It’s tempting to draw sweeping conclusions about what geopolitics will look like after the pandemic. Some argue that we’re witnessing the last gasp of American primacy, the equivalent of Britain’s 1956 “Suez moment.” Others argue that America, the main driver of the post–Cold War international order, is temporarily incapacitated, with a president drunk at the wheel. Tomorrow, a more sober operator can swiftly restore U.S. 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, however, is that we have drifted into one of those rare periods of transition, with American dominance in the rearview mirror, and a more anarchical 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 America’s role in the world.
The wreckage of the pandemic surrounds us—with more than half a million people around the world dead, the ranks of the global 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.
Always attuned to the weakness of others, 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 America, and its own political breakdowns—none more perplexing than Brexit. The drift in the transatlantic alliance is worsening, with the U.S. looking for Europe to do more with less say, and Europe fearing 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. Hard-liners 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 bloody wreck, and Israel’s impending annexation in 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 only become more vulnerable. Latin America now faces 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 ongoing technological disruptions, 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 cures. The same technologies that unlock 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, stabilize geopolitical competition, and ensure at least some modest protections of global public goods.
But now we are living through the worst intersection of man and moment in American history. “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 30 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—and 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 America’s post–Cold War “unipolar moment”—leaving the U.S. 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, while America kept the peace.
The U.S. 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 our diplomatic relationships and tools into exactly their pre-Trump, pre-pandemic shapes is a mirage.
Retrenchment is easily distorted as a kind of nativist isolationism or pathological declinism. It is often portrayed as a Bannonite 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 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 U.S. 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. President Barack Obama’s attempt to shift the terms of American 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 U.S. accepted its relative decline and shrank its external ambitions, where’s the rising ally to whom America can pass the baton, as the British did to the U.S. 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 gradually dominating the Eurasian landmass, Russia a weakening accomplice, and Europe an isolated appendage?
And would an America retrenching in hard power still be able to play the organizing role on issues like climate change, nuclear nonproliferation, and global trade, which 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 U.S. sheds its paternalistic altruism and becomes just another big country, the better off it will be. Restorationists believe that consigning America 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 U.S. failed to take full advantage of its primacy. American leaders naively enabled the rise of our future rivals, thinking they’d be satisfied with a seat at our table, rather than displacing us at its head. The U.S. 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.
Restorationists argue that America suffers most not when it does too much, but 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 U.S. failed to appreciate how much emerging democracies depended on America, and how methodically authoritarians would contest the democratic model.
Although the United States may no longer enjoy unrivaled dominance, 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 U.S. should reject any return to a world of closed spheres of influence—and 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 our allies willing and able to join us 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: America can no longer dictate events as we sometimes believed we could. The Trump administration has done more damage to American values, image, and influence than any other 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, we remain in a better position than any other major power to mobilize coalitions and navigate the geopolitical rapids of the 21st century.
We can’t afford to just put more-modest lipstick on an essentially restorationist strategy, or, alternatively, apply 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.
First and foremost, American 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 corporate America is essential. Leaders must do a far better job of ensuring that trade and investment deals reflect those imperatives.
That doesn’t mean turning our 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 policy makers 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 our broken immigration system.
A second major priority for a reinvented foreign policy involves grand global 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.
They require a new multilateralism—a patchwork of coalitions of like-minded states, which the U.S. is still better placed than any other country to assemble; a hard-nosed approach to reforming international institutions; and agile diplomacy. 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 vital priority is our 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, over-prove our hawkish bona fides, over-militarize our approach, and reduce the political and diplomatic space required to manage great-power competition.
Preventing China’s rise is beyond America’s capacity, and our economies are too entangled to decouple. The U.S. 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 America’s 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 current 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’ll have to act with the discipline that so often eluded the U.S. 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.
Comments(7)
Peace through strength is not a realistic option. While isolationism and appeasement can only mean disaster for our allies and the prospect of a single power dominating the Euro-Asian land mass. However, in a world in desperate need of environmental health and economic equality, globalization has provided neither. The more that human economic growth invades the planet's wild spaces, the greater the likelihood of new and more virile pandemics. Wealth creation and blind materialism are offspring of a self interested liberalism that has placed the autonomous individual in pursuit of money above community and custom. Our human environmental crisis-- unprecedented in world history -- is the height of anarchy by the destruction of all sense of limitation. Sadly, this is the extreme environment in which our geopolitical reality now exists. We must find a new path forward. And that means all the nations of the world working cooperatively in search of some semblance of global harmony. But how? The American unipolar moment did not end history. In the final analysis, it brought temporary hegemony and now a new destabilization. America needed to curb inflation and find new markets for profit realization; while China needed capital to develop in order to compete militarily. The US government and the Chinese Communist Party used each other and now both have lost. Our precarious human civilization cannot afford a replay (once again?) of the Thucydides Trap. China and the US must find a way to re-envision the Indo-Pacific region so that perceived vital interests cannot be trampled upon by the zero sum game of conflicting spheres of influence. The Pacific Ocean must become a Zone of Peace. This can only be accomplished through levels of increasing naval demilitarization leading to concomitant levels of nuclear disarmament. But the whole of the Euro-Asian land mass and the Indo-Pacific is far greater than the sum of its parts. Europe, inclusive of Russia, needs an alternative to NATO; while I have written extensively on a nuclear-weapons-free Zone of Peace in the Middle East. Also included must be a peace plan for the China-India-Pakistan triangle. The future of disputed Kashmir and the prospect of Pakistan joining the Middle East Zone of Peace would be at the very core of any such plan for South Asia. If we as a civilization are to survive the deep environmental and geopolitical anarchy that we all now face, global peace must be our top priority. All will fail without it.
Well written Mr. Horowitz, and I agree with much of it. However, I’m always intrigued by those who say things along the lines of “we must find a way,” when there very well not be a suitable way. Sometimes we have to realize that other players don’t play by the same ground rules that we do and furthermore plan their policies knowing we will stick to our regular playbook. I think we have that in China. Any de-escalation on our part will not be met with reciprocation despite what might be assurances from their part. We have to realize at some point that the boogey might just be real.
I agree with the general thrust of Bill Burns' piece, but I have a somewhat simpler approach. Let's just get back to doing the things we do best. We can't assert more leadership in today's world. Trump has blown that for America, and the world is a bit tired of our preaching anyhow, so we're going to have to dispense with the cowbell (Bill Burns' SNL shorthand for "more leadership") for the time being until we're actually needed again. We also can't retrench to the point that we vanish from the diplomatic stage. Bill's middle way prescription I find a bit mushy and vague. It reads like an efficiency report from the 1980s -- it talks about everything except what diplomats actually do. What we really need is a rebirth of competence, and a sharp focus on America's real geopolitical interests. Above all, we need leaders who will not shrink from asserting America's power when necessary. America doesn't exactly need the amoral realpolitik of another Henry Kissinger, or the imperial pragmatism of an Alexander Gorchakov -- although either would be incomparably better than the clown show we have endured under Trump -- but we might need another Jim Baker, who can manage the foreign policy process and react quickly to changing circumstances. We're in an uncertain world, with unexpected changes occurring all around us. We can't just keep beating the cowbell or withdraw from the challenge. Either of those alternatives courts disaster.
The start point must surely be an end of populism and a realisation that the World desperately needs consensus politics. Having recently spent 8 months assisting Caymans newBureau of Financial Investigation with a focus on foreign predicted financial crime and associated illicit cash flows (an estimated 2-5% of global GDP flows through Cayman registered accounts), it is apparent that global organised crime groups present a real threat to the challenge of tackling environmental crime. Whilst current world leaders are distracted by navel gazing and one upmanship, the real challenges referenced by Steven Horowitz will not be effectively addressed.
A retired Foreign Service Officer and long-time China watcher has given me permission to post his response: The Burns article is long and thoughtful and contains much that is beyond dispute. The need to get our economy right and address pressing social and environmental issues is of utmost importance, as is the need to re-energize our alliances and partnerships around the world. That said, I worry that the first priority for "reinvention" carries that point too far: "First and foremost, American 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." Those issues are matters of domestic policy, and if our foreign policy is driven by those considerations, we will not address the most urgent problem facing the United States, the rise of China. For example, would we be willing to trade important strategic interests for Chinese cooperation on climate change? That is what the PRC will demand, even if China should be at least as concerned about climate change as the United States. I have to admit that as a China hand, I was particularly worried by the assertion that, "Our tendency, as it was during the height of the Cold War, is to overhype the threat (from China)..." To me, that sounds naive given the changes in China's international behavior and the increasing clarity of its intentions. Over the past decade, it became clear that China wished to shove the United States out of Asia, a development that would harm both U.S. strategic interests and our domestic economy. Since the pandemic, it has become just as clear that China wants to re-write the rules of international behavior and weaken democracies (and autocracies) world-wide that do not kow-tow to Beijing. The Chinese leadership is committed to a path that should alarm anyone who believes in a rules-based international order not dominated by an authoritarian, ethno-centric regime whose primary concern is to make the world safe for one-party rule. We are in the beginning stages of what China under its current leadership sees as a long-term strategic and ideological competition with the United States and democracies in general. That does not necessarily mean that there will be conflict between our two nations, just as there never was direct conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. It does mean, however, that the possibility of conflict will only increase if the United States does not push back hard now on Chinese aggression, whether that comes in the form of predatory trade practices, technology theft, cyberattacks, human rights abuses (including in Hong Kong and Xinjiang), disinformation intended to weaken democracies, or outright military pressure in places like the Indian border, South and East China Seas, and Taiwan. As I’ve noted above that will involve a lot of hard work with friends and allies, but the work of meeting this broad-based challenge from China really ought to be the clear foreign policy priority of any US. Administration in the years to come.
To Mr. William J. Burns: The intent of my response is to show you, with your own research a point that needs to be made about UNA 3 North Korea units. Using the older jet fuel kerosene and a chemical which implodes the exhaust, the UNA 3 first section yields 6,284 miles in a loop shot towards Australia if the first section is stabilized in flight. Obviously, the second and third sections, set off by level ballast valves , does maximize the flight of the projectile if it is carrying a satellite that weighs nothing more than a Big Mac Hamburger and Fries. The last UNA 3 launch over the Yellow Sea yielded a much better orbital flight height: Unfortunately Sik failed to check the welding seal of the top bulkhead of the first section; ultimately the first section ignited. However two and three set off correct and as result, the flight was a great success. As a lesson of long range missiles aimed at the United States; If North Korea, as a matter of weight on the projectile, underestimates the trejectory of this long range loop shot; then the attempt will fall short. However; If North Korea overestimates the range, then the projectile will stay in orbit and land in an incalculable way somewhere. So; Does it make any sense at all to duck around North Korean rocket launches against the United States? To me; all of this concern makes no sense at all.
ANOTHER BANANA REPUBLIC Since the beginning of the republic, American administrations have been the main sponsor of political instability in Latinoamerica through military coup Deta't. The US foreign policy around the world continues harming other nations with the blessing of most American voters who don't care or prefer to ignore what their government does. What is happening in America a few weeks before November 2020 election resembles the days before a typical military coup in Latinoamerica; one can feel the fear, outrage, and the uncertainty of the moment. After the military takeover, persecution, and disappearances or exile of political opponents besieges the entire population for years to come. For Americans, the Latino-American democratic process is a joke; they coined the legendary name "banana republics" and use it to describe a politically unstable country with an impoverished working class and a ruling class plutocracy. Now, America, know how Chileans felt (1) or by the same token Cubans, Venezuelans, Guatemalans, you name it. The adagio " what goes around comes around" is taking a new meaning in Trump America. No retrenchment, restoration, or reinvention would have a meaningful impact in America without the subsidence of police brutality against minorities and the draft of a new social contract (between capital and the working class). Indeed, the US is the latest addition to the rogue club of banana republics. Ref (1): NYT, Opinion, 12/12/16 "Now, America, you know how Chileans felt."
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