The Trump “Legacy” for American Foreign Policy: Charles S. Maier

 America and the World—The Effects of the Trump Presidency

The Trump “Legacy” for American Foreign Policy

Essay by Charles S. Maier, Harvard University

Published on 22 September 2021 | issforum.org

Editor: Diane Labrosse  | Commissioning Editor: Diane Labrosse | Production Editor: George Fujii

https://issforum.org/to/ps2021-52

We cannot calculate President Trump’s “legacy” for United States foreign policy simply by describing his diplomacy while he was in power.  Virtuous fathers can fritter away family wealth, and Mafiosi can leave ill-gotten gains to charity.  It is still too early to know what long-term consequences might emerge, and it is difficult to sort out what trends would have prevailed even with a less disruptive leader.  Happily, a one-term presidency is less likely to leave durable wreckage in terms of our international reputation than eight years would have done.  My own admittedly non-impartial view is that Trump’s domestic legacy was more damaging and dangerous than his international one.  With his wanton disregard for truth, his use of social media to spread vituperation and contempt, whether for opponents or supporters who fell out of favor, his winking at practitioners of political violence, he simply trashed the norms needed for a functioning democracy – and that is not to mention the continual challenges to the 2020 election results.  Still, H-Diplo has asked about the consequences for foreign policy, and those remain the focus here.   

The impulsiveness of Trump’s foreign policy, exemplified by the withdrawal from the Paris climate accord and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) Iranian nuclear framework along with the coarsening of rhetoric – yes, words matter – has damaged America’s stature as a reliable partner (or adversary) in foreign affairs.  By the end of the first term an impartial observer might plausibly have believed that the United States was a danger to global peace, not because the country intended a war – George W. Bush was far clearer about that goal in 2003 – but because its leader was brutally transactional, and like every American president possessed extraordinary constitutional power over foreign policy and military decisions.  To my mind, as a historian of Europe, American behavior sometimes recalled the Germany of Kaiser William II – a country, like the United States, that was given to revering its military forces and saddled with a mercurial ruler, unpredictable and heedless of the lamentable impression it was making abroad.  Fortunately, the American defense and state department bureaucracies were inertial or intelligent enough to resist some, though not all, of the White House whims.  And even the president managed to resist the potential for untethered policy making from advisers such as Michael Flynn or John Bolton.

Fortunately, much of the behavior that dismayed those who prize a collaborative relationship with allies and friends involved style more than substance, so can probably be repaired.  Nevertheless, as the Trump presidency fades into history – assuming that he will not successfully run again in 2024 or that his approach to U.S. international behavior will not be reproduced under a Republican successor – it is also evident that the considerable challenges now facing the Biden administration are not simply legacies from the Trump administration.  They are agonizing issues that transcend the question of which president is in power.  President Barack Obama could not resolve them, and it is hardly clear that President Biden can either.  To be sure, Trump denied their gravity and believed he could overcome them on the basis of vague threats or of personal bonding with one or another dictator.  Still, the issues involved would have vexed, and will vex even the wisest leadership.  And to judge from initiatives taken so far, the Biden administration has not figured out, or believed it appropriate to stake out positions, that are fundamentally different.  

This essay was largely written before President Biden’s decision to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan, but a final version must take account of that defeat.  One can argue that the Trump administration’s signing of a peace accord with the Taliban in 2020 foreclosed Biden’s options.  But enough maneuverability remained in terms of timing and residual force levels to leave the current president some freedom of action.  Biden, however, like Obama – with respect to Syria -- and perhaps like Trump, saw the alternative as a ‘forever war’ that could yield no decision.  I appreciate the reasoning that led to this disengagement, but fear that a generation of aspiring Afghan women and those citizens who wagered on presidential assurances will pay a heavy price for U.S. abandonment.  President Biden has claimed that the country will no longer be an al-Qaeda haven (just as President Trump declared that the danger of ISIS had ended), but that proclaimed goal has long been less compelling now that terrorist networks subsist in many different territories.  Indeed, the alleged removal of a terrorist threat from a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan may prove a spurious achievement given the recent actions of the so-called ISIS-K network.  The greater consideration was perhaps that both the Trump and Biden administrations decided that if the Afghans could not finally defend themselves, they did not deserve to be forever defended by the United States.  This is a justification, however, that ignores the role of the allies of United States, and the sacrifices Afghans themselves have made.  Defenders of the sudden withdrawal have also stressed that the United States was unlikely to turn the country into a functioning democracy.  But acknowledging this limitation did not have to mean that the U.S. could not have helped to preserve a non-authoritarian and more tolerant regime at an acceptable cost.  

That admittedly less exalted mission has now been foreclosed, and the decision is in line with Trump’s policies even if Biden faced up to more honestly.  For better or worse, American policy in the Middle East and Central Asia has long been a messy bipartisan one.  It has occasionally been mendacious and disastrous such as in the case of the 2003-04 war in Iraq, which was also supported on both sides of the aisle.  More often it has been one of temporizing, what the British called cunctation – kicking the can down the road, which works until it doesn’t.  This approach has characterized the U.S. approach to the Saudi regime, and it has characterized the government’s unwillingness to pry Israel from its policies that are determined to forestall any viable Palestinian national structure.    

Cunctation may be the only realistic policy with respect to the other issues Biden must face.  In the long run the United States is unlikely to overcome the assertiveness of China in geopolitical and economic terms, the resistance of both China and the Soviet Union to human rights, and the global turn to authoritarianism more widely.  With respect to international economic and social issues, the major Western nations will all confront throngs of migrants fleeing collapsing or abusive state authority in Central America and the Middle East (the latter of which are more of a European concern); they have already had a hard time facing the global health issues raised by the COVID-19 pandemic; and all them are struggling to institute the collective action needed to mitigate the massive impact of climate change.  The harsh truth is that every president inherits a heavily encumbered international situation and must judge what to accept and what to contest.  Biden has accepted Germany’s plan to move ahead with the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia as a “fait-accompli,” even though it threatens to further squeeze Ukraine, and will not reduce German dependence on hydrocarbons^[1]  Despite ritual denials, NATO partners in general have apparently accepted the Russian annexation of Crimea as a fait-accompli.  Swallowing the fait-accompli may become the leitmotif of U.S. decline even though acceptable political rhetoric will never allow it to be confessed openly. 

President Trump did nothing to reverse this melancholy prospect.  His massive over-confidence in his mastery of the art of the deal and his personal presence led him to believe that Kim Jong-un would succumb to his blandishments and renounce North Korea’s nuclear program.  He was foolish to think so and to have disregarded the unsettling impact it would have on the delicate triangle with South Korea and Japan.  Still, if it had been adequately prepared, I would not condemn the wager on a personal meeting as such.  The underlying problem is that Trump seemed to have little capacity to understand the ‘structural’ limits to personal cajolery.  So long as Kim Jong-un remains willing to disregard the economic costs to his population, his nuclear arsenal provides him with a power and status he has no reason to renounce.  The Chinese could change his calculus, but why should they bring Pyongyang to heel so long as it remains an irritant to the United States, South Korea, and Japan?  Beijing has no motive to make life easy for Washington. 

The dilemma posed by the Iranian nuclear program is somewhat different since Tehran has not yet achieved a nuclear stockpile.  The question was (and remains) whether the JPCOA was really likely to forestall that eventuality in the long run.  The Biden administration has not rushed to rejoin it unconditionally.  Detractors of the agreement believe that its 15-year limit is dangerously brief.  Supporters are wagering that somehow Iran’s rulers will find it in their interest to extend it.  In both cases the wager is on the long-term nature of the Iranian regime.  Is it realistic for the United States to seek long-term cooperation from Iranian moderates?  Or should it accept their weakness in the current institutional structure and simply confront the hard-liners with ever-harsher sanctions (assuming that the U.S. and its Israeli allies forswear the option of a preemptive strike with all the incalculable consequences that would entail)?  Obviously, the division between hard-liners and moderates is far too crude and allows for no evolution of positions.  (The historian does well to recall the dilemmas posed by the Versailles treaty framework and its impact on German political institutions between 1919 and 1939.  Would earlier revision have forestalled the advent of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler?  Should it have been enforced integrally early on once he came to power?  These issues are still debated.) 

There is another alternative: simply accept that after fifteen years the Iranians may well acquire nuclear weapons, and that thereafter the Islamic Republic’s potential adversaries will have to rely on the balance of terror to keep them from being used.  This is, after all, the regime that India and Pakistan, China, Russia, France, Britain and the U.S. have relied on since 1945.  Before insisting that it remains unacceptable in the case of Iran or North Korea we have to ask what feasible and acceptable alternative promises greater stability.  

In any case, the non-proliferation regime that has been in theory a bipartisan commitment of U.S. foreign policy is always going to be vulnerable short of global nuclear disarmament.  It establishes a hierarchy of great powers that second-rank authoritarian powers will be tempted to challenge.  In practice it is a regime of slowed proliferation, in which one or two new nuclear powers have been allowed to emerge every couple of decades.  The major deterrent to acquisition aside from cost has been the quite rational conclusion that to possess atomic weapons is likely to make one a target for other nuclear powers.  Trump apparently asked his advisers why, if the United States has nuclear weapons, it doesn’t use them.  The question suggested that the rationality needed for a deterrence regime may not be foolproof.  The Soviets and Americans have preserved a mutual deterrence regime for some 70 years, but it can only be judged successful if it lasts forever.  Israel may ultimately have to live with such a Damoclean status quo.  The debate that Trump’s legacy should reopen is whether the U.S. should strive for universal nuclear disarmament including its own arsenal if it would keep countries such as Iran from acquiring atomic weapons.  A hierarchical system of limited access to weaponry is unlikely to provide stability forever.

Trump’s decision to withdraw from the JPCOA had, of course, wider implications in terms of regional Middle Eastern politics.  It further cemented an alignment with former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli policies, a clear choice to write off any remaining tattered hopes for a two-state solution and to humiliate the Palestinians.  Trump’s turning over a highly complex set of questions to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was not unprecedented (Italian dictator Benito Mussolini also relied on his son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano as foreign minister… before he had him shot for supporting his ouster), but it revealed again how all complex issues were filtered through personal relationships.  

Nonetheless, an implicit strategy was emerging for the Middle East from Kushner’s bricolage.  The administration in effect was brokering an alignment of authoritarian Gulf rulers, the Saudis, and Netanyahu to tamp down the troublesome (and yes, sometimes terrorist) subaltern peoples of the region – whether Palestinians or the non-Arab proletariats of the Gulf.  Having an authoritarian regime in Egypt preoccupied with its own repressive agenda, a hapless Iraqi state, and an epic tragedy in Syria helped facilitate this combinazione.  Probably any international agreements involving Israel and the other Middle Eastern powers should be welcomed, but the so-called Abraham Accords were clearly a coalition of conservative elites against radical change, a latter-day Holy Alliance sanctimoniously named for the spiritual ancestor of the three monotheistic faiths.  None of its signatories apparently recalled how Hagar fit into that story as well.

                                                                                                                                                *

When it comes to foreign policy it seems to me that several fundamental choices currently face the United State, and they are often obfuscated by worn-out slogans.  Does it wish to retain its “global leadership”?  Is it in fact an “indispensable nation”?  Does it make sense for political leaders to insist that its “greatest days lie ahead”?  I am not sure what global leadership consists of these days.  If it involves military preponderance, the U.S. may still retain it, but an edge in hardware probably means less than it once did.  If North Korea managed to land nuclear missiles on any American city the result would be disastrous, no matter what vengeance the United States might choose to exact.  If Russian-protected cyber outlaws brought down urban transportation and medical systems, the consequences would be catastrophic.  It has been evident for over half a century that the United States could not maintain its post-World War II share of global production and wealth, and the real success of foreign economic policy would be a more universal economic development.  If moral “leadership” is at stake – which is where Trump failed most egregiously—then the United States has serious tasks ahead:  absorbing migrants, closing Guantánamo, and reforming its incarceration system (more the product of the Clinton years than Trump’s administration – indeed one area where Trump promised some meaningful reform), and reversing glaring inequalities of race, income, and wealth.  Rather than insisting on global leadership, the task of the U.S. should be to manage America’s relative decline in a multipolar system without military conflict.  Measure success by raising the health, education, and welfare levels of the world’s poorest, including America’s own.

And what about the constitutional provisions for setting American foreign policy?  After the Vietnam War Congress moved to reclaim more power over American military interventions abroad – a tendency that was reversed again after the terrorist attacks of 9/11.  Normally vigorous Congressional oversight should seem desirable.  But let us be candid, Congress supported the cold-war engagement that liberals called for during a period when Democrats still ruled a one-party South and segregationist senators chaired key committees concerned with foreign policy and defense.  Do supporters of a strong presidential role really want Congressional oversight when Trump’s legacy still seems so strong over a Southern white electorate?  

On the other hand, whether speaking as historian or citizen, I am not ready to endorse the calls for a withdrawal from international commitments to the degree that has now become fashionable among some in both conservative and progressive circles.  Andrew Bacevich and Stephen Wertheim have exposed some of the grandiose visions that have motivated American imperial pretensions since the outset of World War II, but perhaps because of my age (a child of the Marshall Plan, so to speak), I think that the military and diplomatic retrenchment they recommend would be unwise in today’s world.^[2]  Aside from the global upheavals that might follow, I do not believe that American politics would witness a succession of uncontested catastrophic outcomes, whether in the Middle East, or Taiwan, or elsewhere without descending into a series of domestic witch hunts or ultimately giving way to a sudden reversal of security policy from an objectively disadvantaged position (cf. Britain in 1938-40).  

I believe it is appropriate to defend values as well as interests, although to what degree military force should be engaged has to be weighed case by case.  There is a case for speaking loudly as well as wielding a big stick.  Speaking truth to power is a more appealing way of putting it.  I would submit it is the best choice for dealing with China even while the United States reengages with regional Asian and European allies.  Human rights cannot be the only guideline for policy but neither can acceptance of the fait accompli.  Public opinion loves to find a suitable “doctrine” for foreign policy – the Monroe Doctrine, the Truman Doctrine, the Nixon Doctrine, etc. – but case-by-case wisdom is probably more useful and will certainly be more necessary.  Ironically, the Trump presidency may have done one indirect public service through all its brutal disruptions if it compels a rethinking of what foreign policy the American imperial republic can and should defend.

 

Charles S. Maier received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1967 and is currently Leverett Saltonstall Research Professor of History at Harvard University.  His most recent book is Once within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging since 1500 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016).

© Copyright 2021 The Authors

 

Notes

[1] John Hudson, “Amid internal disputes over Russia policy, Biden has chosen a mix of confrontation and cooperation,” The Washington Post, 15June 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/biden-putin-summit/2021/06/15/19657e2c-cd44-11eb-9b7e-e06f6cfdece8_story.html

[2] See among his other works, Andrew Bacevich, After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed (New York: Macmillan, 2021); The Age of Illusions (New York: Henry Holt, 2020); The Long Wars: A New History of U.S. National Security Policy since World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); and Stephen Wertheim, Tomorrow the World: the Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020).

 

Os desafios de Biden para América Latina - Hussein Kalout

 Os desafios de Biden para América Latina

Região compõe encadeamento de temas que são fundamentais para os interesses dos EUA no contexto global – como meio ambiente, migração e contenção do poder chinês

Hussein Kalout

Estadão | 7/12/2020, 15h

 

Uma das indagações que perpassa a mente dos líderes dos países latino-americanos é o de tentar decodificar o grau de importância que a região terá no mapa cartesiano da política externa do futuro governo dos EUA. O presidente eleito, Joe Biden, repetirá os desatinos da administração Trump para a região ou oferecerá uma nova perspectiva sem ameaças militares (invadir a Venezuela) ou escolhas de caráter binário (EUA ou China)? 

Biden herdará um país dividido politicamente e em meio a uma grave crise sanitária. Sua missão será, por um lado, minorar as feridas internas após a fratricida eleição, por outro, recompor o deteriorado arco de alianças dos EUA no mundo. 

A América Latina, em si, talvez não seja estruturalmente importante para o sistema nervoso da diplomacia americana. Porém, a região compõe encadeamento de temas que são fundamentais para os interesses dos EUA no contexto global – como meio ambiente, migração e contenção do poder chinês.

Nos últimos quatro anos, a região foi instrumentalizada como entreposto da “guerra cultural” ao largo do governo Trump. O combate ao Castro-Chavismo culminou no desmantelamento do reatamento das relações diplomáticas Washington-Havana e ressuscitou o perigoso discurso do uso da força militar – como meio de coerção – contra alguns governos na região. A relação EUA-América Latina mais recuou do que avançou. 

A Venezuela tornou-se o alvo predileto do governo Trump. Não cabe aqui negar, por obviedade cristalina, o tremendo déficit democrático gerado pelo governo autoritário de Nicolás Maduro. Mas, a invenção de Juan Guaidó – o autoproclamando presidente venezuelano – e a fracassada tentativa de implosão o regime podem vir a ser contabilizados como um dos maiores erros da política externa dos EUA para a América Latina desde a invasão da Baía dos Porcos, em 1961. 

Se o tecido social venezuelano já estava dilacerado, a administração Trump – com a ajuda dos governos do Brasil e da Colômbia – contribuiu para o recrudescimento do regime chavista. O fracasso de sua abordagem política e a incapacidade do Grupo de Lima de oferecer soluções razoáveis para o impasse interno, somente ampliou o fosso e de quebra permitiu que a Rússia consolidasse a sua mão sobre Caracas. O resultado da eleição para a Assembleia Legislativa venezuelana, com maciço boicote da oposição, é puro reflexo daquilo que já estava ruim piorar ainda mais.  

Para agravar a conjuntura continental, a falecida OEA faleceu novamente graças a obra do governo Trump – com o beneplácito dos governos mais afoitos do hemisfério. Ao invés de atuar como instituição proponente de soluções e construtora de diálogos para dirimir conflitos, o que vimos foi a cooptação da OEA como um instrumento de pressão ideológica – não irei me debruçar aqui sobre o papelão vexaminoso exercido pelo secretário-geral da organização no caso boliviano.

Contudo, a pedra de toque para colocar de joelhos o sistema multilateral hemisférico foi a ruptura do consenso em torno da escolha do presidente do BID. Os países latino-americanos viram a administração Trump, com a dedicada ajuda do governo brasileiro, perder o único posto multilateral a eles confiado – e tudo isso como parte da “guerra cultural”.

No afã de deter a expansão dos interesses da China na América Latina, o governo Trump não ofereceu alternativas substantivas economicamente aos países da região. Ampliar investimentos, absorver a pauta exportadora ou aprofundar as relações comerciais com os países latino-americanos nem sequer compôs a sua estratégia. O que se viu foi a ameaça da construção do muro junto à fronteira do México, açodamento na política de imigração e a imposição de barreiras tarifárias contra vários setores produtivos dos países da região – e entre os quais o próprio Brasil, apesar de toda a sua subserviência.

Se o governo Trump errou a mão em pautas como o multilateralismo regional, política migratória, o dilema venezuelano e o grave cochilo com a destruição do meio ambiente, a vindoura administração Biden estará diante de importantes desafios diplomáticos junto aos países latino-americanos.  

Será necessária uma estratégia de reversão de boa parte dessas políticas. O comércio não pode ser assimétrico, os países latino-americanos não podem ser postos como reféns de uma escolha binária entre EUA e China, e o lançamento de uma vigorosa agenda global voltada para o desenvolvimento sustentável e a proteção do meio ambiente requer um diálogo profícuo com os países amazônicos – e não a sua exclusão. Em sua maioria, os países latino-americanos respiram aliviados com a chegada de Joe Biden à Casa Branca, porém, a construção de uma agenda positiva para a região depende, fundamentalmente, do como Washington fará esse trabalho de reversão e a partir de que parâmetros deseja sedimentar as suas relações com os países do hemisfério. 

* HUSSEIN KALOUT, 44, é Cientista Político, Professor de Relações Internacionais e Pesquisador da Universidade Harvard. Foi Secretário Especial de Assuntos Estratégicos da Presidência da República (2016-2018). Escreve semanalmente, às segundas-feiras.

https://internacional.estadao.com.br/noticias/geral,analise-os-desafios-de-biden-para-america-latina,70003543035

Trump Drove Latin America Into China’s Arms - Oliver Stuenkel (Foreign Affairs)

Oliver Stuenkel mostra como a política de Trump para a AL backfired, por incompetente, ideológica e puramente aventureira, como se espera de bestas quadradas...

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

 

Foreign Affairs, November/December 2020

SIGN INSUBSCRIBE

Trump Drove Latin America Into China’s Arms

Biden Has a Chance to Wrest It Back

By Oliver Stuenkel

November 13, 2020

 

The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump took an aggressive approach to Latin America that has spectacularly backfired. Two years ago, John Bolton, who was then the U.S. national security adviser, dubbed the autocratic regimes of Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua the “Troika of Tyranny” and confronted the three countries with crippling sanctions and menacing rhetoric. “Today, we proudly proclaim for all to hear: the Monroe Doctrine is alive and well,” Bolton said in April 2019, referring to the principle behind the long and traumatic history of U.S. interventions in Latin America.

The result was to unite Latin American governments of all stripes against the United States. Regional leaders, concerned about the precedent that U.S. intervention in Venezuela could set, reluctantly sided with the country’s dictator, Nicolás Maduro. Even those strongly critical of Venezuela, such as Colombia, rejected all talk of military intervention, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who had made radical alignment with the United States the centerpiece of his foreign policy, found himself overruled by the country’s armed forces, which categorically oppose the presence of foreign troops in neighboring countries. The autocratic leaders of Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba are still in power—in part because U.S. pressure created a rally-round-the-flag effect and helped them deflect blame onto Washington for internal woes.

Even as it failed to achieve its primary objective, the Trump administration’s policy undermined broader U.S. strategy in Latin America by strengthening China’s hand in the region. Indeed, the aggressive U.S. stance has left Latin American policymakers scrambling for partners who can balance Washington’s influence—a role that Beijing has been only too willing to play. In Venezuela, sanctions have sidelined U.S. firms, creating an ideal opening for Chinese companies to expand their influence. If the Maduro regime were to collapse, Beijing would be well positioned to assume a dominant role in the country’s reconstruction.

During the Trump presidency, China has grown more influential and more powerful in Latin America in virtually every dimension. Brazil is perhaps the most remarkable example: despite Bolsonaro’s anti-China rhetoric and his efforts to strengthen ties to Washington, Brazil’s trade with the United States has fallen to its lowest level in 11 years, while trade with China is booming. Fully 34 percent of Brazilian exports go to China, and China’s relatively quick economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic will likely lead that figure to grow.

Latin American heads of state watched closely as Trump repeatedly humiliated Bolsonaro—surprising him with tariffs on Brazilian products, for example. The lesson they drew was simple: a partnership with Washington entailed significant economic and political risk. They looked to Beijing instead: Chile’s president sought to make his country the region’s main interlocutor with China, and Argentina welcomed a Chinese military-run space station, which began operating in 2018. Of seven countries that shifted ties from Taipei to Beijing during the Trump presidency, three—the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and Panama—are in Latin America. Paraguay faces growing pressure to join them. Many Latin American countries are likely to adopt Huawei’s 5G infrastructure, despite U.S. threats of unspecified “economic consequences” for those that do.

President-elect Joe Biden has an opportunity to take a more constructive approach to Beijing’s growing influence in Latin America. Doing so will require the new administration to avoid antagonizing the region’s leaders and to emphasize shared interests instead. Washington will have to counteract an ugly impression that the Trump administration has created—one that suggests the United States is driven largely by the desire to contain China rather than support the region’s economic development.

DAY ONE

The less threatening the United States appears from a Latin American perspective, the less of an urge the region’s leaders will feel to balance its influence with China’s. Trump administration officials, including former and current Secretaries of State Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo, have made frequent reference to the Monroe Doctrine. The incoming U.S. administration must explicitly distance itself from this language. Such talk was a gift to the Chinese, who defend the principle of nonintervention—a principle that Latin American governments strongly support.

Badmouthing China makes Washington look desperate to dominate and afraid to compete.

The Biden administration should make clear from day one that military intervention in Venezuela is off the table, and it should put an end to broad sanctions that immiserate the country’s citizens. Even Venezuelans who despise Maduro largely oppose the U.S. sanctions, which have caused vast human suffering in a region where millions of people are already sliding back into poverty because of the pandemic. The United States should calibrate sanctions to hurt only those who assure Maduro’s hold on power. It should do the same in Nicaragua and Cuba, because whatever Latin Americans may think about the regime in Havana, broad sanctions fuel anti-Americanism in the region and make China’s life easier.

A POSITIVE AGENDA

Latin American policymakers are far more likely to be influenced by constructive U.S. policies toward their countries than by negative U.S. rhetoric about China. Trade with China has had many positive economic consequences for Latin America over the past two decades, and the United States sounds patronizing and dishonest when it seeks to dissuade the region’s leaders from sustaining these relations. Such meddling is counterproductive—even when the United States has genuinely relevant concerns, such as those about the inequality of a trade relationship that has Latin America mainly selling commodities to China and buying value-added goods in return, or about the risks that Huawei telecommunications infrastructure may pose to privacy.

The Biden administration should instruct its ambassadors and officials not to speak about Chinese–Latin American relations in public at all. Badmouthing China, rather than promoting U.S. strengths, makes Washington look desperate to dominate and afraid to compete. A Central American diplomat once privately told me that when U.S. officials complain about China in Latin America, “they sound like a jealous ex-boyfriend.”

The United States should instead lay out a positive agenda on matters of common concern across the region. Some of these pertain to other regions as well: the United States under Biden should of course return to the World Health Organization and adopt more generous policies to help poor countries gain access to masks, ventilators, and vaccines against COVID-19. Such measures will go a long way in countering China’s growing influence in Latin America.

Biden will need particular diplomatic skill to deal with Bolsonaro.

In Latin America in particular, Washington should emphasize and deepen its work with local partners to promote human rights, protect the environment, and strengthen civil society. It should be an ally in the region’s fight against corruption and a source of economic aid at the current moment of profound crisis. A constructively engaged United States can convene regional discussions to help tackle drug trafficking and transnational crime, which victimizes hundreds of thousands of young Latin Americans every year.

PRESIDENTIAL DIPLOMACY

U.S. presidential diplomacy could go a long way toward overcoming the region’s polarities, and Biden may be particularly well suited for such an enterprise. He is unusually knowledgeable about Latin America for a U.S. president-elect, and his moderate, pragmatic style may allow him to establish a meaningful rapport with leaders from the left (Bolivia, Mexico, Argentina), through the center-right (Colombia, Chile, Uruguay), to the far right (Brazil). Dialogue in the region has all but broken down in recent years: President Bolsonaro has so far refused to speak to his Argentine counterpart, and Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has yet to visit a single Latin American country. Only if and when these leaders resume a constructive dialogue will the region be able to address its most urgent problems, such as migration from Venezuela and Central America, environmental degradation in Brazil, transnational crime, and a poverty rate nearing 40 percent.

Biden will need particular diplomatic skill to deal with Bolsonaro. The self-styled “Trump of the Tropics” repeatedly attacked the Democratic candidate during the campaign because of his comments about deforestation in the Amazon. Biden’s task will be to get Brazil to adopt more stringent environmental rules—but to do so without pushing it into the arms of China, which is careful never to criticize Brazil’s controversial environmental policies, and without issuing public threats, which Bolsonaro uses to mobilize his radical followers.

No matter how much U.S. diplomacy improves under Biden, trade between China and Latin America is almost certain to continue growing, and China will therefore consolidate some influence on the continent. Economic ties to China may help to mitigate the worst of the coming recession in Latin America, even if it can’t be staved off altogether. Nonetheless, Washington has an opportunity to become a far more trusted and influential partner to Latin America than it has been under President Trump. The new administration should seize the moment as the region charts its geopolitical course.

 

A New U.S. Foreign Policy for the Post-Pandemic Landscape - William J. Burns (The Day After, Carnegie Endowment)

 The Day After

a magazine by Carnegie Endowment initiative

https://carnegieendowment.org/publications/the-day-after

 

Navigating the post-pandemic international landscape will pose an enormous challenge for decisionmakers in boardrooms and situation rooms alike.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has convened its global network of more than 150 scholars from twenty countries and six global centers to produce “The Day After: Navigating a Post-Pandemic World”—a digital magazine that provides grounded, fresh analysis and new approaches to some of the most consequential challenges unfolding before us.

 

 

Chapters : 

1)     Post-Pandemic Landscape (William J. Burns)

2)     Asia’s Future

3)     U.S. Middle Class

4)     Resurgent Russia

5)     India’s Path Ahead

6)     Arab Decisions

7)     Europe’s Global Test

8)     Nuclear Arms Control

9)     Securing Cyberspace

10)   Revitalizing Democracy

COMMENTARY; View From Latin America, Moisés Naím

 

A New U.S. Foreign Policy for the Post-Pandemic Landscape

William J. Burns

Carnegie Endowment, October 8, 2020

Link: https://carnegieendowment.org/2020/09/09/new-u.s.-foreign-policy-for-post-pandemic-landscape-pub-82498

 

 

As the global order crumbles, the United States must reinvent its role in the world.

It’s tempting to draw sweeping conclusions about what geopolitics will look like after the coronavirus pandemic. Some argue that we’re witnessing the last gasp of U.S. primacy, the equivalent of Britain’s 1956 “Suez moment.” Others argue that the United States, the main driver of the post–Cold War international order, is only temporarily incapacitated, with a president drunk at the wheel. Tomorrow, a more sober operator can swiftly restore its leadership.

There is a lot we don’t know yet about the virus or how it will reshape the international landscape. What we do know is that we have drifted into one of those rare periods of transition, with U.S. dominance in the rearview mirror and a more anarchic order looming dimly beyond. The moment resembles—in both its fragility and its geopolitical and technological dynamism—the era before World War I, which triggered two global military convulsions before statecraft finally caught up with the magnitude of the challenges. To navigate today’s complicated transition, the United States will need to move beyond the debate between retrenchment and restoration and imagine a more fundamental reinvention of its role in the world.

We have drifted into one of those rare periods of transition, with U.S. dominance in the rearview mirror and a more anarchic order looming dimly beyond.

The wreckage of the global pandemic surrounds us—with more than 650,000 people dead, the ranks of the hungry doubling, and the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression raging. Well before the coronavirus hit, however, the liberal international order built and led by the United States was becoming less liberal, less ordered, and less American. The pandemic has accelerated that trend and aggravated preexisting conditions.

With the United States and its allies reeling, distracted, and divided by the pandemic, China’s ambition to become the dominant player in Asia has grown, as has its desire to reshape international institutions and rules to suit its power and preferences. The pandemic has also magnified the insecurities of Chinese leadership, amplifying their worries about economic sluggishness and social discontent.

The result is greater domestic repression and an even more pugnacious brand of “wolf warrior” diplomacy. Chinese President Xi Jinping has cracked down hard on Hong Kong, flexed China’s military muscles across the Western Pacific, raised the temperature of border conflicts with India, and discarded the “hide and bide” strategy of his predecessors. Instead of a neat Thucydidean dynamic between rising and established powers, the behavior of China and the United States reflects an uneasy combination of ambition and vulnerability, each prone to bravado to mask gnawing uncertainties.

Always attuned to the weakness of others, President Vladimir Putin is losing sight of Russia’s own weakness. The collapse of the oil market and Putin’s mismanagement of the pandemic have made Russia’s one-dimensional economy and stagnant political system even more brittle. A potent counterpuncher, Putin still sees plenty of opportunities to disrupt and subvert rival countries—the kind of tactics that can help a declining power sustain its status. His margin for error, however, is shrinking.

Europe is caught between an assertive China, a revisionist Russia, an erratic United States, and its own political breakdowns—none more perplexing than Brexit. The drift in the transatlantic alliance is worsening: the United States is looking for Europe to do more with less say, and Europe fears that it will become the grass on which the great power elephants trample.

The pandemic has also intensified the Middle East’s disorder and dysfunction. Hardliners in both Tehran and Washington pose combatively at the foot of a dangerous escalatory ladder. Proxy wars in Yemen and Libya spin on. Syria remains a wreck, and Israel’s impending annexation of portions of the West Bank threatens to bury a two-state solution.

As the pandemic’s wave crests over developing countries, the world’s most fragile societies will become only more vulnerable. Latin America will grapple with the biggest economic decline in the region’s history. Africa—with its growing cities and daunting food, water, and health insecurities—faces greater risks than perhaps any other part of the world.

All of these challenges and uncertainties are further complicated by technological disruption and by ideological and economic competition. The pace of change has outstripped the capacity of faltering, inward-looking leaders to shape the rules of the road. False information spreads with the same alacrity as truth; infectious diseases move faster than treatments and cures. The same technologies that have unlocked so many human possibilities are now being used by authoritarian leaders to lock in citizens, surveil them, and repress them.

With the triumphalism of globalization long behind us, societies struggle with widening inequality and mercantilist impulses. Democracy has been in retreat for more than a decade, the compact between citizens and governments badly frayed. International institutions are beginning to break, paralyzed by too much bureaucracy, too little investment, and intense major power rivalry. Looming above it all is the forbidding menace of climate change, as our planet gradually suffocates on carbon emissions.

This moment screams for leadership to help forge a sense of order—an organizer to help navigate this complicated mess of challenges.

This moment screams for leadership to help forge a sense of order—an organizer to help navigate this complicated mess of challenges and stabilize geopolitical competition, and a mobilizer to help cope with the “problems without passports” that reach beyond the capacity of any one state and ensure at least some modest protections of global public goods.

But now, the United States is living through the worst intersection of man and moment in its history. For President Donald Trump, America First really means Trump first, America alone, and Americans on their own.

The post-pandemic future of the United States is not preordained. We still get a vote, and we still get to make some fateful choices. They are more complicated than those we faced at the end of the Cold War, when our undisputed primacy cushioned us from our mistakes and sustained our illusions. But today’s choices are even more consequential than those of thirty years ago.

The United States must choose from three broad strategic approaches: retrenchment, restoration, and reinvention. Each aspires to deliver on our interests and protect our values; where they differ is in their assessment of American priorities and influence and of the threats we face. Each is easy to caricature, but each deserves an honest look.

RETRENCHMENT

It’s not hard to persuade many Americans—struggling through the human and economic costs of the pandemic, pained by the open wounds of our racial divides, and doubtful about the power and promise of the American idea—to pull up our national drawbridges and retrench. Nor is it hard to make the case that the prevailing bipartisan foreign policy consensus fumbled the United States’ post–Cold War “unipolar moment,” leaving us overstretched overseas and underinvested at home.

Proponents of retrenchment argue that, for too long, friends and foes alike were glad to let the United States underwrite global security while they reaped the benefits. Europe could spend less on defense and more on social safety nets, China could focus on economic modernization, and the United States kept the peace.

The United States may be first among unequals for now, but the notion that its leaders can resurrect the era of uncontested American primacy, prevent China’s rise, or will its diplomatic relationships and tools into exactly their pre-Trump, prepandemic shapes is a mirage.

Retrenchment is easily distorted as a kind of nativist isolationism or pathological declinism. It is often portrayed as a call to throw overboard a sense of enlightened self-interest and focus at long last on the “self” part. The heart of the argument is far less radical: it’s about narrowing our concept of U.S. vital interests, sharply reducing global military deployments, shedding outdated alliances, and reining in our missionary zeal for democracy-building abroad. Retrenchment means jettisoning our arrogant dismissiveness of nationalism and sovereignty, and understanding that other powers will continue to pursue spheres of influence and defend them. And it means acknowledging that the United States can manage threats and adversaries more effectively than it can vanquish them.

The main risk in retrenchment lies in taking it too far or too fast. Any effort to disentangle the United States from the world comes with complicated downsides. Former president Barack Obama’s attempt to shift the terms of U.S. engagement in the Middle East offers an important caution. His thoughtful long game met the unsynchronized passions of the region’s short game, creating significant dislocations and doubts about American power.

There are bigger structural questions too. Even if the United States accepted its relative decline and shrank its external ambitions, where’s the rising ally to whom it can pass the baton, as the British did to the Americans after World War II? However sclerotic some of our alliances have become, how confident are American leaders that they can shape our fate better without them? Isn’t there a danger of the United States becoming an island power in a world inhospitable to islands—with China a more dominant presence on the Eurasian landmass, Russia a weakening accomplice, and Europe an isolated appendage?

And would a United States retrenching in hard power still be able to play the organizing role on issues like climate change, nuclear nonproliferation, and global trade that no other country can play right now?

RESTORATION

A case can be made that American diffidence, not hubris, is the original sin. Warts and all, U.S. global leadership ushered in an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity. We give it up at our peril. Retrenchers subscribe to the diplomat George Kennan’s view that the sooner the United States sheds its paternalistic altruism and becomes just another big country, the better off it will be. Restorationists believe that consigning the United States to such a role, in an otherwise rudderless world, would be a fatal mistake.

They argue that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States failed to take full advantage of its primacy. U.S. leaders naively enabled the rise of our future rivals, thinking they would be satisfied with a seat at our table rather than displacing us at its head. The United States slowed NATO’s expansion to pacify Russian anxieties—only to see an ever more revanchist Russia get back on its feet—and welcomed China into the World Trade Organization as a “responsible stakeholder” yet failed to hold it to account when it continued to behave irresponsibly, breaking the rules while the American middle class broke its back.

Despite our self-inflicted wounds, we still have the world’s strongest military, most influential economy, most expansive alliance system, and most potent soft power.

Restorationists argue that the United States suffers most not when it does too much but when it tries too little. They believe that U.S. leaders feared the uncertain slippery slope of intervention abroad far more than the certain waves of human tragedy that would flow absent American action. They see “leading from behind” as an oxymoron and think the United States failed to appreciate both how much emerging democracies depended on it and how methodically authoritarians would contest the democratic model.

The United States may no longer enjoy unrivaled dominance, but power differentials still lean significantly in our favor. Despite our self-inflicted wounds, we still have the world’s strongest military, most influential economy, most expansive alliance system, and most potent soft power.

Restorationists worry about the risk of overreaction to relative American decline. The contest with China is not another Cold War to avoid but one to fight with confidence and win. The United States should reject any return to a world of closed spheres of influence. It should be clear-eyed about the rise of techno-authoritarianism and push back hard with a new concert of democracies. And although we might need to rebalance our foreign policy tools and avoid the excesses of the post-9/11 era, the risks of slashing our defense budgets and our global military posture outweigh the rewards.

For critics, Saturday Night Live’s “More Cowbell” sketch—admittedly not your standard foreign policy analogy—embodies the restorationist view. To paraphrase the immortal words of the producer Bruce Dickinson: The world has a fever and the only prescription is more U.S. leadership, however discordant and self-involved we can sometimes be and however fatigued our bandmates might be with our prima donna act.

The promised cure, however, leaves many questions unanswered. Do the American people have the stomach and resources right now for a cosmic struggle with authoritarianism or unbounded competition with China? Are the maximalist aims sometimes thrown around in this debate necessary or achievable? How far are U.S. allies willing and able to join in common cause? Will a more assertive international posture accelerate or delay the renewal of the American middle class? Is restraint an invitation to disorder or the best defense against it?

REINVENTION

There lies an alternative between breaking up the band and resigning ourselves to the perpetual din of the cowbell.

We live in a new reality: the United States can no longer dictate events as we sometimes believed we could. The Trump administration has done more damage to America’s values, image, and influence than any other administration in my lifetime. And our nation is more divided by political, racial, and economic tensions than it has been in generations. But even so, assuming we don’t keep digging the hole deeper for ourselves at home and abroad, the United States remains in a better position than any other major power to mobilize coalitions and navigate the geopolitical rapids of the twenty-first century.

We can’t afford to apply a more modest lipstick to an essentially restorationist strategy, or, alternatively, a bolder rhetorical gloss to retrenchment. We must reinvent the purpose and practice of American power, finding a balance between our ambition and our limitations.

Smart foreign policy begins at home, with a strong democracy, society, and economy.

First and foremost, U.S. foreign policy must support domestic renewal. Smart foreign policy begins at home, with a strong democracy, society, and economy. But it has to end there too—with more and better jobs, greater security, a better environment, and a more inclusive, just, and resilient society.

The well-being of the American middle class ought to be the engine that drives our foreign policy. We’re long overdue for a historic course correction at home. We need to push for more inclusive economic growth—growth that narrows gaps in income and health. Our actions abroad must further that goal rather than hamper it. Prioritizing the needs of American workers over the profits of corporations is essential. Leaders must do a far better job of ensuring that trade and investment deals reflect those imperatives.

That doesn’t mean the United States should turn its back on trade or global economic integration, however. Supply chains in some sectors with national security implications will require diversification and redundancy to make them sturdier, but policymakers shouldn’t disrupt global supply chains that benefit American consumers and fuel emerging markets. An improved economic approach might involve elements of industrial policy, focusing more government support on science, technology, education, and research. That ought to be complemented by reform of the United States’ broken immigration system.

A second priority for a reinvented foreign policy involves grand challenges—climate change, global health insecurity, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and the revolution in technology. All of those problems directly affect the health, security, and prosperity of Americans. None of them can be solved by the United States on its own. All will require international cooperation despite intensifying strategic rivalry.

These challenges require a new multilateralism—a patchwork of arrangements, with coalitions of like-minded states at its core, which the United States is still better placed than any other country to assemble; a hard-nosed approach to reforming international institutions; and agile diplomacy to engage rivals on questions that cut across major power competition. Just as our forward military basing helped deal with threats to security during the Cold War, preventive diplomacy can help cushion our society against inevitable shocks and strengthen its resilience.

A third priority is the United States’ greatest geopolitical challenge: managing competition with China. In recent decades, undisciplined thinking led us to assume too much about the benefits of engaging with China. Today, undisciplined thinking of a different sort is causing us to assume too much about the feasibility of decoupling and containment—and about the inevitability of confrontation. Our tendency, as it was during the height of the Cold War, is to overhype the threat, overprove our hawkish bona fides, overmilitarize our approach, and reduce the political and diplomatic space required to manage great power competition.

Preventing China’s rise is beyond the United States’ capacity, and the two countries’ economies are too entangled to decouple.

Preventing China’s rise is beyond the United States’ capacity, and the two countries’ economies are too entangled to decouple. The United States can, however, shape the environment into which China rises, taking advantage of the web of allies and partners across the Indo-Pacific—from Japan and South Korea to a rising India—who worry about China’s ascendance. That will require working with them—and engaging Chinese leadership directly—to bound rivalry with Beijing, define the terms for coexistence, prevent competition from becoming a collision, and preserve space for cooperation on global challenges.

Everything rides on developing a strategy that reinforces—rather than trades against—these three interrelated priorities. China, obviously, is not the United States’ only geopolitical challenge—just by far the most important. We cannot ignore other regions where we have enduring interests: Europe remains a crucial partner and North America our natural strategic home base, despite the Trump administration’s rare diplomatic feat of alienating the Canadians. Nor can we ignore the inevitable crises at home and abroad that so often derail the neatest of strategies.

Armed with a clear sense of priorities, the next administration will have to reinvent U.S. alliances and partnerships and make some hard—and overdue—choices about America’s tools and terms of engagement around the world. And it will have to act with the discipline that so often eluded the United States during its lazy post–Cold War dominance.

If America First is again consigned to the scrap heap, we’ll still have demons to exorcise—our hubris, our imperiousness, our indiscipline, our intolerance, our inattention to our domestic health, and our fetish for military tools and disregard for diplomacy. But we’ll also still have a chance to summon our most exceptional national trait: our capacity for self-repair. And we’ll still have a chance to shape our future—before it gets shaped for us by other players and forces.

This essay is adapted from an article published by The Atlantic on July 14, 2020.

 

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COMMENTARY

View From Latin America

Moisés Naím

https://carnegieendowment.org/2020/09/09/view-from-latin-america-pub-82533

 

Latin America faces a critical test: Can it overcome economic crisis without sinking into democratic dysfunction?

Even before the coronavirus pandemic hit, Latin America’s beleaguered economies had brought the region to a crisis point. Plummeting prices of export commodities, falling revenues from remittances and tourism, adverse financial markets, massive capital flight, currency devaluations, and high indebtedness led to a perfect storm of soaring unemployment, greater poverty, and ballooning government deficits.

The pandemic will only exacerbate this dire state of affairs. Latin America’s health systems are grossly inadequate. Ultrapopulist leaders such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador—whose two countries account for half of the region’s population and economic output—have not only denied the severity of the pandemic but also actively undermined their own government’s response. Asked about soaring COVID-19 deaths, Bolsonaro replied, “So what? I’m sorry. What do you want me to do?” López Obrador insisted that the coronavirus could be neutralized with amulets.

The region’s economic crisis has left even responsible presidents constrained.

The region’s economic crisis has left even responsible presidents constrained. According to the United Nations, the combination of an acute global economic slowdown and Latin America’s preexisting woes will cause the region’s most severe recession since 1914 and 1930.

What political consequences will these twin challenges have on a region that has struggled for more than forty years not to slip back into cycles of breakdown and repair? Typically, the burdens of belt-tightening have fallen disproportionately on the poor, who are pushed deeper into poverty by joblessness, inflation, and draconian cuts in public budgets and social safety nets. This time around, however, the poor will not shoulder the downturn alone. They will be joined by the largest middle class the region has ever had, as tens of millions have been lifted out of poverty in the past twenty years.

Fighting to retain its newfound standard of living is something that this precarious, incipient middle class knows how to do. Its members are highly connected, better informed, and energized. They are adroit in staging demonstrations to defend their rights and demand economic relief. Street protests in Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, and Peru have catalyzed dramatic changes in public policies and even succeeded in ousting presidents.

The geopolitical backyard of the United States is about to enter a turbulent period in which its democracies are tested as never before.

The geopolitical backyard of the United States is about to enter a turbulent period in which its democracies are tested as never before. After the Great Depression, Latin America endured painful decades of military dictatorships. It could again become the land of presidents for life, military juntas, stealthy autocracies, disappeared dissidents, and torture chambers. The region’s leaders—and the world’s democracies—must do everything they can to prevent such bleak outcomes from becoming realities.