US foreign policy after the election

The quality of US foreign policy will continue to deteriorate and even more rapidly if Donald Trump is reelected - or otherwise remains as President for another term. I much prefer to think about how a Biden Administration might make some pragmatic improvements and repair some of the mess the current administration has made.

Either way, I've been thinking through some of the major themes under which I'm looking at both possibilities.

Nuclear nonproliferation (including nuclear arms reduction) and climate change are the two greatest threats not only to the United States but all of humanity. Those two priorities should frame the whole of US foreign policy.

As the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists noted earlier this year (Closer than ever: It is 100 seconds to midnight 01/23/2020):

Humanity continues to face two simultaneous existential dangers—nuclear war and climate change—that are compounded by a threat multiplier, cyber-enabled information warfare, that undercuts society’s ability to respond. The international security situation is dire, not just because these threats exist, but because world leaders have allowed the international political infrastructure for managing them to erode.

In the nuclear realm, national leaders have ended or undermined several major arms control treaties and negotiations during the last year, creating an environment conducive to a renewed nuclear arms race, to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and to lowered barriers to nuclear war. Political conflicts regarding nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea remain unresolved and are, if anything, worsening. US-Russia cooperation on arms control and disarmament is all but nonexistent. ...

This situation—two major threats to human civilization, amplified by sophisticated, technology-propelled propaganda—would be serious enough if leaders around the world were focused on managing the danger and reducing the risk of catastrophe. Instead, over the last two years, we have seen influential leaders denigrate and discard the most effective methods for addressing complex threats—international agreements with strong verification regimes—in favor of their own narrow interests and domestic political gain. By undermining cooperative, science- and law-based approaches to managing the most urgent threats to humanity, these leaders have helped to create a situation that will, if unaddressed, lead to catastrophe, sooner rather than later. [my emphasis]

NATO is an important alliance not least because it exists, and has a key institution in the world for over six decades. Whatever criticisms we want to make of its history, it was a key institution for a Europe that has not had a major war since 1945. And even if we think significant changes in the alliance may be needed, treating it like a Mob protection racket as the current President has done is clearly not a good way to handle it.

Foreign policy realists like George Kennan and Stephen Walt warned that expanding NATO after 1989 would be problematic because Russia would inevitably regard it as a military threat and act accordingly. The expansion of NATO to include Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, all of which were part of the former Soviet Union, was a particularly risky step. But to quote one of Trump's most infamous statements in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is what it is. A redefined NATO in the context of a larger strategic understanding with Russia would be very desirable. But incredibly difficult. Something way beyond the capability of a team of wreckers and grifters like the current administration.

Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) President Richard Haass comments in Present at the Disruption: How Trump Unmade U.S. Foreign Policy (Foreign Affairs 95:5 Sept-Oct 2020) on "Trump’s reluctance to reaffirm U.S. fidelity to NATO’s Article 5, the treaty’s collective-defense provision." This is a strong sign to the NATO allies that bipartisan commitment to the NATO alliance has been at the least drastically reduced. While American pundits and Democratic consultants making campaign ads may want to pretend that the current President is some kind of bizarre aberration in an otherwise conservative and sensible Republican Party, NATO governments cannot afford to make that assumption. As Haass remarks, "Alliances are predicated on reliability and predictability, and no ally is likely to view the United States as it did before."

The reality that China is the most powerful rising world power and in future decades will have an economy significantly larger than any other country. And that means they will have a greater influence on the terms of world trade and their military clout will increase and that other countries around the world will have to make decisions about how to work with and balance against China's power. That much is not really in question, it's the way the international system works.

But the general political discussion in American politics is painfully superficial, dominated by vague ideas about trade policy and melodramatic rhetoric that sometimes sound like a rehash of primitive slogans out of the 1950s that even then were promoting a poorly-informed policy. So, for instance, we hear a lot about China's threatening moves in the South China Sea. Apparently every TV pundit knows there could be a confrontation of some kind between the US and China in the South China Sea. I doubt that many of them could say much more than that what the US interests there are. Haass notes in his essay that the Trump Administration "has been mostly passive as China has solidified its control of the South China Sea."

Vietnam is one of the countries bordering on the South China Sea. Which should be a reminder to Americans that misunderstandings, exaggerated fears, and blinding ideology on the part of American policymakers have produced bad results in that area in the past. Jacob Stakes in The Chinese Military Threat Is Real (Democracy Journal 08/14/2020) makes his case on how the US should regard the changing military power configuration in which China is now operating:

Beijing defines its sovereign territory expansively to include Taiwan, disputed islands and rocks in the East and South China seas along with the waters themselves, and land on the border with India. Therefore, even “defensive” goals seek to redraw the map, using force if necessary, with major implications for the United States and its alliance commitments, especially with Japan and the Philippines.

US Latin American policy has been chronically bad for most of the existence of the United States. In more recent times, both the Cheney-Bush and Obama Administrations followed policies that favored "business-friendly conservatives" like Maricio Macri of Argentina or (now) Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil over elected center-left governments from the Texas border to Tierra del Fuego. And it's been even worse under Trump, as the malicious but clownishly inept regime-change operation against Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela dramatically illustrates. To put in in terms not usually encountered in Foreign Affairs, US Latin American policy should not give top priority to the narrow interests of financial buccaneers and extractive industries. A policy build on genuinely supporting democratic processes along with constructive trade relations and, where necessary, military cooperation would make a lot more sense for the country, however inconvenient it might be for some business lobbies.

American democracy, so long as we can keep it, is an important element of "soft power" that is not only of theoretical interest but also enhances American influence in very practical ways. But not every policy that the US justifies as democracy promotion is benign, much less those known as humanitarian intervention. See: the great concern professional neocon warmongers expressed for women's rights in places like Afghanistan and Iraq during the Cheney-Bush Administration.

But Ben Rhodes, a Deputy National Security Adviser for eight years during the Obama Administration, argues (The Democratic Renewal: What It Will Take to Fix U.S. Foreign Policy Foreign Affairs 95:5 Sept-Oct 2020):

A Biden victory in November would offer the temptation of seeking to restore the United States’ post–Cold War image of itself as a virtuous hegemon. But that would badly underestimate the country’s current predicament. The United States hasn’t just lost ground; the ship of state is pointed in the wrong direction, and the rest of the world has moved on. Global concerns about U.S. credibility aren’t simply tied to the calamitous presidency of Donald Trump—they’re rooted in the fact that the American people elected someone like Trump in the first place. Having seen Americans do that once, foreign leaders and publics will wonder whether the United States might do it again, particularly given the fealty of the Republican Party to Trump’s nationalist, authoritarian brand of politics.

He hopefully suggests that a Biden Administration might find ways to renew the soft-power assets of the US:

The extraordinary mobilization against structural racism and injustice offers an opportunity to renew the United States’ sense of purpose. A large part of the country’s claim to global leadership has been the evolutionary and redemptive elements of its story—the fact that the United States is a multiethnic, multicultural society that has, through constitutional democracy, chipped away at institutional racism and the lingering power of white supremacy.

War really should be the last resort in foreign policy. That's a classic part of historical Just War Theory. Every war presents complications of its own. Preventive war is already illegal in international law and for good reasons. It should not be the case for the United States to use "humanitarian intervention" as a fig leaf for reckless military interventions, like with Libya in 2011.

We need a fully functioning and professional State Department. See: Doyle McManus, Almost Half the Top Jobs in Trump’s State Department Are Still Empty The Atlantic 11/04/2018; Courtney Bublé, Watchdog Finds Serious Staffing and Leadership Problems at State Department Government Executive 01/23/2020; Diplomacy in Crisis: The Trump Administration's Decimation of the State Department (Democratic Staff Report for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) 07/28/2020.

Zombie ideas and attitudes can lurch around for a long time. Cold War triumphalism is one that the US should relegate to the past. And in many ways, that attitude has been swallowed by the events of the last 30 years. But the Republicans' current celebration of "American Exceptionalism" incorporates a version of Cold War triumphalism. But it was always a perilously superficial view of the period in which the Warsaw Pact ended, the Soviet Union dissolved, and the "state socialist" systems in them were replaced. David Singer wrote in 2000 (Triumphalism and Reality in U.S. Cold War Policies Peace Review 12:4):

[W]ith the end of the Cold War, the U.S. was awash in triumphal shouts of victory and success. But in the 10 or so years since, we have not only seen all of those dreadful chickens come home to roost, but we have also demonstrated that we still see them as indicators of national greatness. Actually, they are really signs of declining influence, global chaos, and the continuing erosion and destruction of those norms and institutions so essential to building a civilized human community. [my emphasis]