Richard Haass claims Netanyahu's war aim of "eliminating or destroying Hamas" is unrealistic

Richard Haass makes this important point about the shift in partisan politics in the US around Israel, i.e., unconditional support for Israel is becoming more and more mainly a position of rightwing Republicans and Christian Zionists, who are basically all Republicans anyway.

Full post: https://brucemillerca.substack.com/p/richard-haass-claims-netanyahus-war

A (reserved) plug for (part of) the foreign policy Blob on Ukraine

If I had to name my top go-to source for current foreign policy matters, it would be Responsible Statecraft, a website of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft headed by Andrew Bacevich.

It features work by people like Bacevich himself, Anatol Lieven, and Jim Lobe who established a solid record of critical analysis of US foreign policy during the famous Global War on Terror and its subsidiary parts, notably including the Afghanistan War and the Iraq War.

Their general approach is a "restrainer" outlook, one that asks sensible questions about American plans for wars and regime change operations.

They tend to have a lot in common with the "realist" view notably represented by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. Bacevich himself expresses considerable admiration for Reinhold Niehbuhr's brand of theologically-informed "realism" as expressed in his Book, The Irony of American History (1962).

The restrainers and the realists and more left-leaning foreign policy analysts often refer to the mainstream, "establishment" foreign policy advocates as "the Blob," because they see the Blob perspectives as too constricted and sometimes excessively solicitous of views that happen to coincide with the sales prospects of military contractors.

Decades before Q-Anon, the Council on Foreign Relations was a favorite villain in rightwing conspiracy theories and a bogeyman of the John Birch Society. Since conspiracy-theory bogeymen never disappear entirely, I'm sure there are more contemporary Q-Anon-, COVID-denier-, Putinist and other versions that still feature the CFR. If you dig into anti-"critical race theory" fantasies, it probably shows up there, too.

But the CFR is a respectable establishment organization whose members feature diplomats and former State Department officials. It publishes the journal Foreign Affairs. It is a longtime ritual for potential (non-Trumpista) Presidential candidates to publish an article on their foreign policy positions in Foreign Affairs. Fun fact: the journal has been called Foreign Affairs since 1922. It had previously been titled The Journal of International Relations (1919-1922) and, originally, The Journal of Race Development (!!! 1910-1919).

The Council does have an incentive to take more-or-less reality-based views of the world. They also have a lot of sources and contributors who are actual experts in practical diplomacy and international-relations studies. In other words, you don't have to be an admirer of ghouls like Henry Kissinger to get decent information from some parts of the Blob. (Although Lord knows Kissinger was and still is more reality-based than the "neoconservatives" who gave us the famous cakewalk we now know as the Iraq War.)

The Foreign Affairs website is publishing a lot of publicly-available articles on the Ukraine war. Critical reading is always in order, of course. The website at this writing features a piece by Robert Kagan, one of the neocons who managed to be wrong about pretty much everything about the Iraq War. Sometimes it's helpful to read analyses by people who have a solid record of being wrong, just to see what to watch out for.

The current president of the CFR is Richard Haass, who tends to fall within the liberal-internationalist perspective. Here are a couple of fairly recent commentaries of his on Ukraine which give some decent background on how the current situation developed. And they don't come from the "we-always-knew-that-Russia-was-an-expansionist-Evil-Empire-and-thank-the-war-gods-that-we-may-be-in-a-new-Cold-War" point of view which is popping all over the place right now.

"Perspective on Ukraine, With Richard Haass" 03/02/2022, a week or so into the war, is a podcast with a transcript, io which he reminds us about how this whole nuclear war thing works:

[W]e avoided a world war during the cold war and certain rules were, or unwritten rules were understood about avoiding direct conflict, that we could back proxies and allies, but not come into direct conflict and nuclear weapons were there above providing a kind of blanket over the whole thing. And when Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev the Soviet leader backed down in 1962, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, in some ways that really reinforced that bias against the use of nuclear weapons, because any victory would be pyrrhic. Somebody once said the living would envy the dead. But there were unwritten rules about avoiding conflict directly, because that could always escalate. Things could get out of hand. And the Biden administration essentially took that possibility off the table by saying, "We are not going to directly intervene in Ukraine." (my emphasis)

This is a recent long presentation by Haass, The State of the World 04/07/2022:

One notable feature of that interview is that Haass speaks very pragmatically about the  limitations of the formal rules of the "world order" (for which liberal-internationalists are advocates). And about how raw power still makes a huge difference (as the "realists" always remind us). But he does so in a way that doesn't dismiss either the value of international law or the very practical limitations to it. There's a particularly interesting section where he discusses why he doesn't subscribe to the New-Cold-War mantra of democracies-vs.-authoritarians. And he also talks in an accessible way about how the recognition of national sovereignty is still a fundamental feature of international relations, something which many liberal internationalists and advocates of "humanitarian intervention" find particularly uncomfortable.

Haass also takes note of the spectacularly dumb move by the Cheney-Bush Administration in 2008 to insist that NATO make a public statement that both Georgia and Ukraine would become NATO members in the future, without any formal measures under way to prepare for that. As he notes, that was the worst of both worlds, declaring they would do something they knew Russia regarded as a security threat but without any substantive steps to actually do it. Saying that is something like blasphemy to the New-Cold-War hawks who deny that the West's expansion of NATO and intent to expand it further could have had any possible relation of any kind to subsequent Russian actions.

And here's an informative CFR discussion on military aspects of the current war, The Struggles of the Russian Military in Ukraine 04/14/2022:

Foreign policy “realism,“ liberal internationalism, and the Ukraine crisis

Joseph Nye, Jr. and Richard Haass are both respectable members of the foreign policy establishment. In fact, Haass is going on 18 years as president of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the most iconic symbol of the foreign policy establishment.

They both thought it necessary to defend their liberal internationalist approach in Foreign Policy in two articles of 02/02/2022, Nye in Realism About Foreign-Policy Realism and Haass in Putin's Ukraine Quagmire.

Advocates of different kinds of foreign policy outlooks aren't required to sign statements endorsing a particular set of principles. The labels aren't copyrighted property! Academics and foreign policy advisors are often reluctant to identify with a defined set of principles. And "foreign policy" encompasses a huge scope of information. So it's impossible for even those consciously adhering to the same school of thought not to have differences on issues.

Nye and Haass are addressing the "realist" foreign policy outlook identified in the immediate postwar years with figures like Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan, Reinhold Niehbuhr, and Henry Kissinger. Its best-known current advocates are Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer.

Neoconservatism as represented by the Cheney-Bush Administration and their war in Iraq is a major influence in American foreign policy thinking, which is basically an American supremacist view. The MAGA/America First outlook is essentially crude rightwing nationalism and militarism, whose advocates are sometimes critical of US military intervention. But the neocon outlook and the MAGA one are very similar in practice, because jinoigstic MAGA slogans don't easily translate into policy.

At this point, the main dissenting trend of foreign policy thought in the US could be broadly inlcuded in the "restrainer" outlook, currently effectively advocated by the scholars and analysts who associate with Andrew Bacevich's Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Their position applies a skeptical view to militarized approaches to foreign policy.

None of these categories of foreign policy outlook lines up clearly with current left-right differences in US politics. Although the liberal internationalist approach is more prevalent among Democrats and some toxic mixture of neoconservatism and MAGA militarism more in the Republican Party, there are a wide range of shared assumptions between various "schools" of foreign policy thinking.

Which is where the "realists" come in. They argue that the incentives on nations in the international system tend to push them to act in certain ways in their dealings with other nations. And so different theoretical frameworks by foreign policy makers often wind up with similar sets of choices.

Ukraine: A crisis that the realists worried would come

The current Ukraine crisis is playing out a way that realists said was likely when the liberal internationalists and neocons tripping on Cold War triumphalism decided to push for NATO enlargement. Lately, we've seen quite a few references the warning George Kennan, "realist" architect of the postwar containment policy, gave in 1997 (A Fateful Error New York Times 02/05/1997):

[E]xpanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.

Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.

The liberal internationalists/interventionists of the Clinton 'Administration and the neocons under Bush cheerfully ignored swuch warnings.

Joseph Nye aregues in his new piece:

Was the current crisis in Ukraine caused by a lack of realism in US foreign policy? According to some analysts, the liberal desire to spread democracy is what drove NATO’s expansion up to Russia’s borders, causing Russian President Vladimir Putin to feel increasingly threatened. Viewed from this perspective, it is not surprising that he would respond by demanding a sphere of influence analogous to what the United States once claimed in Latin America with its Monroe Doctrine.

But there is a problem with this realist argument: NATO’s 2008 decision (heavily promoted by the George W. Bush administration) to invite Georgia and Ukraine eventually to join the Alliance can hardly be called liberal, nor was it driven by liberals. In making such arguments, realists point to the aftermath of World War I, when US President Woodrow Wilson’s liberalism contributed to a legalistic and idealist foreign policy that ultimately failed to prevent World War II. [my emphasis]

This is a surprisingly defensive polemic that rests on a simple word play. Outside of the US and Canada, "liberal" in party politics, doesn't mean center-left. Elsewhere, it refers to to a commitment to representative government (i.e., political democracy), the rule of law, and respect for international law. It does not refer to "liberal" as in the Democratic Party in the US. These are the dates of NATO expansion since 1999, all of which enjoyed wide bipartisan support in the US:

1999: Czechia, Hungary, Poland
2004: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia
2009: Albania, Croatia
2017: Montenegro
2020: North Macedonia

One of the implications of the "realist" viewpoint is that it can sound amoral at a theretical level, more so coming from some of its advocates than others. But Nye uses the following example to imply that Realism is inherently amoral:

In a famous historical example of this approach, Winston Churchill, in 1940, ordered an attack on French naval vessels, killing some 1,300 of Britain’s allies rather than letting the fleet fall into Hitler’s hands. Churchill also authorized the bombing of German civilian targets.

Leaving aside how well-known that incident is today - I doubt that even most World War II buffs have ever heard of it - and that brief description Nye gives could be misleading. The vessels in question at that time were under the control of the German-dominatied Vichy regime under Philippe Pétain. (Thomas Parker, When Winston Churchill Bombed France: The Battle of Mers el-Kabir, The National Interest 08/13/2016)

Haass doesn't dunk on the realists as such in his article. But he basically argues that everything seems to be going fine in the current confrontation over Ukraine. Which is a more practical attitude than obsessive fear-mongering about Russia's intentions in the current situation. He puts the argument this way:

But while Putin manufactured the Ukraine crisis believing he held a clear advantage vis-à-vis the West, he committed an error that can prove dangerous even for a skilled martial-arts practitioner: he underestimated his opponent.

While Biden and NATO have said they will not intervene directly on behalf of Ukraine, this is not the same as accepting Russian dominance. In fact, the US has organized a comprehensive response. It has sent arms to Ukraine to increase the costs to Russia of any invasion and occupation. There are plans to fortify NATO member countries closest to Russia. Substantial economic sanctions are being prepared. And rerouting gas to Europe would partly offset the possible loss of Russian supplies.

It's worth noting that in 1997, Haass himself was more cautious than the most enthusiastic American advocates of NATO enlargement, though he declared himself resigned to recognize the establishment consensus on the matter that realist like Kennan warned against (Enlarging NATO: A Questionable Idea Whose Time Has Come Brookings Institute 03/01/1997):

The sixteen members of NATO will soon invite Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and possibly others to join. There are strong arguments for enlarging the alliance, above all securing the democratic and Western orientation of selected former Warsaw Pact states and hedging against political uncertainty in Russia.

But there are arguments at least as strong against enlargement. Expanding NATO could complicate its ability to achieve consensus, weaken the security of those countries not brought in, increase demands on defense budgets when they are already overstretched, and alienate Russia. In the process, Europe’s security could well diminish, not grow.

This debate is increasingly moot. Events have all but reached a point of no return. The costs of going ahead are less than those of changing course. [my emphasis]

(Minor corrections for clarity made on 02/22/2023)

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]

An ambiguous warning on US-China relations

Trying to understand what's actually being said in foreign policy position papers can be a lot like reading tea leaves, or maybe necromancy.

William Blake's depiction of the Witch of Endor conjuring the spirit of the prophet Samuel

The stereotypically establishment foreign policy association, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), recently published a paper by Robert Blackwill and Thomas Wright, The End of World Order and American Foreign Policy (Council Special Report #86, May 2020). Blackwill was a deputy national security adviser in the Cheney-Bush Administration. wright directs the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institute. This paper includes a disclaimer noting that CFR "takes no institutional positions on policy issues," so the paper is not an official CFR position.

This paper is partially reminiscent of the infamous Project for a New American Century (PNAC), in that it centers on countering China. That in itself isn't strange, of course, because China is clearly the rising power in the world and either already has or is likely to soon have the world's largest economy. So of course other countries have o seek ways to accommodate or otherwise adjust to China's increasing international power. That much is a banal observation in 2020.

As CFR's President Richard Haass put it in his book, A World in Disarray (2017),

No relationship [in the post-Second World War period] has been more important than the one between the United States, the dominant power of the era, and China, the country widely seen as posing the biggest challenge to American prin1acy. lt is also true that no relationship was likely to experience more difficulties. Much of history is the result of friction leading to conflict between existing and rising powers, reflecting the difficulty in peacefully accommodating the changing power balance and relationship between the two. ...

... the relationship between the two remained surprisingly good in the aftermath of the Cold War. Growing economic ties filled much of the space that hadl been taken up by shared concern about the Soviet Union. Two-way merchandise trade alone grew from $20 billion in 1990 to nearly $600 billion twenty-five years later.2 Investment likewise grew from negligible to truly substantial amounts. Meanwhile, diplomatic interaction both increased ancl expanded as top-level summits came to be supplemented by frequent meetings involving both governments' bureaucracies discussing the full range of bilateral, regional, and increasingly global issues.

But the congruence was broader. The underlying premise of China's national security following the chaos of Mao's Cultural Revolution was that the country needed several decades of economic development if it was to be stable and secure, that the rate of clevelopment needed to be rapid, and that such growth could take place only amid regional stability and decent relations with the world's largest and most innovative economy. All of this provided a rationale from China's perspective for behaving with restraint and maintaining good relations with the United States so that trade would grow and technology transfers would be forthcoming. [my emphasis]

This background is a reminder that we all need to be cautious of hair-on-fire representations of US-Chinese relations, i.e., the presentation of China as a newly-emerged bogeyman. It's an evolving relationship, and US policy makers have been very aware of China's development over the last several decades and have generally welcomed it.

Haass depicted the state uf US-China relationship as of 2016-17 as follows:

Overall, Sino-American relations a quarter of a century after the end of the Cold War are difficult to describe or categorize. In many ways, the two are still searching for a rationale to take the place of the anti-Sovietism that informed their relationship prior to 1989. The Chinese speak of a new model of a major-country relationship, but the two governments have not for the most part been able to fill in the blanks and move past generalities. Adding to the uncertainty is the vulnerability of the relationship to a crisis growing out of competing claims in the South China Sea, Sino-Japanese tensions, or Taiwan.

Still, for all this, the durability of the Sino-American relationship is striking, something worth commenting on given the changing strategic context and power balance between the two countries as China has grown in both absolute and relative terms. The relationship has clone fairly well under Democrats and Republicans alike and under a number of Chinese leaders. Again, history would have predicted far more friction, and while it is still possible that something approximating a new cold war could materialize, it is by no means inevitable. [my emphasis]

Blackwell and Wright present a diagnosis of US-China relations in 2020 that has much more of a new-cold-war vibe:

On the face of it, the answer would seem obvious: the United States should try to reconstitute a shared strategic understanding between the major powers based on these national interests—a classic world order bargain, if you will. But such a pathway is problematic. Although it may seem strategically sensible and prudent to many observers, for others the gap between the United States and China is too large to bridge, and a compromise could undermine Washington’s regional alliances. Moreover, there is for the foreseeable future no appetite in Washington on either side of the aisle, or in Beijing, for such a comprehensive effort. The U.S. executive branch and Congress are focused on drawing up bills of indictment against China (many justified), with no prescriptive suggestion except for public coercion that diplomacy, difficult as it may be, could ease the bilateral tension. Opinion polls show that the American people favor alliances, free trade, and a foreign policy that includes support for human rights, democracy, and the rule of law.) With U.S. treatment of China a major issue in the 2020 presidential campaign, it is difficult to imagine a national consensus on any dramatic change of course that accommodates to some degree China’s preferences regarding world order.

For its part, China seeks to comprehensively undermine U.S. alliances and to eventually replace the United States as both the most important power in Asia and the world’s technological leader. Beijing is making progress in that long-term effort, as its coercive power grows and Washington falters internationally. Whatever the objective reality, Beijing’s behavior suggests it could well believe it is playing a winning hand.

In any case, both nations at present are fully committed to their core convictions of how best to conduct their societies and governance, promote their national interests, and organize the international system. It is difficult to imagine either side offering major compromises on any of these fundamentals anytime soon. [my emphasis]

They present a general framing that I find dubious. They describe a post-Second World War world order that was rules-based and founded on generally accepted principles of the international order, led by an enlightened and generally benevolent United States. They see China and Russia as making "major departures from the shared understandings of the 1990s". As a result, "the return of great power rivalry" has "shattered hopes in that multilateral order." (my italics)

China and Russia in particular defend a Westphalian and nineteenth-century model of order organized around balance of power, national sovereignty, and spheres of influence. They oppose the U.S. model of humanitarian intervention, democracy promotion, strengthened alliances, and opposition to spheres of influence. Meanwhile, the United States distances itself from its own world order traditions. [my emphasis]

Everyone, including especially American citizens, have good reason to have a critical view of what that "model of humanitarian intervention" looked like. Haass observes:

Like most other countries, China opposed the U.S. decision to attack Iraq in 2003, believing it was unwarranted. China went along with what it thought was a limited humanitarian intervention in Libya in 2011, but, like Russia, it was critical when the effort expanded into one of regime change. China also was more supportive than not of sanctions to curb lran's nuclear ambitions and, as will be discussed in greater detail below, committed itself to take steps to reduce its own carbon emissions starting in 2030. [my emphasis]

It's also hard to guess what they particularly have in mind with their very general recommendations, which reads like boiler-plate diplomatic vagueness: more competent governance in the US (duh!), wield diplomatic leverage more effectively, improve relations with Canada and Mexico, try to improve relations with the EU and NATO allies, and so on.

Their paper is so full of such boilerplate that it's hard to judge what they are actually advocating. Again, I'm very wary of their description of the post-1945 world order collapsing into a "Westphalian" world due to Russia and China's bad actions and goals. We remember the Cold War understandably as primarily a contest between the US and the Soviet Union. But we also had a cold war - which became a hot war in Korea - against China. And because of dogmatic, ill-informed anti-Communist assumption, along with the purges of many diplomats with substantial expertise in the Far East during the McCarthy period, the fear of China contributed to some very dubious foreign policy decisions. A supposedly expansionist China was one of the main justifications for the Vietnam War, which was an even worse disaster for the US than the Iraq War. A 21st century rerun is not something I want to see.

But there are parts of the Blackwill-Wright paper I find attractive:

The COVID-19 crisis ought to mark the end of the post-9/11 era. The United States has overly invested in the greater Middle East, and Washington should stop trying to fix the most dysfunctional and self-destructive region on earth. It is time to withdraw U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan in the next year without requiring agreement with the Taliban; recognize that the possibility of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine issue is more remote by the day; end support for the Saudi war in Yemen; revive and update the JCPOA to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons; be clear that, although the United States hopes Iran becomes a democracy, that is a decision for the Iranian people, and the United States should not be actively trying to bring this about; and downgrade U.S. relations with its Arab partners, to focus on matters of mutual interest rather than offering general support for their domestic and international objectives. While continuing its enduring commitment to Israel’s safety and security, the United States should redirect its resources from the Middle East to matters that are far more relevant to its national interests today and in the future. [my emphasis]

That kind of foreign policy pragmatism makes sense!