The success of 21st-century American statecraft will be defined by its ability to meet transnational challenges with a sustainable playbook that breaches the gap between domestic governance and foreign policy.
As long-standing challenges for U.S. foreign policy assume more complicated and perilous dimensions, the United States also faces new global governance issues altogether. Challenges that respect no borders — from climate change to global pandemics, displacement crises, cybersecurity, and data governance — represent the new frontier for foreign policymakers. Owing both to their novelty and that they transcend the purview of just one government entity — requiring multi-pronged policy coordination — these issues pose a unique challenge to the United States. They sit at an ambiguous intersection of foreign policy and governance at home.
The very fact that these challenges transcend borders and by definition cannot be solved by any one country alone means that, as Joseph Nye argues, “it will not be enough to think in terms of American power over others. One must also think in terms of power to accomplish joint goals, which involves power with others.” The critical assessment needed then is twofold: how well the United States prepares to address these issues at home, and how well the United States develops networks of coordination on a global level.
Given how the Trump administration gutted funding for science and health, closed the door on refugees, departed from climate coalitions, and forsook multilateral diplomacy, it is tempting to dwell upon the ways in which the outgoing administration axed U.S. capabilities on both pillars of the assessment. While this is a crucial part of the story, there are several broader factors or “systemic flaws” that inhibited U.S. proactiveness toward these issues and weakened the trajectory of U.S. foreign policy, independent of the Trump administration.
Washington’s response to the pandemic offers a salient case study. As COVID-19 continues to tear through American cities and towns, and the United States offers up a fledgling response — compared to other advanced democracies who were either better prepared or quicker to implement aggressive, innovative approaches — the depths of American failure are still being charted. Even as Americans anticipate the distribution of vaccines, the outgoing administration’s negligent response to COVID-19 is well-documented. Whether it took the form of failing to properly guarantee U.S. testing capacity; spurning measures that would improve the supply of critical equipment; eschewing the basic role of the federal government by placing the onus of responsibility on state governments to navigate global supply chains on their own; or by refusing to take part in multilateral efforts to address the crisis, the Trump administration exemplified the failures of American government to navigate the intersection of proactive governance and robust foreign policy.
COVID-19 presents a diverse set of challenges to manage, but experts warn that there could be more dire health threats in the not-so-distant future. Bearing the Trump administration’s unique failures in mind, would a different administration have been better or more fully prepared for a pandemic of COVID-19’s severity or worse? What are the systemic obstacles in the way of domestic and international success, even under a more punctilious administration? And what do these obstacles have in common with other transnational issues that America faces?
Flaws in the Blueprint and the Structure
For years, experts inside and outside of government warned of the dangers a globalized world presented for the spread of deadly viruses. Growing concerns about bioterrorism and pandemics, along with post-9/11 sensitivity to the ways even a sprawling federal government could fail to counter predictable threats, led the Bush Administration to develop a 381-page pandemic flu plan in November 2005. In 2006, the Senate also signed into law the 2006 Pandemic and All Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA), as a way of improving “the Nation's public health and medical preparedness and response capabilities for emergencies, whether deliberate, accidental, or natural.” Those efforts notwithstanding, the years that followed unveiled a dangerous pattern of de-prioritization until the next major disease outbreak inspired a new round of systems rethinking, new organizational structures, and funding restoration.
The Obama administration, whose response to the Ebola and H1N1 Virus outbreaks largely garnered retrospective praise from public health experts, initially terminated the White House’s dedicated office on global health security upon entering office, repeating an act taken by the Bush administration, and one that would be repeated by Trump. Amid 2018 talks about the reauthorization of the PAHPA, private sector witnesses testified to Congress that federal funding of PAHPA programs had been largely “episodic” for a decade. In parallel, the HHS’ Hospital Preparedness Program, dedicated to equipping hospitals with PPE, decontamination facilities, extra hospital beds, and more, experienced funding constraints that ultimately amounted to a 50% reduction in budget from 2002 to 2018.
In short, when threats like Anthrax and Ebola emerged in the past, Congress allocated billions of dollars toward a response. Yet it did little to sustain resources between crises in ways that would make a difference when the next one hits.
Part of the challenge also stems from the fact that pandemics do not fit squarely into the mandate of any one government body. One Obama administration official opined that pandemic preparedness tends to fall secondary in priority due to the diverse range of policy domains on which it touches, encompassing everything from border controls and domestic health policy to foreign aid and diplomacy — none of which hold pandemics as their central priority. Though the White House should simply do a better job of coordinating these diverse components, a flood of policy initiatives and sources of noise constantly vie for the White House’s attention. Following his experience as Obama’s Ebola Czar, Ronald Klain argued to this effect, stating that “there should never be an Ebola Czar again,” and calling instead for a standing Pandemic Prevention Directorate. Absent a present-day crisis, current governance structures seem to prejudice against adequate prioritization at all times, rather than simply when threats present themselves.
The absence of an integrated strategy with sufficient prioritization appears as a recurrent theme for many of the pressing transnational 21st-century issues the United States faces. Consider American efforts to address climate change and we see the outline of a similar story. While the United States maintains an Environmental Protection Agency, climate change is a broad enough issue to require significant, multi-stakeholder efforts — spanning the gamut of federal departments, along with state and municipal governments — in order to tackle its many sources and effects. In response, some propose creating a National Climate Council, akin to the National Security Council, to drive action across federal, state, and local entities.
Whether or not the creation of a new body altogether is warranted, this line of reasoning suggests that the problem the United States faces is less a lack of tools than inconsistent, inefficient, and insufficient measures to bring those tools together under one roof.
Issues on the Horizon Are Closer than they Appear
In 2020, the term “black swan” event regained traction as a type of risk which policymakers, business leaders, and others have failed to anticipate and mitigate against. Yet the current crisis is inherently not a “black swan”, as officials and experts have long worried about the dangers of a potential pandemic.
“The absence of an integrated strategy with sufficient prioritization appears as a recurrent theme for many of the pressing transnational 21st-century issues the United States faces.”
The current crisis highlights the dangers of failing to act against a very different kind of risk: a “gray rhino” event. In her 2016 book, Michele Wucker writes that, “we can see gray rhinos in front of us, but black swans by definition only appear in the rearview window … most so-called black swans happen because people ignored the gray rhinos.” As such, the question is whether foresight of longer-term challenges leads to practical actions of the scale that is needed. Because the incentive structure in hyper-partisan American politics biases toward the pursuit of short-term political victories, it is unlikely that so-called “gray rhinos” will receive the sustained attention, resources, and mobilization needed to address them while they remain manageable threats if current conditions persist.
Still, there are tangible ways — if incremental — that past administrations moved toward long-term pandemic preparedness. The Bush administration set up a project called Global Argus as an early-detection system for indicators of an infectious disease outbreak. Building on this, the Obama administration established the Pandemic Prediction and Forecasting Science and Technology Working Group to apply remote-sensing and AI tools to predict outbreaks and their course. However, the apparatuses for surveillance and development of vaccines and treatments were largely geared toward influenza, while failing to account for a litany of other infectious diseases. Meanwhile, the American economy, hospital system, and congressional allocation of resources have been centered largely around the needs of the present rather than the potential needs of the future. In other words, just-in-time efficiency rather than long-term resiliency.
In an alternative universe, the human and economic costs wrought by the COVID-19 policy failures might also inspire a national mindset shift on other uniquely 21st-century “gray rhino” issues. A failure like this could lead the nation to look more deeply at challenges that Mark Carney called a “tragedy of the horizon,” like climate change, and take proactive action now rather than reactive, costly, and insufficient action later. Of course, this alternative universe may be just that, in that it depends on incentives aligning within a political environment that is increasingly detached from substance and good faith discussions of good governance.
Is it possible to shelter certain institutions of government enough from the capricious national political environment that they nonetheless make strides in policymaking? Perhaps to an extent, but that shelter appears tenuous. The U.S. military, for instance, is acutely aware of the problems climate change will portend for global security, from the role of droughts in heightening ethnic conflicts to the emergence of climate refugees and the flagging viability of coastal bases. As Michael Klare chronicled, the Pentagon committed heavily during the Obama years to addressing and preparing for climate change. While the Pentagon quietly continued its research and planning under the radar of the Trump’s White House, it shut down some of its efforts, with military experts questioning whether the research translated at all into concrete implementation.
Myopic political tactics interfere with more far-sighted institutional planning against long term risks. The hyperpartisanship of today only makes it less likely that American political leaders will adopt a long-term view toward the problems the United States will increasingly face throughout the 21st century.
When Everything is Politics, Politics is Everything
This pandemic also starkly contrasts the unique nature of the American politicization problem with that of many other democracies around the world. Distrust of government and science has devolved into a caricatured version of itself, as swaths of the American population reject even simpler, less prohibitive measures. The politicization of science promotes an erroneous kind of American exceptionalism: one where measures that most other countries see as rational are interpreted as political statements.
It also raises the question: even with the right toolbox at its disposal, is the United States set up to confront these kinds of issues without trust in government and effective mechanisms for holding leaders accountable? More competent political leadership, deploying what experts regard as an already strong set of public health tools, would have mitigated the preventable tragedy unfolding across the country. But American politicization of science would remain a problem for the system. Building greater state capacity is insufficient without basic levels of trust in the government to competently deliver on its rightful duties.
Beyond science, politicization also muddies public discourse and distorts how Americans perceive several other transnational challenges. Refugee resettlement — long insulated from the politicization of broader immigration policy — fell victim to a deliberate political strategy which conflated refugees resettling from overseas, asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border, and elective forms of migration. In the latter half of the Obama presidency, Republican politicians started calling into question things that previously had both political and expert consensus, such as vetting procedures and the number of refugees being resettled into the United States from war-zones. They created an artificial link between the immigration courts’ handling of asylum seekers at the border with the State Department’s overseas refugee resettlement program. The result was what Rebecca Hamlin characterizes as a confused sentiment that “asylum seekers at the US/Mexico Border … are being cast here as the undeserving ones [who] are taking money away from needy refugees waiting patiently overseas.”
The U.S. toolbox to lead on these kinds of issues at the international level is in and of itself vulnerable to politicization, and therefore under attack.
Throughout COVID-19, Republicans have largely focused their blame on the Chinese government, the World Health Organization, and certain state governments, while Democrats have pointed to the Trump Administration’s failures. Absent political leadership coalescing around a shared set of takeaways from this crisis, it will be harder to achieve a durable, bipartisan notion of which capabilities and policies are needed to guard against the next crisis. As a result, government institutions may struggle to embark on the rigorous effort needed to adapt and better prepare the U.S. toolbox.
“Washington’s success in addressing transnational issues will also heavily rely on the political will of the United States to engage with willing partners, allies, and adversaries alike. ”
Though American allies expected that the Trump administration would represent an outlier in U.S. global climate leadership, the Trump administration’s attempts to politicize and undermine government-led climate research carries potentially longer-term implications for the country’s future status as a central source of trustworthy research.
Meanwhile, politicization of migration in all its forms led the Trump administration to take a more exclusionary stance on foreign students, a base-pleasing move that may only hamper American scientific, economic, and technological competitiveness in the long run.
Because issues like these cut across borders, and cannot be solved by domestic or foreign policy alone, they are uniquely vulnerable to the challenges presented by extreme politicization relative to other aspects of U.S. foreign policy.
Diplomacy on the Sidelines
Washington’s success in addressing transnational issues will also heavily rely on the political will of the United States to engage with willing partners, allies, and adversaries alike. Climate change, refugee crises, and global health threats are not zero-sum challenges, and cannot be solved by any one country on its own, making global cooperation foundational for solutions of a sufficient scope. At the same time, the path to international cooperation and progress on transnational issues is inherently more nuanced than traditional questions of state-to-state diplomacy. Effective climate change cooperation, for example, requires coordination not just between national governments, but also between actors such as municipalities, domestic-facing government agencies, global corporations, small- and medium-sized businesses, civil society groups, and multilateral institutions.
Historically, some of the United States’ greatest successes in the arena of foreign policy had little to do with exercising sheer military strength; they were achieved by tapping into diverse diplomatic capabilities and assets to mobilize a complex coordination of actors over an extended period of time. A case in point, from 1974-1987, American diplomats led a concerted effort to align a host of national interests to develop the Montreal Protocol, a feat which proved critical to the recovery of the ozone layer. However, reversing the erosion of the ozone layer required sustained diplomatic efforts beyond the initial 1987 provisions to strengthen the stipulations of the protocol and universalize the treaty.
As maintaining a robust and proactive diplomatic strategy increasingly becomes a precondition to addressing modern challenges — and the complexity of what it requires grows — it is all the more concerning to see the United States’ emphasis on diplomacy wane. Over the past few decades, non-military tools have increasingly fallen by the wayside as political leaders let military resources take precedence as they tackle America’s ills.
Concerns about the militarization of U.S. foreign policy are not merely the gripes of diplomats at the losing end of debates on key policy decisions. Warnings over America’s atrophying diplomatic toolbox now increasingly echo in the Pentagon. Several of the Pentagon’s most respected former heads came forth in recent years to warn about the decline in the capacity of the State Department. Former Marine Corps Four-Star General and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis beseeched Congress that “if you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition ultimately.” Robert Gates pronounced that “Washington has … seriously neglected its nonmilitary instruments of power, which have withered and weakened as a result.” A growing consensus among the academic and think tank community calls for greater diplomatic engagement and restraint in the use of force abroad. The list goes on, yet Congress remains reluctant to adjust course.
“Without a more effective and broad-encompassing strategy that puts diplomacy at the center, America will continue to find itself reacting to the course of events instead of constructively shaping their direction.”
Some of this stems from institutional drift within the government, and some of it lies in the post-9/11 political culture of the United States — one where international engagement is synonymous with eliminating threats from hostile actors.
This persistence of this trend has come at great cost over the last two decades. At once, the growing, severe repercussions of failing to put the necessary weight into diplomacy are laid bare by the ongoing pandemic. Moreover, U.S. adversaries are showing a more adept understanding of the importance of other tools besides conventional weapons in pursuing strategic goals. The United States’ over-reliance on military tools limits its response to adversaries’ actions in the domains of cybersecurity and information environments. Experts warn that Washington’s focus on tactical aspects of information warfare — without a coordinated approach to the systems and governance which shape the global information commons, data, and technology usage — risks enabling less-than-democratic powers to shape global governance systems around these crucial issues. Without a more effective and broad-encompassing strategy that puts diplomacy at the center, America will continue to find itself reacting to the course of events instead of constructively shaping their direction.
A Story of Self-Sabotage
To omit the ways in which the current administration sabotaged the United States’ capacity to address these transnational issues at home and abroad is to present an incomplete picture. Across every single one of the “systemic flaws” described here, the Trump administration exacerbated these failings.
In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, any U.S. administration would require formidable leadership to secure the public health of its citizens to overcome some of the systemic flaws in policymaking this article has explored. But past administrations nonetheless designed playbooks for future administrations to draw from in formulating their own response. With the severity of such systemic flaws, no playbook could hope to be completely predictive or effective, but had the Trump administration followed the basic tenets of the past administrations’ playbooks with the urgency that was required, it isn’t difficult to imagine a different outcome.
On climate change, the Trump administration tanked engagement in climate science and data distribution, where Washington had previously made pertinent information from satellites, sonars, and other remote-sensing technologies available to countries around the world. It abandoned climate coalitions, including the Paris Agreement, the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, and the High Ambition Coalition. It drastically cut emissions standards at home. And it cut off climate assistance funding to the Green Climate Fund, which supports poorer countries who disproportionately face the most adverse effects of climate change. While simultaneously claiming to pursue a reduction in the number of refugees and migrants seeking entry to the United States, its own stance on collective climate action contradicts that position, given that the World Bank projects that climate-related issues like food insecurity and flooding will create an additional 51 to 118 million “climate migrants” by 2050.
The Trump administration accelerated the declining use of diplomacy as a tool. As Ronan Farrow chronicled, the administration took what had previously been a somewhat uncontroversial position on budget reduction and proposed a vast series of cuts that would reduce the State Department’s funding by 28%, end all funding for the United States Institute of Peace, strip a variety of global health programs, and cut American contributions to U.N. peacekeeping missions by 50%. The Trump Administration’s sabotage of U.S. capabilities and expertise will leave long-term damage to diplomatic capacity and initiatives around the world, even if the Biden administration and Congress restore these budgets in 2021.
“It behooves the United States to play a central coordinating role for collective action in order to ensure that its interests are advanced as countries work to confront [transnational] challenges.”
Its actions abroad have only brought this bleak picture into sharper focus. By announcing its withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords, the Trump Administration sought the company of a small cadre of countries including Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Angola, and Yemen who have not ratified the agreement. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump Administration pursued a form of vaccine nationalism that bypasses collective efforts led by the U.N. and threatens to monopolize access to the cure, at least in the short-term. While America is not the only country engaging in vaccine nationalism, it is worth remembering that its leadership in forging collective global health action on diseases like HIV/AIDS and Ebola were some of the United States’ crowning achievements in foreign policy in the last two decades.
The capacity of the U.S. government to credibly and effectively address the most pressing transnational issues of the 21st century will depend on American policymakers engaging in a clear-eyed assessment of U.S. readiness on both an international and domestic level. This must include not only an honest appraisal of the Trump administration’s negligence and self-sabotage, but of the systemic factors that have been salient over a longer period of time. While not all of the flaws are exclusive facets of the United States, these big-picture factors restrict U.S. pandemic readiness as well as its capacity for effectively handling other transnational issues. It will continue to do so until there is a serious reckoning between the political expediency of “short-termism” and the national interest.
It is vital to long-term American interests and values to play an active role in global governance. The United States, alone, cannot solve any one of these issues. Beyond that, it behooves the United States to play a central coordinating role for collective action in order to ensure that its interests are advanced as countries work to confront these challenges, even if in a fragmented way. The task that lies ahead for America is the re-evaluation and modernization of the toolbox for confronting these uniquely 21st-century issues globally and locally, while accounting for and addressing the domestic political conditions that will inhibit even the best set of tools from operating at full capacity.
Leaders in Washington now face a very clear choice. They can continue to stumble from crisis to crisis, and watch as fragmented patchworks of countries work to solve the transnational issues of the day. Or, they can undertake the arduous, but rewarding task of developing and funding robust, versatile, and comprehensive tools for domestic governance and proactive diplomatic engagement to address the challenges before it. If America wants to be ready for the future, it must learn to plan for it.
All views expressed in this article are solely those of the author, and do not represent the views of The International Scholar or any other organization.
Photo Credits:
Vice Pres. Joe Biden, with Deputy Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, discuss partnerships with South Korean, Japanese representatives, by U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Flickr,
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