The United States urgently needs dispassionate, wholesale reappraisals of its foreign policy to prepare itself for the long-term in an increasingly competitive, multipolar world order.
For well over a decade, analysts of international politics have observed an increasingly post-American world. It is a world in which American power and its centrality within networks of cooperation and global governance is waning — not necessarily in absolute terms, but relative to a handful of emerging powers, China foremost among them.
Many call it a “multipolar” world, in which regional hegemons have as much, or greater capacity to influence the direction of regional geopolitics as the United States — the established global hegemon — does. Others point to the deterioration of U.S.-China relations and the emergence of similar dynamics to those of the Cold War — when geopolitics were bipolar, dominated by global competition between just two great powers.
And yet, other scholars maintain that singular American power remains unchallenged in certain domains — insulated from the volatility of the Trump administration and other changing geopolitical dynamics — signifying the resilience of American centrality within the global political landscape.
How American foreign policy leaders perceive the power structures shaping international politics, and the role of the United States within those structures, will have a profound impact on the strategies conceived, tactics explored, and decisions chosen in U.S. statecraft. As the nascent Biden administration charts its course, four key questions stand out when examining the long-term role of America in the world:
As tensions between the United States and China grow, U.S.-Russia relations remain rocky, and regional powers like Japan, India, and the European Union demonstrate unique strategic outlooks of their own, how should the changing distribution of power and influence in the international system be diagnosed?
What are some of the most salient geopolitical advantages for the United States compared to its rivals? To what extent are they durable, and if not, how can they be solidified to ensure a sound, long-term trajectory for U.S. grand strategy?
In a more competitive global environment, U.S. priorities are more likely to meet resistance, whether from allies, rivals, or adversaries. How should the U.S. go about selecting interests that are vital versus those that are vested, superficial, or tangential?
When considering emerging long-term trends, in what regions and on what issues are there opportunities for constructive, positive American engagement that advances U.S. interests?
Getting the Diagnoses Right
The United States cannot properly reappraise its foreign policies without accurately diagnosing the changing power structures in the international system. With the rise of China, some hawks liken emerging Sino-American competition to a new Cold War, yet this is a flawed analogy. Between the complex economic interdependence that exists between the United States and China and the degree to which China is integrated into global commerce, this is a very different operating environment than the Cold War between the U.S. and USSR.
It is unrealistic to expect developing countries to eschew their political, trade, and investment relationships with China at the behest of the United States. Across developing countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa there is a pattern of engagement with great powers: the appeal of Chinese investment is strong enough to overcome the impact of American hand-wringing on their foreign policy trajectory. And neither the United States nor China are the only meaningful players on the issues developing countries care about: countries like Japan and Turkey, too, represent important partners.
“The United States cannot properly reappraise its foreign policies without accurately diagnosing the changing power structures in the international system.”
Even for allies with advanced industrial economies, the United States cannot presume to engage with China in a unified manner, presenting the same posture on every single issue vis-à-vis China. American allies like the European Union, Japan, India, the United Kingdom, and Australia all have priorities of their own that cannot be dictated by Washington. Each is capable of politely neglecting to accommodate certain U.S. attempts to alter those priorities, as various unsuccessful American efforts to challenge growing Chinese weight in the global economy and governance demonstrated.
Yet, despite trends towards multipolarity in geopolitics, there remain elements of continued U.S. hegemony along certain faultlines, such as the central role the dollar plays in global financial architecture and the ability of the U.S. to project military power at a global level. In the last two decades, many of America’s foreign policy woes stemmed from ill-conceived exertions of U.S. power, rather than the waning of its power, underscoring the importance of assessing the most effective ways to exercise Washington’s considerable and formidable remaining advantages.
This distinction also warrants objective, as opposed to insecure, analysis of the specific threats that other powers pose to U.S. interests. The oft-misunderstood rivalry with Russia, in particular, highlights the need for objectivity. The emergence of a more threatening Russian posture over the past two decades has more to do with Russian vulnerability — both domestically and internationally — than it does with the resurgence of Russian power in the international arena. Stark economic conditions, a rising opposition movement headed by Alexei Navalny, and six straight years of declining living conditions, warrant realistic diagnoses of Putin and Russia’s ability to challenge core U.S. interests.
It would therefore be a mistake of significant magnitude to assume that the United States must counter every single move of its rivals in order to preserve its security; instead, it should seek and assess genuine motives at play, and what those reveal about Moscow's and Beijing’s strategic priorities.
Deploying Rather than Squandering American Advantages
From the indispensability of the dollar, to favorable demographic trends, a strong set of alliances, and unrivaled military capabilities, the United States has unique advantages at its disposal that are unmatched by other powers. However, these advantages, and colder calculations of geopolitical strengths and weaknesses, are often detached from political debates in the United States that introduce platitudes about American vitality and exceptionalism.
“Just as America should be careful not to overestimate the threats or influence of rival powers, it must also realistically assess its own weaknesses and strengths.”
Just as America should be careful not to overestimate the threats or influence of rival powers, it must also realistically assess its own weaknesses and strengths. Overestimating American indispensability can lead to ineffective tactics, humiliation, or worse, in a world where other powers hold equal or greater influence over certain issues and geographic regions. The opposite can be dangerous, as well, if it leads to a distorted insecurity about the United States’ position relative to other powers.
To avoid committing this error, Washington must embrace a dispassionate understanding of true American advantages, and a redoubled effort to maintain those advantages, even if it upends strategies that have a home in administrations of both political parties — and it must do so soon. Alarmingly, some of the very factors that privilege America within the global system are imperiled by flawed foreign and domestic policy still in practice today.
Favorable Demographic Outlook
The twin forces of high fertility rates and steady immigration into the U.S. enabled the American economy to avoid the constraints many other great powers faced throughout history, contributing to America’s rise and continued global power. Today, the United States retains a better demographic outlook than many other powers, but that outlook is in jeopardy, as evidenced by the latest census data from the 2010s. As mortality among middle-aged people increased, life expectancy fell in the United States. Meanwhile, nativist sentiments pose a long-term threat to the future of immigration in guaranteeing healthy population growth. These trends may undermine American economic competitiveness by reducing the ability of the United States to attract and retain working-age talent, minimizing the advantage the U.S. might otherwise enjoy relative to other powers whose demographic outlook is even more worrisome.
System of Alliances
Alliances are an indelible source of strength and differentiation for the United States in the international system. However, there are several sources of strain that threaten the ability of American alliances to support U.S. foreign policy goals. First, the position that several post-9/11 administrations took that American allies should either check their concerns at the door and join U.S. initiatives — or that the United States will go it alone if it needs to — forces an unnecessary degradation of relations when allies are unwilling to join U.S. initiatives with which they disagree. Relatedly, a bipartisan assumption that allies — particularly those in Europe — carry similar perceptions of threats, priorities, and goals to the United States when it comes to overall relations with other great powers like Russia and China creates false expectations and perceptions of American allies’ willingness to engage in more direct confrontation. While there is a shared outlook on some issues, wholesale alignment is a thing of the past, and the United States repeatedly finds itself disappointed when it expects or mandates otherwise.
Centrality of the American Financial System
Recent research underscores that economic globalization actually strengthened the power of the American financial system. However, abuse of that leverage may lead to a decline in American centrality in global financial networks. In response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, the United States’ use of SWIFT sanctions led Russia, the Eurasian Economic Union, and other BRICs countries to pursue a blockchain-based payment system as an alternative. After the Trump administration unilaterally departed from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and imposed sweeping sanctions on Iran, the European Union developed INSTEX, an alternative payment system that may allow European countries to divert away from U.S. financial channels long-term. In Western European countries that can more easily set up their own alternatives or leverage their pre-existing financial infrastructure, U.S. weaponization of its financial influence may reduce the United States’ ability to persuade European allies to align on other critical issues.
Unique Soft Power
Another defining factor that differentiates the United States from other great powers in history is its soft power — the allure of American politics, society, culture, and governance that made the United States a more attractive partner for many internationally. While U.S. soft power in the cultural domain hardly swayed in the last few years, its overall reputation drastically fell. As the United States grappled with a flailing national COVID-19 response, a corrupt presidential administration, and insurrectionists storming the Capitol in the last year, the dangers of the hyper-partisan, polarized environment that is dividing and degrading U.S. society and politics were on full display.
The Global Soft Power Index 2021 by Brand Finance ranked the United States sixth in soft power — a huge drop from its traditional first-place position. But to the extent that the Trump administration was a product of longer-running forces in American politics and society, the administration simply brought trends that were already underway to a head, even if it bears a disproportionate amount of blame for this latest blow to American soft power.
Adapting US Foreign Policy for a More Competitive Global Environment
Foreign policy elites and experts often bandy about the term “great power competition,” as the defining challenge that the United States now finds itself confronting. While it is accurate to say that there is more competition between great powers now than twenty years ago, a great degree of risk arises in framing “great power competition” as the goal for U.S. foreign policy rather than simply a condition of the international system.
Since the ending of the Cold War, U.S. policymakers demonstrated a decidedly mixed ability to define and assign appropriate prioritization to vital versus vested national interests. Robust military capabilities notwithstanding, American leaders erred in their deployment of military power over the last two decades. Protracted wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East undermined the geopolitical positioning of the United States, and led to a significant ballooning of vested interests that are a distraction from longer-term considerations of national interest.
The Gulf countries, for example, continue to absorb an outsized amount of military attention and talking space amongst foreign policy officials, despite the fact that genuine U.S. strategic interests in the region diminished in importance since the days of the Carter Doctrine. Military forces bogged down in various outposts in the Gulf region are unnecessary to fulfill the vital U.S. strategic priorities there. In Afghanistan, meanwhile, the United States finds itself in a position where a “win” increasingly means minimizing losses as much as possible — no doubt a defining factor in the Biden administration’s decision to withdraw its forces.
“A great degree of risk arises in framing “great power competition” as the goal for U.S. foreign policy rather than simply a condition of the international system. ”
Part of this outsized influence is due to political leaders allowing and often encouraging the creeping militarization of U.S. foreign policy to take root and grow over time, resulting in the prioritization of military goals and capabilities at the expense of political and diplomatic ones. The causal forces at play in the Middle East’s proxy conflicts between Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey are largely political and social, yet it is military and intelligence leadership which drove U.S. strategy, not diplomats.
Blurring the line between vital and vested interests also leads the United States to make dangerous miscalculations that hamper long-term national security. This pattern of errors could be particularly dangerous if it bleeds into how the U.S. manages relations with other great powers such as China. As Daniel Hexon recently wrote, “not every move by Moscow or Beijing constitutes a direct threat to Washington’s national interests.” But if geopolitical competition is treated as the goal of U.S. foreign policy altogether, it seems unlikely that the United States will have the discipline to rigorously filter out the direct threats versus the peripheral.
Questioning which U.S. interests are vital and which are merely vested should be coupled with the reassessment of opportunities the United States may be missing out on due to the narrow focus of the past several decades. In the post-9/11 environment, policymakers focused on parts of the world that held little long term strategic value to the United States apart from their link to the counterterrorism prerogative. Now, the focus is shifting to how the United States can best compete with a rising China, but there is evidence that U.S. foreign policy continues to be dominated by a sense of threat — this time vis-à-vis China — rather than strategic opportunities.
Of the many problems that an outlook treating every instance of China expanding upon its ties with other countries as a threat to the United States presents, perhaps the most pernicious is that it inevitably leads the the United States to adopt unrealistic expectations of third-party countries. In some ways, both the United States and China are facing a similar challenge: how to adjust to a world where smaller countries will be loath to align fully with the geopolitical stances of only one other country. Globalization affords smaller economies greater choice and autonomy in their engagement of more powerful countries, with more options for international trade and investment.
“The rise of China as a great power seems to naturally lead to discussions of a new Cold War, yet this type of discourse fails to account for the complexity and nuance of current times, and America’s role in a more competitive world.”
An inability to re-evaluate foreign policy strategies and prioritize vital U.S. interests leads to sluggish course corrections, evidenced by the manner in which the United States struggles to position itself appropriately to changing political and economic environments, as well as the forces of technology, globalization, populism, and social movements. The rise of China as a great power seems to naturally lead to discussions of a new Cold War, yet this type of discourse fails to account for the complexity and nuance of current times, and America’s role in a more competitive world.
A reframing that might support more effective American engagement around the globe is a shift from asking, “How can the U.S. best compete with [insert Russia or China]?” to “What would make the U.S. a more compelling, attractive partner on the issues that other countries care most about?” Research on developing Asian countries’ relationships with China by Evelyn Goh found strong evidence that when these less powerful states have alternative partners, they are more willing to resist Chinese pressure on core national security issues. The more the United States can cultivate constructive relationships with developing countries — anchored not by an imperative to counter China, but by matching up U.S. capabilities with the unique needs of those countries — the more resilient American influence will be in a more competitive environment.
Assessing Long-Term Opportunities for Impact and Influence
Sound reappraisals of U.S. foreign policy must necessarily assess longer-term trends to ensure that American strategy is geared towards the problems and opportunities of the future, rather than those of the past and present.
Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, is in the midst of the most rapid population growth and urbanization in the world, with noticeable gaps in infrastructure, financing, and youth employment opportunities that all represent key arenas for catalytic partnerships. Now, because of COVID-19, the region faces its first recession in 25 years. Enhancing U.S. engagement with Sub-Saharan Africa is no matter of philanthropy. Supercharging American commercial and economic engagement on the African continent should be viewed, as Howard French argues, as a matter of “deep self-interest” given the long-term demographic implications. Instead, a security lens towards the continent dominates U.S. policy, which treats counterterrorism and criticizing Chinese activity in Africa as the two biggest priorities.
In South America, a region the United States should avoid taking for granted, corruption is on the rise and the rule of law is in jeopardy in a growing number of countries. A rising number of democracies in Latin America are sliding backwards and populists are gaining traction in the region. It is more important than ever before for the United States to support the strengthening of a robust civil society, rule of law, and economic development agenda in the region. This would also go a long way toward mitigating the worst of U.S. anxieties about China growing its political influence in South America, by ensuring these countries are resilient should China attempt to exploit its economic weight for unfavorable ends.
The trans-Atlantic relationship is a resilient one, despite the reverberations of an America First foreign policy. Nevertheless, the strength of future trans-Atlantic relations depends partly on upcoming elections in France and Germany — crucial allies within the EU bloc. It is conceivable that should Marine Le Pen of the National Rally party become France’s next president, the United States would find it harder to coordinate a common stance on pressing transnational issues. The way that the Biden administration navigates the growing European push for “strategic autonomy” will also play a large role, both in the short-term and long-term. Future NATO initiatives represent an important testing site for a more innovative, coordinated, and multilateral approach in policy-setting for the United States and its European allies, and a way to practice more constructive engagement with international partners.
“Sound reappraisals of U.S. foreign policy must necessarily assess longer-term trends to ensure that American strategy is geared towards the problems and opportunities of the future, rather than those of the past and present.”
Beyond specific geographic engagements, the United States also needs to think long-term in how it tackles transnational issues like climate change, cybersecurity, and mass migration. The complexity and universality of these challenges provides clear avenues for the United States to work with allies and strategic rivals alike. While real conflicts of interest drive competition between the United States and China, there are several areas where cooperation on shared interests is possible. China, for example, is at the forefront of green innovation and technology, an area where the United States lags behind not out of a lack of capability, but rather from a failure of prioritization. As climate change worsens and green innovation becomes more profitable, the two largest economies in the world can drive this industry forward. This would also better align the United States with close allies in the European Union, where tackling climate change is already a top priority.
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In short, the United States has much work to do in order to adjust to long-term trends shaping geopolitics for years to come. It must be careful to diagnose the changing distributions of power appropriately — avoiding errors of both overestimation and underestimation — and steering clear of analogies that do more to damage than aid U.S. foreign policy efficacy. And it must keep in mind the diverse, evolving outlooks of countries outside the United States, China, and Russia grouping, working to understand their priorities and constraints rather than treating them as pawns in a greater competition.
While it may be a mistake to treat great power competition as the overriding goal of U.S. foreign policy altogether, that does not mean the United States should let its unique competitive advantages sit on the sidelines or atrophy. Ultimately, it will require Washington to identify those assets and capabilities that privilege America in the global system, reassessing the way they are deployed, investing in their renewal, and deploying them within a framework that effectively filters vital interests from vested or peripheral ones. It will also allow Washington to ensure that it does not miss longer-term opportunities for constructive engagement in the world as a result of distortion of its energies on foreign policy.
The new Biden administration faces a number of tests in the next year, including the current global effort to recover from COVID-19, which present opportunities to undertake the exact kinds of reappraisals that would bolster America’s foreign policy in a more competitive world. It is up to Joe, now, to seize the day.
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 Courtesy of Pixabay on Pexels, Modified by Cameron Vaské