and Trump’s inept handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The good news is that progress on addressing the pandemic and its economic fallout is already visible. The bad news is that the country’s political and social divisions are certain to endure. Biden is fond of saying that America will lead by the power of its example, but it may be a long time before that example is one the world again admires.

Biden further reinforced humanitarian concerns by pledging to open the country’s doors to a much larger number of refugees. What could also help would be to make a significant number of doses of Covid-19 vaccines available to the developing world. This would be not only morally right, but also in America’s self-interest, as it would slow the emergence of mutations that threaten the effectiveness of existing vaccines. It would also help countries everywhere recover, leading to broad economic improvement and, ultimately, fewer refugees.

Although Biden is correct to criticise Russia and China for violating the rule of law, he can’t force their hands. Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping are prepared to pay the price of sanctions to maintain political control, and the US can’t hold the entire relationship with either country hostage to human rights. It must consider other vital interests, a reality underscored by the Biden administration’s decision to sign a five-year extension of the New START nuclear pact with Russia.

Similar realities (the need for help vis-à-vis North Korea just to mention one) will limit how much pressure the US can exert on China over its behaviour in Hong Kong or towards its Uyghur minority in Xinjiang. And even where Biden can place the rule of law at the centre of US policy—say, in Myanmar—he may discover that governments can resist, especially if they have outside help. All this raises questions about the wisdom of making democracy promotion so central to US foreign policy.

China policy will prove easier to articulate than to implement. Biden voiced strong criticism of Chinese behaviour, but also noted a desire to work with Xi’s regime when it is in America’s interest to do so. China will have to decide whether it is prepared to reciprocate in the face of US criticism, sanctions and export restrictions on sensitive technology.

The US will likewise encounter difficulty in realising its goal of organising the world to meet global challenges, from infectious disease and climate change to nuclear proliferation and conduct in cyberspace. There’s no consensus and no international community, and the US can neither compel others to act as it wants nor succeed on its own.

A good many difficult decisions remain. The Biden administration will need to determine what to do about Iran’s nuclear ambitions (and whether to re-enter the 2015 nuclear pact that many observers see as flawed). There are also questions about what to do with the accord signed a year ago with the Taliban—not so much a peace agreement as a cover for US military withdrawal—and about a North Korean regime that continues to expand its nuclear and missile arsenals.

However Biden’s foreign policy shapes up, it’s important that it be bipartisan and involve Congress when possible. US allies understandably fear that, in four years, Americans could return to Trumpism, if not the man himself. The fear that Trump wasn’t an aberration, but rather reflected what the US has become, undermines US influence. The temptation to govern by executive action is understandable, but when it comes to foreign policy, Biden should try to revive the principle that domestic politics stops at the water’s edge.

The end of liberal diplomacy?

On 11 December, President Donald Trump proclaimed that the United States would recognise Morocco’s sovereignty over the disputed Western Sahara, an apparent reward for the country’s decision to establish diplomatic relations with Israel. The move was swiftly condemned as a blatant violation of diplomatic norms. But, with his facile approach to protracted conflicts, Trump inadvertently made an important point: the emperor—the prevailing diplomatic approach—has no clothes.

To be sure, Trump has himself stood naked on the world stage, as when he claimed to have reached a breakthrough with North Korea or touted his administration’s implausible Middle East ‘peace proposal’. But none of his predecessors—in the US or elsewhere—resolved these conflicts either, despite adhering to revered diplomatic norms.

Those norms are inextricably linked to the liberal world order that emerged after World War II. The ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) doctrine—the world’s commitment, adopted unanimously by the UN General Assembly in 2005, to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity—exemplifies this liberal diplomacy.

But, in the past couple of decades, it has been all downhill for this vision. In Libya—the first case where the UN Security Council authorised a military intervention based on R2P—UN envoys come and go, but the country’s future is decided by foreign powers acting unilaterally. And, with the Security Council deadlocked, R2P hasn’t been invoked to justify military intervention since, despite several notable mass atrocities perpetrated by people’s own governments.

The repeated failure of the UN’s collective security system can be partly attributed to the decline of the liberal world order itself. Long before Trump, America had become increasingly reluctant to act as the order’s guarantor (in Libya, President Barack Obama vowed that the US would ‘lead from behind’). Add to this Russia’s aggressive revisionism, China’s abandonment of its ‘peaceful rise’ and the European Union’s preoccupation with its own survival.

But many of the world’s biggest diplomatic challenges—from the Israeli–Palestinian conflict to the dispute over Western Sahara—predate these factors. Even at its peak, liberal diplomacy could not resolve them, not least because it too often treated statecraft as an expressive art, detached from an ever-changing reality.

Consider the fight over Western Sahara—Africa’s longest-running territorial dispute. In 1975, with Spain poised to cede control of the territory, the International Court of Justice rejected Morocco’s claim to it, and ruled that the local people, the Sahrawis, were entitled to self-determination. But Morocco quickly invaded and annexed the territory.

Since then, the situation has changed drastically. Western Sahara is one of the most sparsely populated territories in the world, with only about 70,000 inhabitants in 1975, and perhaps 550,000 today, living in an area half the size of Spain. Two-thirds of the population are Moroccans, many having moved there after annexation.

In this context, the case for Western Sahara’s self-determination is dubious. A more appropriate approach, which reflects the reality on the ground, is to grant Western Sahara autonomy within the Kingdom of Morocco—exactly the plan endorsed by Trump. (In 2013, Obama backed the same approach in a joint statement with Morocco’s King Muhammed VI.)

Securing political control of an occupied territory by changing its demography is nothing new. Some 600,000 Israelis now live in the West Bank, alongside 2,750,000 Palestinians. Iran has been repopulating vast areas of Syria with Shia Muslims. Nearly 46 years after Turkey invaded Northern Cyprus, settlers from mainland Turkey comprise about half the territory’s population.

Such behaviour should never be endorsed. But pretending it’s not happening won’t help either. When actors are in a protracted state of diplomatic limbo, disregard for the actual balance of power or the duration of the conflict perpetuates a fait accompli favouring the stronger side. This is as true of the Morocco – Western Sahara dispute as it is about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, where infatuation with the deceptive two-state paradigm has made peace all but impossible.

In fact, when Arab states have rejected deals with Israel, they have usually ended up with less. The Palestinians did this on at least two occasions. Likewise, Syria is worse off for rejecting Israel’s offer in 2000 to return the Golan Heights: in 2019, the Trump administration officially recognised Israeli sovereignty.

While Trump’s move was unjustifiable under international law (even if one believes Israel was justified in its use of force during the Six-Day War in 1967), there’s no denying that the prolonged failure of liberal diplomacy made it possible. And it’s part of a larger pattern of unilateral annexations.

For example, the recent eruption of the decades-old conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh ended with a Russia-brokered deal that legitimised Azerbaijan’s annexation of a significant amount of territory. Russian peacekeeping forces were dispatched to enforce the deal. The UN was nowhere to be found.

Trump has much to answer for, diplomatically and otherwise. But the fact is that the diplomatic norms he disregarded weren’t producing results in many of the world’s longest-running conflicts. And, as reckless as his actions often were, they could well bring about progress on seemingly intractable conflicts—most notably, the century-old Arab–Israeli conflict.

After all, because of Trump, Morocco, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Sudan have joined Egypt and Jordan in normalising relations with Israel. (Trump offered Indonesia billions of dollars in aid to do the same, but the country rejected the deal.) Trump also brokered peace among Arab rivals in the Gulf seeking to counter Qatar’s deepening relations with Iran and Turkey.

While President Joe Biden is right to reject many aspects of Trump’s toxic presidency, he would do well to safeguard its few achievements. But for liberal diplomacy to be revived, a reinvigorated transatlantic alliance—with a far more cohesive EU acquiring the hard power it now lacks—is vitally important.

Counting the costs of the Trump presidency

We can finally state with confidence that US President Donald Trump will leave the White House, however reluctantly, on 20 January. As his four years in office come to an end, it’s not too soon to raise the question of how he will be viewed.

History will judge Trump to have been a consequential US president, in that he left America and the world much changed. He will also be seen as one of the worst, if not the worst ever.

True, Trump did accomplish some useful things. Domestically, he pushed policies—a cut to the too-high corporate tax rate; the easing of some overly burdensome regulations—that appear to have contributed to robust economic growth. In foreign policy, he deserves credit for moving the US policy vis-à-vis an increasingly repressive, powerful and assertive China in a more sober, critical direction. He was also right to provide defensive arms to Ukraine, given that part of that country is under Russian occupation.

Negotiating a new trade pact with Mexico and Canada, and then persuading Congress to approve it, were significant achievements, even if the improvement over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was modest and important parts of the new accord were taken from the text of the far bigger Trans-Pacific Partnership that Trump unwisely rejected. The United States also played a valuable role in facilitating the normalisation of ties between Israel and several of its Arab neighbours, notwithstanding its failure to make any headway on the Palestinian issue.

But these and any other accomplishments are dwarfed by what Trump got wrong. Three failures in particular stand out. The first is the damage he has done to American democracy. The events of 6 January 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters besieged and occupied the US Capitol, were the culmination of the president’s efforts to demonise the media, violate established norms, promote lies, question the authority of the courts and reject the results of a presidential election that passed every serious test of its legitimacy.

Trump’s incitement and instigation of unlawful activity and violence were the final straws. To be sure, not all the blame here lies with Trump, because no one forced so many Republican officeholders to follow his lead in seeking to undermine the legitimacy of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. Those who enabled Trump through their political and financial support share responsibility for his sustained assault on the restraints that are critical to the functioning of any democratic system. Nonetheless, what distinguishes this incident of American populism from previous episodes is that it was engineered from the Oval Office rather than from the outside.

The second defining issue is Covid-19. The virus’s outbreak and subsequent spread were China’s failure, but Trump’s inept and inadequate response is what explains why at least 400,000 Americans will have died from the disease by the time he leaves office. The flawed US response also caused millions of jobs and businesses to disappear (some permanently), millions of students to fall behind, and governments and people around the world to lose respect for America.

There was much that the Trump administration could and should have done to deal with the coronavirus. Although it deserves credit for its role in accelerating the development of Covid-19 vaccines, that accomplishment was partly undermined by the failure to arrange for their efficient delivery. The administration also failed to offer consistent messaging on the need for face masks; nor did it ensure that medical personnel had adequate protective gear or provide essential federal support for the development of effective, efficient tests.

The contrast with the relatively successful responses of Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Vietnam and China underscores that a viral outbreak need not have led to a pandemic, and certainly not to one on the scale experienced in the US. Ironically, Trump apparently feared that prioritising the fight against Covid-19 would weaken the economy and doom his re-election chances, when in fact it was his failure to rise to the challenge that probably did him in.

Trump’s third legacy-defining failure was a foreign policy that undermined America’s position in the world. In part, this outcome owes something to the reasons described above: his assault on democracy and failure to deal effectively with Covid-19.

But Trump’s foreign policy also failed on its own grounds. North Korea added to its nuclear stockpile and built more and better missiles despite Trump’s personal diplomacy with Kim Jong-un. Iran reduced the time it would need to develop nuclear weapons following the Trump administration’s unilateral exit from the 2015 nuclear pact (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action). Venezuela’s dictatorship became more entrenched, and Russia, Syria and Iran increased their influence across the Middle East after America withdrew troops and support for local partners.

More broadly, the US withdrawal from international agreements and institutions became the hallmark of Trump’s foreign policy, as did his criticism of America’s European and Asian allies, cosiness with authoritarian leaders and disregard of human rights violations. The net result has been a reduction of US influence on the world stage.

Trump inherited a set of relationships, alliances and institutions that, however imperfect, had for 75 years created a context in which great-power conflict had been avoided, democracy expanded and wealth and living standards increased. Embracing a blend of ‘America first’ nationalism, unilateralism and isolationism, Trump did what he could to disrupt many of these relationships and arrangements without putting anything better in their place.

It will be difficult—if not impossible—to repair this damage anytime soon. Trump will no longer be president, but he will remain influential in the Republican Party and the country. While the world was already in growing disarray, and while US influence was already declining, Trump dramatically accelerated both trends. The bottom line is that he is handing off a country and a world in far worse condition than he inherited. That is his distressing legacy.

From the bookshelf: Do morals matter in US foreign policy?

The idea of morality in US foreign policy is a macabre jest in the age of President Donald Trump.

Yet the amorality of a shape-shifting American president emphasises the value of moral compass points. By taking us to dark places, Trump shows the value of ethical points of light in steering a nation’s course.

In foreign policy, as in the life of a country, it’s not merely a case of who has the power and who doesn’t. A policy that says the ends justify the means starts from a false premise. We can never know the ends. All we have are the means.

Power is as much about frame and form and philosophy as it is about force. Whether you prefer to think in terms of principles or morality, there must be reference points to navigate across the spectrum from the seven deadly sins to the uses of the Seventh Fleet.

The fundamental question of foreign policy is how to control and direct relations between states. The answer from the realist or conservative school is to look to norms (even manners), state institutions and a balance of power. More optimistic and ambitious liberal internationalists turn towards morality, international law and multilateralism.

Trump doesn’t follow either of those intellectual schools. His temper and tantrums as much as his tweeting prove he’s no conservative, with no understanding of how a foreign-policy realist views the mix of forces and interests, capabilities and ambitions.

The age of Trump has brought Joseph Nye to ponder where morals fit in the foreign policy of modern US presidents. Nye is a rare foreign policy thinker who changed the understanding and vocabulary of international relations, through his concept ‘soft power’.

Nye’s new book, Do morals matter? Presidents and foreign policy from FDR to Trump, analyses the role of ethics in US foreign policy from 1945. He works through the presidents from Franklin Roosevelt, scoring their foreign policy on three dimensions: intentions, means used and consequences.

Each president had choices. They could shift the system, as the 45th president has dramatically demonstrated: ‘The advent of the Trump administration has revived interest in what is a moral foreign policy and raised it from a theoretical question to front-page news.’

While Americans constantly make moral judgements about foreign policy, Nye writes, too often they’re haphazard and concerned with the headlines of the moment (hello, Donald!). Enter Nye’s three dimensions for judgement: ‘A moral foreign policy is not a matter of intentions versus consequences but must involve both as well as the means that were used.’

The ‘founders’ of America’s international era were Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. They had ‘no grand design’, Nye says, but all three regarded US isolationism in the Great Depression as a serious mistake. Having won the war, the founders would build on the lesson learned by the broken peace of the 1930s.

The three were liberal realists who drew upon both traditions in constructing their mental maps of the world. While believing in American exceptionalism, they were not ideologues or crusaders, balancing risks and values.

The founders get better grades than the three presidents of the Vietnam era: John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, who were trapped by the domino theory and broader concerns about the credibility of US global commitments in the Cold War.

The post-Vietnam presidents, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, get good grades on ethics. Nye pushes back at those who see this as a weak period in foreign policy. After Vietnam and Watergate, he says, Ford and Carter ‘built their reputations on telling the truth’ and that boosted confidence at home and soft power abroad.

Nye gives most of the credit for the end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union to Mikhail Gorbachev, while still ranking it as a major accomplishment in American foreign policy. The Soviet empire ended without a war because of both luck and skill.

Ronald Reagan’s harsh language initially frightened Soviet leaders. But once Gorbachev took power, ‘it was Reagan’s personal and negotiating skills, not his rhetoric, that was crucial. And Reagan was guided by his moral vision of ending the Cold War and removing the threat of nuclear weapons’.

The foreign policy record of George H.W. Bush ranks near the top, Nye judges: ‘Bush’s contextual intelligence, prudence, and understanding of the importance of not humiliating Gorbachev were crucial. Some people say that in life, it is more important to be lucky than skilful. Fortunately, Reagan and Bush were both.’

The unipolar presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, didn’t have to worry about the balance of power and there were few restraints on American hubris. Clinton gets a good overall score for using the unipolar moment to focus on economic globalisation and institutions. Bush’s invasion of Iraq ranks with Vietnam as a major disaster of the Pax Americana.

Nye sees Barack Obama and Donald Trump as ‘power shift’ presidents, reacting against George W. Bush by ushering in ‘a period of retrenchment’.

Obama, flexible and incremental, cycled through liberalism on the campaign, realism on entering office, optimism in the Arab Spring, and a return to realism by refusing to intervene in Syria’s civil war.

Trump is the wealthiest and oldest US president, Nye writes, ‘unfiltered by the Washington political process’, with the top job his first elected office. Doing politics as reality television, Trump—‘populist, protectionist and nationalist’—hogs the camera with outrageous statements and breaks conventional norms. Unpredictability is a political tool, but too much lying debases the currency of trust.

Trump rejected the liberal international order, questioned alliances, attacked multilateral institutions, withdrew from international trade and climate agreements, and launched a trade war with China. The promise to restore American greatness translated as transactional, disruptive diplomacy.

In a judgement penned before the Covid-19 pandemic, Nye writes that Trump showed ‘an immoral approach to consequences in which personal political convenience prevailed over lives’.

Using his model to assess morality and effectiveness in foreign policy, Nye ranks the 14 presidents:

Best: Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush

Middle: Kennedy, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Clinton and Obama

Worst: Johnson, Nixon, George W. Bush and Trump

Looking at the worst category, Nye writes that Johnson, Bush and Trump were ‘notably deficient on the dimension of contextual intelligence, sometimes teetering on the edge of wilful ignorance, reckless assessment and gross negligence’.

Nye observes that moral choices are an inescapable aspect of foreign policy, though cynics may pretend otherwise. He dismisses the realist line that ‘interests bake the cake and values are just some icing presidents dribbled on to make it look pretty’. Icing says a lot about the idea as well as the taste of the cake, as Nye argues: ‘Humans do not live by the sword alone. Words are also powerful. Swords are swifter, but words can change the minds that wield the swords.’

Concluding, Nye reflects that the important moral choices for future presidents will be about where and how to be involved in the world. American leadership, he says, is not the same as hegemony or domination or military intervention. America now has less preponderance in a more complex world.

His final sentence has a Trumpian shadow: ‘The future success of American foreign policy may be threatened more by the rise of nativist politics that narrow our moral vision at home than by the rise and decline of other powers abroad.’

Is China America’s next ‘evil empire’?

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave a landmark speech on 23 July titled ‘Communist China and the free world’s future’ in which he made it plain that China was now America’s main national security threat. The central theme of his speech was the Chinese Communist Party’s—not the Chinese people’s—designs for global hegemony.

This was clearly a well-prepared and strongly positioned speech. Pompeo said that it was the fourth in a series of China speeches; the other three were delivered by National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, FBI Director Chris Wray and Attorney General William Barr. All this points to a coordinated position in the US administration on the threat from China.

However, the question now is, can we work on the principle that President Donald Trump is of the same view? Pompeo’s speech was mainly about the ideological threat from China’s communism, whereas Trump is much more focused on transactional issues, such as trade and business. Even so, neither Beijing nor the rest of us can afford to dismiss this speech.

The following is a selection of some of the more important assertions by Pompeo:

  • He said that his mission was to explain to the American people ‘what the China threat means for our economy, for our liberty, and indeed for the future of free democracies around the world’.
  • We are watching a Chinese military ‘that grows stronger and stronger, and indeed more menacing’.
  • If we want to have a free 21st century, ‘the old paradigms of blind engagement with China simply won’t get it done’.
  • ‘The free world must triumph over this new tyranny.’
  • ‘We opened our arms to Chinese citizens, only to see the Chinese Communist Party exploit our free and open society.’
  • Barr has said that ‘The ultimate ambition of China’s rulers isn’t to trade with United States. It is to raid the United States.’
  • ‘Perhaps we were naive about China’s virulent strain of communism … or hoodwinked by Beijing’s talk of a “peaceful rise”.’
  • ‘China is increasingly authoritarian at home, and more aggressive in its hostility to freedom everywhere else. And President Trump has now said: enough.’
  • ‘General Secretary Xi Jinping is a true believer in a bankrupt totalitarian ideology.’
  • ‘[I]t’s this ideology that informs his decades-long desire for global hegemony of Chinese communism.’
  • ‘We, the freedom-loving nations of the world, must induce China to change … because Beijing’s actions threaten our people and our prosperity.’
  • ‘We can’t treat this incarnation of China as a normal country, just like any other.’
  • ‘We know that the People’s Liberation Army is not a normal army … Its purpose is to uphold the absolute rule of the Chinese Communist Party elites and expand a Chinese empire, not to protect the Chinese people.’
  • ‘We must also engage and empower the Chinese people—a dynamic, freedom-loving people who are completely distinct from the Chinese Communist Party.’
  • Growing up during the Cold War taught him that ‘communists almost always lie. The biggest lie that they tell is to think that they speak for 1.4 billion people who are surveilled, oppressed, and scared to speak out.’
  • ‘The CCP fears the Chinese people’s honest opinions more than any foe.’
  • ‘But Beijing is more dependent on us than we are on them … The timing is perfect. It’s time for free nations to act.’
  • ‘For too long we let the CCP set the terms of engagement, but no longer. Free nations must set the tone. We must operate on the same principles.’
  • ‘[I]f we don’t act now, ultimately the CCP will erode our freedoms and subvert the rules-based order that our societies have worked so hard to build. If we bend the knee now, our children’s children may be at the mercy of the Chinese Communist Party, whose actions are the primary challenge today in the free world.’
  • ‘Now, this isn’t about containment … It’s about a complex new challenge that we’ve never faced before.’
  • ‘[W]e can’t face this challenge alone … Maybe it’s time for a new grouping of like-minded nations, a new alliance of democracies.’
  • ‘If the free world doesn’t change, communist China will surely change us.’
  • ‘Securing our freedoms from the Chinese Communist Party is the mission of our time, and America is perfectly positioned to lead it because our founding principles give us that opportunity.’’
  • ‘[O]ur nation was founded on the premise that all human beings possess certain rights that are unalienable. And it’s our government’s job to secure those rights. It is a simple and powerful truth. It’s made us a beacon of freedom for people all around the world, including people inside of China.’

Some of the reactions to the Pompeo speech in Australia have been to describe it as ‘scary’, whereas others consider it was a compelling assessment of China. The fact is that Beijing has now been plainly informed by the US that the relationship has changed and that it can expect much more forceful responses from Washington in future.

This is not the first time that America has launched such a provocatively worded policy against its main adversary. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan made his infamous ‘evil empire’ speech, which identified the Soviet Union as ‘the focus of evil in the modern world’ and characterised the US conflict with the USSR as a battle between good and evil. Some commentators believe that Reagan’s speech and his subsequent ‘Star Wars’ threat laid the groundwork for the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union.

But nobody should expect the Australian government to endorse Pompeo’s speech or use his ideological language. Indeed, at the recent AUSMIN meeting, which occurred five days after the speech, Foreign Minister Marise Payne made it plain that Australia’s positions on China are our own and ‘we make our own decisions, our own judgements in the Australian national interest’. Even so, careful scrutiny of the joint AUSMIN statement reveals that it is overwhelmingly about both the coercive and the assertive threats from China.

Samantha Power: Trump’s tweets are confusing and dangerous

President Donald Trump’s random tweets make it hard for allies, and potential adversaries, of the United States to understand its policies and, potentially, to de-escalate dangerous situations, says former US ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power.

Interviewed by journalist Stan Grant as part of ASPI’s ‘Strategic Vision 2020’ online conference series, Power said that if China were not talking to Trump on any given day, it would have no idea how to communicate with his government.

‘So this dysfunction in terms of governance, which has hurt us so much in the pandemic, also really doesn’t allow us to feel secure that if there was, let’s say, in a freedom of navigation operation in the South China Sea, some kind of unintentional clash, where would the de-escalate story moves come from?’

To avoid confrontation, people around Trump had to be empowered to maintain channels of high-level communication. ‘But if you’re a senior Chinese official, if you are not talking to the president of United States on a given day, you’re not confident even that the channel is a relevant channel.’

And while the US under Trump was retreating from international institutions, a much more transactional and heavy-handed tenor had been brought to its core alliances, Power said.

‘When China is rising economically and throwing its weight around, is that the right time to make your allies question your staying power, your bond, your truthfulness, your reliability, however you want to slice it?’ Power said that had left NATO and other key US allies off balance and not sure about the constancy of the United States. ‘That is abetting, or at least accompanying, what [Chinese] President Xi [Jinping] is doing.’

All of this was happening as Washington shifted into a very confrontational posture towards Beijing, Power said, ‘but I’m sure that your prime minister is learning of America’s plans and America’s statements and this strategic shift in tweets and speeches in the same way as Trump’s closest advisers.’

That was not to knock the closeness of the US–Australia relationship, she said. ‘I mean, Trump’s own cabinet doesn’t know where Trump is going day to day.’

Trump had, arguably, way too much tolerance for risk, friction and chaos, Power said.

She said she’d learned a lot as a war correspondent and an activist, then working in Barack Obama’s Senate office and on a political campaign where ‘I got battered and bruised and had to resign in humiliation’. She went on to be a White House staffer, and finally a diplomat representing the US. ‘Now I’m back to being a citizen and throwing things at the television.’

She’d been an intern at a television station when the unedited and shocking feed arrived of the Tiananmen Square massacre of protesting students. ‘And so what I witnessed was the uncut raw footage of kids being mowed over by tanks and trying to flee on their bikes and putting their friends and loved ones on the basket of the bike and tottering away.’

Power said the US and its allies were now so struck by the risk of armed conflict that they could ‘lose sight of the dog that’s not barking’—climate change. Because Trump had pulled the US out of the Paris agreement, the nation would have to meet those commitments and make up for lost time. ‘Paris was never enough.’

She described how she had graduated in a time after the Soviet Union collapsed when it seemed that authoritarianism had been permanently vanquished and that everybody was trending in a more liberal direction.

Now she feared the divisions that were being created in the US during the pandemic. ‘There’s a lot of anti-Chinese animus being stirred, including with really devastating effects for Asian Americans living in the US, and hate crimes up, and taunts. And it’s really disturbing what the effects of this kind of rhetoric calling it the “China virus” again and again and stirring people up in this way’, Power said.

‘But offsetting that, there’s not an appetite for war in this country. There is huge war fatigue out of the overextension in the Middle East.’

Power warned that conflicts were going to last longer as they became more and more complex. ‘And not only are we underinvesting in Australia and in the US in our diplomacy, but even if we were all in and actually empowering our diplomats and funding them and staffing out in the way that we needed to, it’s just getting much, much harder for outsiders to play a role because of the number of stakeholders now who are making money off of other people’s misery.’

In weakened states, it was easier for non-state actors, including terrorists, to wreak havoc and harder to get a pandemic in check.

If Joe Biden won the November election, Power said, he’d face a massive task domestically. In terms of the United States’ global role, ‘the strength of our democracy is our best form of leadership internationally’.

A Biden administration would need to work with America’s closest allies, ‘recognising that our alliances are not nice to have, they’re need to have in the 21st century.’

US ‘strategic approach’ to China: compete, compel and challenge

Since US President Richard Nixon journeyed to Beijing in 1972, America’s grand strategy for China has been to engage and hedge.

Now the hedge is burnt and the engagement is off—no marriage of minds possible.

Washington proclaims its new grand strategy is to ‘compete’ against challenges from China and ‘compel’ Beijing to stop and reduce harmful actions.

Compel! Remember when the argument was whether the hedge policy was edging to containment? We have officially entered the era of compete and compel and challenge.

On 19 May, the White House sent to Congress a report titled ‘United States strategic approach to the People’s Republic of China’,  based on a ‘fundamental re-evaluation of how the United States understands and responds to the leaders of the world’s most populous country and second largest national economy’.

The US predicts ‘long-term strategic competition between our two systems’, which is one of 19 instances of words built on the stem compet– (‘competition’, ‘competitors’, ‘competitive’, ‘compete’, ‘competing’) in the 16-page document.

Beijing’s challenge gets a dozen mentions, under headings for ‘economic challenges’, ‘challenges to our values’, and ‘security challenges’. Compel is used 11 times, to describe how Beijing applies pressure and how Washington will force China to change.

To take Washington at its words, the foreign policy blob has hardened and sharpened.

Many factors are at work in the hardening. Not least is the change wrought by Xi Jinping. The leader for life proclaims the values of his techno-authoritarian state with the Chinese Communist Party at its heart. The US has accepted that Xi means what he says and does what he means.

In 2015, Xi said he wanted a ‘new type of great power relations’. Five years on, he’s certainly got it.

The US National Security Council’s take on the strategy document is all about the ‘malign actions and policies’ of Xi and the party: ‘As demonstrated by the Chinese Communist Party’s … response to the pandemic, Americans have more reason than ever to understand the nature of the regime in Beijing and the threats it poses to American economic interests, security, and values.’

Much history flavours the power equation as the US muses into the mirror: glimpse the old missionary duty, glance again at ‘Who lost China?’, and ponder Kipling’s line, ‘A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.’

The lament is that China has disappointed the US. China has not become what the US hoped for. To repurpose a bit of Beijing-speak, China has hurt the feelings of the Washington people.

The new strategy’s story is that the old engage-and-hedge approach was based on the ‘hope’ that the US could ‘spur fundamental economic and political opening’ and make China a responsible global player with a more open society.

Even if Donald Trump is swept away by the presidential election in November, the new grand strategy has taken root.

The paper proclaims that it’s based on the Trump administration’s vision of ‘principled realism’, but don’t waste time trying to relate the policy to The Donald’s realism (?) or principles (?!)

The importance of the new design is what it says on the box: this is a ‘whole-of-government’ document. Washington institutions are on board while Democrats and Republicans are in rare agreement.

The history narrative offered by a strategy paper from a Republican administration has plenty of Democrat adherents. It’s the narrative captured by the headline ‘How Washington got China wrong’ on the cover of Foreign Affairs in March 2018. That article was ‘The China reckoning: how Beijing defied American expectations’, authored by the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs in the Obama administration, Kurt Campbell, and Ely Ratner, the deputy national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden.

If Trump wins, we get more of this grand strategy. If Biden wins, it’s the same strategy with less Trump fireworks.

Describing the hardening of US views, a former deputy director of the CIA, John McLaughlin, comments: ‘There is today the closest thing I’ve seen to a consensus among scholars, policymakers and the public that China presents a serious threat coming at us fast.’

The strategy document accuses China of employing ‘intimidation and coercion’, attempting to reshape the international rules in its own image, and using ‘economic, political, and military power to compel acquiescence’.

One lonely, obligatory paragraph states that the contest can have limits:

Competition need not lead to confrontation or conflict. The United States has a deep and abiding respect for the Chinese people and enjoys longstanding ties to the country. We do not seek to contain China’s development, nor do we wish to disengage from the Chinese people. The United States expects to engage in fair competition with the PRC, whereby both of our nations, businesses, and individuals can enjoy security and prosperity.

In setting this balance, though, the US says it’ll have ‘a tolerance of greater bilateral friction’. Buckle in for shouting and plenty of bumps.

The US says its competitive approach has two objectives:

  • ‘improve the resiliency of our institutions, alliances, and partnerships to prevail against the challenges the PRC presents’
  • ‘compel Beijing to cease or reduce actions harmful to the United States’ vital, national interests and those of our allies and partners’.

The allies are named and praised—and lined up.

Australia makes four appearances: for its concept of the Indo-Pacific; the trade retaliation Beijing has directed at Oz; the way the CCP has attempted to influence the ‘discourse and behaviour’ of Oz politicians; and the Blue Dot Network launched by the US, Japan and Australia in November ‘to promote transparently-financed, high quality infrastructure through private sector-led development’ in the Indo-Pacific.

The tone is similar to Malcolm Turnbull’s account of the Oz wake-up moments about China. Turnbull called China a ‘bully’. The US offers a grand strategy to compete with, compel and challenge the bully.

Withdrawal from Open Skies Treaty confirms US foreign policy decay under Trump

Washington’s announcement on 21 May that it is unilaterally withdrawing from the Treaty of Open Skies has been rightly condemned as an irresponsible national security misstep. Although there is substance to the US’s claims that Russia has repeatedly violated its commitments under the treaty, which has been signed by 35 countries and allows them to conduct unarmed observation flights over one another’s territory as a confidence-building measure, the decision to step away from it when the global security environment is deteriorating is yet another example of the destabilising and ultimately self-defeating foreign policy of the current US administration.

The main thrust of Washington’s rationale for withdrawing appears to be that Russia has been in violation of its treaty obligations by denying the US flyover rights in certain locations. The US also argues that Russia is using imagery obtained on flyovers ‘in support of an aggressive new Russian doctrine of targeting critical infrastructure in the United States and Europe with precision-guided conventional munitions … Russia has, therefore, weaponized the Treaty by making it into a tool of intimidation and threat.’

Given that Russia operates satellites equipped with greater imagery capabilities than Open Skies aircraft—which, ironically, is also one of the issues identified by critics of the treaty who see the flights as redundant—one of Washington’s key defences of its decision appears hollow. The US has also gained a number of advantages from the treaty and has arguably been a net beneficiary of being a party to it.

The US withdrawal is also difficult to understand because it will be clearly disadvantaged by the decision. Russia will be permitted to continue observation flights over US military bases in Europe, provided Moscow remains party to the treaty.

But this is merely the latest instance of the White House taking a path that appears contrary not only to the US’s long-term security interests but also to the objectives of international arms-control efforts.

In 2018, President Donald Trump delivered on his threat to withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on Iran’s nuclear program, which had successfully wound back Tehran’s enrichment efforts and provided the international community with unprecedented visibility of Iran’s nuclear activities. At the time, Trump said that the US would work on finding a ‘real, comprehensive, and lasting solution to the Iranian nuclear threat’.

And while the US is no closer to a new deal with Iran today, what the White House’s strategy has done is prompt Tehran to resume nuclear activities prohibited by the JCPOA, in the process cutting in half the time it would need to produce enough weapons-grade fuel to build a nuclear bomb.

In 2019, Washington formalised its withdrawal from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, citing Russian non-compliance as the reason. While Russia clearly had a case to answer in this context, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a valid point when he observed that, ‘Instead of engaging in a meaningful discussion on international security matters, the United States opted for simply undercutting many years of efforts to reduce the probability of a large-scale armed conflict, including the use of nuclear weapons.’

Washington is also showing signs that it may sabotage prospects for extending the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty by insisting that Russia bring China to the negotiating table before the US will support its renewal. There’s almost no chance China will agree, and Washington’s insistence on Chinese participation has been assessed as potentially a ‘poison pill’ intended to kill off prospects for a new arms-control treaty.

More worryingly, on 23 May reports emerged that senior US national security officials have discussed conducting the first US nuclear test explosion since 1992 in order to establish a negotiating position for discussions with Moscow and Beijing on a trilateral deal to regulate their respective nuclear arsenals. Such a move by the US would have far-reaching consequences: it would likely kill off any prospect of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty ever coming into force and it would potentially trigger a new round of testing by nuclear-weapon states, starting a new arms race.

The common thread running through these cases is the Trump administration’s tendency to use a strategy of brinkmanship to force the US’s favoured negotiating outcome in contentious arms-control agreements, rather than traditional diplomacy. But there are also signs that the US is potentially rethinking its overall approach to international arms control.

The newly appointed US undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, Marshall Billingslea, has said that the US ‘know[s] how to win these [arms control] races and we know how to spend the adversary into oblivion’. He went on to note that Trump ‘has a long and successful career as a negotiator, and he’s a master at developing and using leverage’.

More broadly, the US’s repudiation of key arms-control arrangements may also suggest antipathy on the part of the current administration towards the idea of international agreements. As noted by the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, the US’s withdrawal from Open Skies, ‘has nothing to do with the Open Skies Treaty and everything to do with the fact that the contemporary [Republican Party] sees international agreements as a stain on our sovereignty’.

The Trump administration has hollowed out the expertise of the US State Department, so it shouldn’t be surprising that constructive voices have been lost in the foreign policy debate in Washington.

At the start of 2018, a year into the Trump presidency, US think tank the Center for American Progress observed that ‘President Trump has needlessly alienated America’s allies; stoked tensions and heightened risks with little to show but damaged credibility; squandered the goodwill of people everywhere; and surrendered the high ground of America’s moral and global leadership.’ Since then, the Trump administration has continued to chip away at the foundations of the international security architecture.

But the greatest tragedy of the Trump administration from a foreign policy perspective is that this disruption has come at a time when the world needs constructive US leadership in international affairs more than it has in decades.

Trump’s transactional myopia

US President Donald Trump’s attacks on unfair Chinese trade and technology policies may have been justified, but his tactics have damaged the alliances and institutions on which the United States depends. Will the short-term gains outweigh the long-term institutional costs?

Trump’s defenders claim that his aggressive unilateral approach broke the inertia in the international trade regime and prevented other countries from diluting US power. But Trump’s transactional diplomacy is very different from the institutional vision of foreign policy that former US Secretary of State George Shultz once described as patient ‘gardening’.

Ever since World War II, American presidents have tended to support international institutions and sought their extension, whether it be the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty under Lyndon B. Johnson; arms-control agreements under Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter; the Rio agreement on climate change under George H.W. Bush; the World Trade Organization and the Missile Technology Control Regime under Bill Clinton; or the Paris climate agreement under Barack Obama.

It wasn’t until Trump that a US administration became broadly critical of multilateral institutions as a matter of policy. In 2018, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo proclaimed that, since the end of the Cold War, the international order has failed the US, and complained that ‘multilateralism has become viewed as an end unto itself. The more treaties we sign, the safer we supposedly are. The more bureaucrats we have, the better the job gets done.’ The Trump administration turned to a narrow transactional approach to institutions.

Institutions are simply valued patterns of social behaviour. They are more than formal organisations, which sometimes ossify and need to be reformed or discarded. Institutions include organisations, but even more important is the whole regime of rules, norms, networks and expectations that create social roles and moral obligations. A family, for example, is not an organisation, but it is a social institution in which the parents’ role entails moral obligations concerning their children’s long-term interests.

Some foreign-policy realists devalue institutions on the grounds that international politics is anarchic and thus zero-sum: my gain is your loss, and vice versa. But in the 1980s, University of Michigan political scientist Robert Axelrod used computer tournaments to show that games that offer a rational incentive to cheat in the short run can be transformed when there’s an expectation of a continuing relationship. By enhancing what Axelrod called ‘the shadow of the future’, international institutions can encourage reciprocity and cooperation, with consequences that go beyond any single transaction. This is what Trump’s transactional myopia misses.

Of course, institutions sometimes lose their value and become illegitimate: witness slavery or segregation, which were once widely accepted. In international relations, the Trump administration worried that the post-1945 institutions had ‘Gulliverised’ the US, and they had a valid point. The Lilliputians use multilateral institutional threads to limit the bargaining power that the American Gulliver would otherwise bring to bear in any bilateral face-off.

The US can use its exceptional strength and resources to break those institutional gossamer threads and maximise its bargaining power in the short term. But it can also see such institutions as means to rope others into support for global public goods and institutions that are in America’s and others’ long-term interests. The US complains about free riders, but it gets to steer the bus.

The terms ‘liberal international order’ and ‘Pax Americana’ that were used to describe the period after World War II no longer accurately describe the US’s role in today’s world. Nonetheless, unless the largest countries take the lead in creating global public goods, they will not be provided, and Americans, among others, will suffer. What’s clear is that withdrawal from international problems won’t be possible, and isolation isn’t an option.

Nationalism versus globalization is a false choice. The important policy choices for future US presidents will be about where and how to be involved. American leadership is not the same as hegemony, domination or military intervention. Even during the seven decades of American pre-eminence after 1945, there have always been degrees of global leadership and influence, and US foreign policy functioned most effectively when presidents understood the importance of networks of multilayered partnerships with others. The hegemony (in the sense of control) and global unipolarity that underpinned US foreign policy after the end of the Cold War were always illusions.

Foreign partners help the US when they want to, and their willingness is affected not just by America’s hard military and economic power, but also by its soft power of attraction based on an open culture, liberal democratic values, and policies that are formulated in ways that are perceived as legitimate. Jeffersonian respect for the opinions of humankind and Wilsonian use of institutions that encourage reciprocity and enhance the long shadow of the future have been crucial to the success of American foreign policy. As Henry Kissinger reminds us, world order depends on the ability of a leading state to combine power and legitimacy. Institutions enhance legitimacy.

Trump’s successor, whenever he or she arrives, will face the challenge of reteaching the American public about a foreign policy whereby the US provides global public goods in collaboration with others and uses its soft power to attract their cooperation. The success of American primacy after 1945 depended on exercising power with as well as over others. This will be accentuated by the new transnational problems of the 21st century such as pandemics, climate change, terrorism and cybercrime. The future success of US foreign policy may be determined more by how quickly Americans can relearn these institutional lessons than by the rise and decline of other powers.

What the Trump impeachment inquiry means for the rest of the world

Once again, the United States is undergoing the profound drama of presidential impeachment proceedings. But, unlike in the past, this time the implications for the rest of the world could be substantial.

Consider the two modern precursors to today’s impeachment inquiry into US President Donald Trump’s effort to persuade Ukraine’s government to announce a criminal investigation of one of his leading Democratic challengers, former vice president Joe Biden and Biden’s son. The first was the slow-brewing crisis that began with a midnight break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s offices in 1972 and went on to consume the US political system for two years, culminating in President Richard Nixon’s resignation in August 1974. The second was the special counsel investigation of President Bill Clinton, who was impeached in the US House of Representatives in 1998, but acquitted by the Senate in February 1999.

In both cases, the roots of the crises were domestic. Nixon was accused of misusing his office for domestic political ends, and then of obstructing the investigation. Clinton was accused of perjury and other abuses relating to his personal behaviour. The case against Trump is very different: US foreign policy is at its very center.

US relations with Ukraine are not some peripheral issue. America’s Ukraine policy is born of its commitments to European and international security. At least since Russia’s annexation of Crimea and incursions into eastern Ukraine in 2014, helping Ukraine secure its independence and sovereignty has been a central foreign-policy concern for both the US and the European Union.

Moreover, unlike the previous two impeachment crises, this one could jam up the machinery of US foreign policy. During Watergate, Henry Kissinger, serving simultaneously as secretary of state and national security adviser, kept the ship afloat, and both the Vietnam War and US–Soviet relations remained high on the agenda. Likewise, throughout the Clinton drama, which coincided with the run-up to the Kosovo War, US diplomacy and foreign policymaking didn’t suffer any major disruptions.

Obviously, the same cannot be said for the Trump impeachment inquiry. The proceedings have already revealed deep rifts between a foreign-policy apparatus that is trying to uphold the stated US policy on Ukraine and a White House that has been pursuing fundamentally different objectives. Whether that apparatus is still capable of carrying out its work on this critical issue is now an open question. On the White House side, there’s a noticeable absence of ‘adults in the room’. Under Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has been implicated in the scandal himself, an already diminished State Department has become a key battleground in the larger impeachment fight.

Moreover, Trump himself could make the current impeachment drama far worse for the rest of the world. During the Clinton impeachment proceeedings, the White House committed to maintaining business as usual and avoided participating in the daily partisan disputes of the process. Trump has already adopted exactly the opposite approach, not least by attacking (on Twitter) the former US ambassador to Ukraine while she was testifying before the House Intelligence Committee.

Clearly, Trump intends to obsess over every detail of the process. Every minute that he spends tweeting and watching Fox News will be time that other occupants of the Oval Office would have spent focusing on pressing issues of state. In this respect, the Trump drama has parallels to Watergate, which was clearly a distraction for Nixon. But given that Trump is even less constrained by (or even aware of) the constitutional principles that he is accused of violating, his efforts to derail the proceedings are likely to be even more brazen.

Whether Trump’s behaviour justifies removing him from office will be for the US Senate to decide. But whatever happens, America’s political crisis comes at a time of rising global instability. In addition to a revisionist Russia seeking opportunities for zero-sum gains wherever it can find them, an increasingly assertive China is flexing its muscles in Asia and on the world stage.

Meanwhile, the Middle East has entered another phase of profound instability, such that a single spark could easily ignite another crisis. North Korea’s nuclear-armed regime is contemplating new moves and conducting further ballistic-missile tests. Trade tensions remain high, despite the recent announcement of a ‘phase one’ deal between the US and China. And mass protests are sweeping the globe, from Santiago and Quito to Beirut and Hong Kong.

In today’s interconnected world, a crisis anywhere can end up on the desk of the US president, and the policy response that does (or doesn’t) come can have global implications. French President Emmanuel Macron recently made headlines by warning of an impending ‘brain death’ for NATO. If that grim prognosis about the state of transatlantic relations was true earlier this month, it is all the more relevant now that the impeachment drama has reached a fever pitch.

In the previous impeachment episodes, the US remained a strategic actor on the world stage. But Trump’s America has already proved to be a source of global disruption. Whether the latest scandal leads to a strategic blow-up or merely a strategic timeout remains to be seen. The world can afford neither scenario.