As the incoming Trump administration prepares to take office on January 20, 2025, a recalibration of U.S. foreign policy priorities and broader national strategy goals is already underway. Advocates of realism and restraint welcome Trumpâs emphasis on a foreign policy that prioritizes pragmatism and âpeace through strengthâ over ideological moralism, even while liberal internationalists fear the effects of âAmerica Firstâ policy on multilateral alliances.
Both sides recognize, however, a need for a prudent shift from crippling foreign policy misadventures and ideational stagnation to a bold U.S. foreign policy vision in all theaters of potential competition.
Among the constellation of apparent global security hotspots, three seemingly disparate locations â Taiwan, Greenland, and the Panama Canal â have emerged as serious contenders in the geopolitical realignment of interstate competition over resources, trade and shipping routes, and political-military dominance, becoming the recent focus of President-elect Trumpâs typically boisterous social media posts over the holidays.
All three, whilst geographically distant, do share a common denominator â China â a so-called âpacing challengeâ deemed most intent on dislodging Americaâs hegemony, supplanting its economic clout, and challenging its military primacy in an increasingly multipolar world. All represent tests for the kind of foreign policy Trump says he wants to pursue, while denying Chinese encroachments in key strategic areas. (...)
Part of the so-called Washington swamp is the opacity of the funding going to powerful think tanks that provide policymaking expertise to Capitol Hill, to White House staff, and to agencies, including the Pentagon and State Department. It is no secret that the think tanks that have an outsized influence on foreign policy and national security affairs receive grants from the government to conduct studies and research to the tune of millions of dollars a year. Meanwhile, these organizations get tons of funding from the military contractors who stand to benefit from those reports and research in support of American war policy.
Foreign governments, too, are plowing millions into think tanks in hopes to influence the direction of policy their way.
Not only do think tanks generate a lot of paper but their experts write op-eds, they testify before Congress, they are called upon by reporters and producers to give their take on policy and world events â like the wars Washington is currently funding with American money and weapons â all over the information landscape. In short, they help shape perception and manufacture consent. (...)
I asked a Mexican friend why I didn't see a lot of homeless people around like we have in the states. He gave me a puzzled look and said, why would we have homeless people? If you are hungry a Mexican will give you a burrito.
The rest of the world looks at us and just puzzles. It really doesn't have to be this way.
I asked a Mexican friend why I didn't see a lot of homeless people around like we have in the states. He gave me a puzzled look and said, why would we have homeless people? If you are hungry a Mexican will give you a burrito.
The rest of the world looks at us and just puzzles. It really doesn't have to be this way.
Contemporary neoconservatism is, in its guiding precepts and policy manifestations, a profoundly ahistorical ideology. It is a millenarian project that not just eschews but explicitly rejects much of the inheritance of pre-1991 American statecraft and many generations of accumulated civilizational wisdom from Thucydides to Kissinger in its bid to remake the world.
It stands as one of the enduring ironies of the post-Cold War era that this revolutionary and decidedly presentist creed has to shore up its legitimacy by continually resorting to that venerable fixture of World War II historicism, the 1938 Munich analogy. The premise is simple, and, for that reason, widely resonant: British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, in his âlust for peace,â made war inevitable by enabling Adolf Hitlerâs irredentist ambitions until they could no longer be contained by any means short of direct confrontation between the great powers.
Professor Andrew Bacevich brilliantly distilled the Munich analogyâs two constituent parts: âThe first truth is that evil is real. The second is that for evil to prevail requires only one thing: for those confronted by it to flinch from duty,â he wrote. âIn the 1930s, with the callow governments of Great Britain and France bent on appeasing Hitler and with an isolationist America studiously refusing to exert itself, evil had its way.â This is the school playground theory of international relations: failure to stand up to a bully at the earliest possible opportunity only serves to embolden their malignant behavior, setting the stage for a larger and more painful fight down the line.
The Cold War years saw a feverish universalization of the Munich analogy whereby every foreign adversary is Adolf Hitler, every peace deal is Munich 1938, and every territorial dispute is the Sudetenland being torn away from Czechoslovakia as the free world looks on with shoulders shrugged. This was the anxiety animating the spurious domino theory that precipitated U.S. involvement in Korea and Vietnam, but appeasement fever was kept in check by the realities of a bipolar Cold War competition that imposed significant constraints on what the U.S. could do to counteract its powerful, nuclear-armed Soviet rival.
These constraints were lifted virtually overnight with the fall of the Berlin Wall and dissolution of the Soviet bloc. President George H.W. Bush proclaimed the end of the âVietnam syndrome,â or Americansâ healthy skepticism of war stemming from the disastrous decades-long intervention in Vietnam, following U.S. forcesâ crushing victory in the Gulf War. The George W. Bush administration gave itself infinite license to intervene anywhere against anyone, including preemptively against âimminent threats,â on the grounds that anything less is tantamount to appeasement. âIn the 20th century, some chose to appease murderous dictators, whose threats were allowed to grow into genocide and global war,â Bush said in 2003. âIn this century, when evil men plot chemical, biological and nuclear terror, a policy of appeasement could bring destruction of a kind never before seen on this earth.â
Even as the threat landscape has shifted since 2003, neoconservatismâs epigoni have trotted out the Munich analogy to justify every subsequent military intervention in the Middle East. Where direct confrontation is too costly and risky, as with Russia and China, the historicists insist that anything short of a policy of total, unrelenting maximum pressure and isolation amounts to appeasement. (...)
Meet Trump's new National Security Council The president-elect is stacking this critical policy deck with hawks bent on sticking it to China and intervening in war over Taiwan
None of these appointments bode well for advocates of U.S. foreign policy restraint, let alone for those who voted for Trump hoping he would prioritize domestic problems over endless foreign wars. At best, Trumpâs picks will seek to simply replace one dangerous, nuclear-tinged Great Power conflict with another. At worst, they will not do the former, and embroil the United States into two of the latter.
Xmas stocking stuffing Noam Chomsky Has Been Proved Right (Stephen Walt) The writerâs new argument for left-wing foreign policy has earned a mainstream hearing.
For more than half a century, Noam Chomsky has been arguably the worldâs most persistent, uncompromising, and intellectually respected critic of contemporary U.S. foreign policy. In a steady stream of books, articles, interviews, and speeches, he has repeatedly sought to expose Washingtonâs costly and inhumane approach to the rest of the world, an approach he believes has harmed millions and is contrary to the United Statesâ professed values. As co-author Nathan J. Robinson writes in the preface,The Myth of American Idealism was written to âdraw insights from across (Chomskyâs) body of work into a single volume that could introduce people to his central critiques of U.S. foreign policy.â It accomplishes that task admirably. (...)
As the title suggests, the central target of the book is the claim that U.S. foreign policy is guided by the lofty ideals of democracy, freedom, the rule of law, human rights, etc. For those who subscribe to this view, the damage the United States has sometimes inflicted on other countries was the unintended and much regretted result of actions taken for noble purposes and with the best of intentions. Americans are constantly reminded by their leaders that they are an âindispensable nationâ and âthe greatest force for freedom the world has ever known,â and assured that moral principles will be at the âcenter of U.S. foreign policy.â Such self-congratulatory justifications are then endlessly echoed by a chorus of politicians and establishment intellectuals. (...)
Late Friday, president-elect Donald Trump announced his pick for Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent. The announcement had taken a longer time than other appointments, suggesting a period of extended infighting within the coalition on economic policies and personnel.
According to reports, opposition to Bessent was centered on the idea that he was insufficiently committed to Trumpâs proposal to hike tariffs to 50-60% on all imports from China and to 10-20% on imports from all other countries. On the other hand, he was the candidate most favored by the financial markets, a consideration that may have prevailed at the end, reflecting a presidential disposition to treat the performance of the stock market as a report card. (...)
And in an illuminating interview conducted just this fall, Bessent goes into greater detail (beginning at around 30 minutes) about how the U.S. should make use of its combination of three huge assets â military strength, financial preeminence, and sheer market size â as usable tools along a spectrum that runs from cooperation through suasion to outright coercion.
He plays with the idea of a stratification of tariff levels (green, yellow, red) based on adherence to American values and interests, invoking a hypothetical reminder to India of the risks it might run by buying Russian oil. He suggests that countries that benefit from the American defense umbrella return the favor by buying long-maturity U.S. debt of 30 or 40 years, âpaying upfrontâ for what they receive.
Bessent then welcomes the fact that the centrality of the dollar in the international monetary system allows America to use its power of sanctions extraterritorially (against entities outside its borders) to influence or punish their behavior. And finally he talks about the potential to use tariffs against China not to push regime change but rather to force it to change an economic model based on investing and exporting too much and consuming too little. (...)
Is the world doomed to live under an increasingly discredited and selective ârules-based international orderâ (RBIO) instead of an inclusive order centered on international law? Is the RBIO the only construct that can strengthen American security and prevent the world from descending into chaos, or is a better alternative possible?
The Quincy Instituteâs Better Order Project has brought together more than 130 experts, scholars, and practitioners from over 40 countries to collectively develop a package of proposals aimed at rejuvenating and stabilizing the international order, based on shared commitments to international law, multilateralism, and the ability of states to participate on an equal basis.
Join us live on November 25th from 10:00 AM - 1:30 PM Eastern Time as we address how to chart a smoother path through todayâs rocky transition away from unipolarity, and discuss several of the Better Order Project's proposals with some of the international initiative's participants, including: Michael Mazarr of the RAND Corporation, Antonio Patriota, Brazilian Ambassador to The United Kingdom and former Foreign Minister of Brazil, Professor Asli Bali of Yale University, Christopher Sabatini of Chatham House, Fyodor Lukyanov, Editor-in-Chief of Russia in Global Affairs, Nathalie Tocci, Director of the Istituto Affari Internazionali in Italy, Naledi Pandor, former Foreign Minister of South Africa, and more.
Is the world doomed to live under an increasingly discredited and selective ârules-based international orderâ (RBIO) instead of an inclusive order centered on international law? Is the RBIO the only construct that can strengthen American security and prevent the world from descending into chaos, or is a better alternative possible?
The Quincy Instituteâs Better Order Project has brought together more than 130 experts, scholars, and practitioners from over 40 countries to collectively develop a package of proposals aimed at rejuvenating and stabilizing the international order, based on shared commitments to international law, multilateralism, and the ability of states to participate on an equal basis.
Join us live on November 25th from 10:00 AM - 1:30 PM Eastern Time as we address how to chart a smoother path through todayâs rocky transition away from unipolarity, and discuss several of the Better Order Project's proposals with some of the international initiative's participants, including: Michael Mazarr of the RAND Corporation, Antonio Patriota, Brazilian Ambassador to The United Kingdom and former Foreign Minister of Brazil, Professor Asli Bali of Yale University, Christopher Sabatini of Chatham House, Fyodor Lukyanov, Editor-in-Chief of Russia in Global Affairs, Nathalie Tocci, Director of the Istituto Affari Internazionali in Italy, Naledi Pandor, former Foreign Minister of South Africa, and more.
