Our So-Called Foreign Policy: “Anonymous” Inanity on China

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Atlantic Council, Biden, China, China Strateg Group, decoupling, Donald Trump, Foreign Affairs, George F. Kennan, globalism, Iran, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, The Long Telegram, The Longer Telegram, X Article, Xi JInPing

How lucky for President Biden that, just as he’s announced a wide-ranging review of U.S. China policy (after he and his supposedly fellow foreign policy mavens spent the entire presidential campaign lambasting Donald Trump’s initiatives and clearly conveying that they knew exactly how to fix these alleged blunders), a wavelet of advice has appeared offering answers, at least at the broad brush level.

How unfortunate for the United States, though, that so little of this advice has any prospect of advancing and defending American interests vis-a-vis China, much less improving on the Trump efforts to neutralize the China threat. In fact, if Mr. Biden follows his longstanding Beijing-coddling instincts and generally heeds the authors, the United States is bound to become more vulnerable and more beholden to the People’s Republic than ever.

Two blueprints for the President to follow have emerged in recent weeks: a memo from an anonymous author who clearly views him or herself as a latter day George F. Kennan; and a collective effort from a “China Strategy Group” dominated by Silicon Valley figures (and co-chaired by Google co-founder Eric Schmidt). The first is the most easily disposed of, and will be the subject of today’s post. Tomorrow I’ll discuss the Group’s China grope.

Kennan, in case you’ve forgotten, was the mid-twentieth century American diplomat whose analyses of Soviet power and behavior (including an early 1946 memo written during his stint in Moscow that became known as “The Long Telegram”) powerfully shaped the Cold War strategy of containment adopted by Washington. He was by no means perfect, but in my view amply deserves his reputation as one of the most incisive foreign policy analysts in American history – which is why if he read the new and arrogantly titled “The Longer Telegram,” he’d probably be hard-pressed to decide whether to laugh or cry.

The most eye-catching proposal made by the author (whose desire for anonymity apes that displayed Kennan in a 1947 article that grew out of “The Long Telegram” that he published in the journal Foreign Affairs as “X”): urging that rather than focus on broadly changing China’s totalitarian system of government and control over the economy, or targeting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in particular as Public Enemy Number One, U.S. policy recognize Chinese leader Xi Jinping and his inner circle as the dominant game changer that has turned the People’s Republic and its practices from a “manageable” challenge into today’s mortal danger not only to the United States but to the entire world.

I actually agree with the author that prompting Chinese reform of any kind is a fool’s quest – a prime reason that I regard substantially decoupling America’s economy from China’s as the best way to ensure that the nation can handle whatever problems Beijing creates. It was also heartening to see “Anonymous” recognize that dealing with China successfully will be that much harder for Washington if it keeps going out of its way to demonize Russia – which has clearly become a Democratic Party staple.

But concentrating U.S. China policy “through the principal lens of Xi himself” and seeking to capitalize on “significant” opposition within the CCP to “Xi’s leadership and its vast ambitions” in order to “return [China] to its pre-2013 path—i.e., the pre-Xi strategic status quo” suffers from at least two glaringly obvious flaws.

The first is Anonymous’ belief that however numerous China’s challenges to U.S. interests before Xi gained control, “they were manageable and did not represent a serious violation of the US-led international order.” In fact, even the author him/herself doesn’t seem to believe this.

If he or she did, why admit that the current Chinese challenge, “to some extent, has been gradually emerging over the last two decades”? And that that “China has long had an integrated internal strategy for handling the United States….” And that pursuing its goals “nationally, bilaterally, regionally, multilaterally, and globally….has been China’s approach for decades.” And that “What links” today’s China threat and that posed by the Soviet Union in particular during the early Cold War is that “the CCP, like the former CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union], is an avowedly Leninist party with a profoundly Marxist worldview”?

Have Xi’s ambitions magnified the threat? Of course. But – as Anonymous also admits – not because Chinese leaders’ goals have fundamentally changed, but because growing economic and therefore military strength have brought them within reach.

In the author’s own words,

“China has undergone a dramatic economic rise in recent decades, and it is using its economic power to engage in coercive practices and to become the center of global innovation….China is transforming its economic heft into military strength, modernizing its military and developing capabilities to counter the United States’ ability to project power in the western Pacific.”

And although China has generated much of this impressive progress through its own devices, it’s also indisputable that its closely related economic, technological, and military advances stem from the U.S. and other free world resources and knowhow that flooded into China precisely when the bipartisan Washington consensus viewed any possible dangers emanating from Beijing as “manageable.” In other words, whether knowingly or not, Anonymous in effect is arguing for a return to the policies that helped create the problem he’s (correctly) identified. And P.S. Since he or she is described as “a former senior government official with deep expertise and experience dealing with China,” chances are the author had more than a minor hand in crafting this failed approach.

The second fatal flaw in “The Longer Telegram” is its assumption that American foreign policymakers understand enough “about the fault lines of internal Chinese politics” to manipulate them into bringing back those allegedly manageable pre-Xi leaders. To which anyone with even the skimpiest knowledge of American diplomacy should be responding, “Remember Iran.”

For since that country’s 1979 revolution replaced a generally pro-American monarch with a zealously anti-American Shiite Islamic theocracy, U.S. leaders have tried repeatedly to find influential moderates that would help reshape the new regime’s behavior. Because the United States knew so little about the internal politics and fault lines of this leadership, all these efforts have failed. Does Anonymous really believe that Washington’s knowledge of China’s even more secretive leadership is any better?

The Atlantic Council, the globalist Washington, D.C. think tank that published “The Longer Telegram,” calls it “one of the most insightful and rigorous examinations to date of Chinese geopolitical strategy and how an informed American strategy would address the challenges of China’s own strategic ambitions.”

Actually, its signature recommendation is so internally contradictory and naive that I don’t blame the author for wanting to stay Anonymous.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Globalism on Steroids on the Way for America?

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alliances, America First, Antony Blinken, Blob, Cold War, containment, Foreign Affairs, George F. Kennan, globalism, international institutions, Joe Biden, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Trump

I’ve written at length on how President Trump has conducted a foreign policy that follows America First principles unevenly at best. Now the evidence is growing that if Joe Biden becomes President, he’ll pursue a strategy that will look like globalism on steroids – in other words, an approach certain to return the nation to a diplomacy that minimizes or ignores completely America’s unique advantages on the world stage, maximizes its vulnerabilities, and needlessly increases its exposure to danger.

Aside from Biden’s own strongly globalist impulses, the main evidence so far is the news that he’s decided to appoint longtime aide Antony Blinken as his Secretary of State. Practically all you need to know about this Washington foreign policy veteran, his priorities, and the almost congenitally globalist worldview from which they spring was summed up in this New York Times headline: “Biden Chooses Antony Blinken, Defender of Global Alliances, as Secretary of State.”

For those still doubting his hallmark, The Times stressed in its homepage subhead that, “Mr. Blinken is expected to try to re-establish the U.S. as a trusted ally ready to rejoin international agreements” – which had the added virtue of making clear that Blinken (along with Biden) is thinking not only about America’s security arrangements with Europe and East Asian countries, but about the entire raft of international institutions ranging from the United Nations to the World Trade Organization.

As I’ve explained, this globalist obsession with multilateralism overlooks (1) the potential of the security alliances in particular to plunge the United States into nuclear war for stakes far less than vital; and (2) America’s matchless overall capabilities and potential to achieve security and prosperity in an inevitably unstable, dangerous world through its own power, favored geographic position, and wealth, rather than by making quixotic attempts to pacify the international environment.

At least as worrisome, Blinken seems utterly oblivious to the importance of cultivating and wielding national power when international arrangements of various kinds do offer advantages to the United States. No one could reasonably disagree with his recent observation that

“Simply put, the big problems that we face as a country and as a planet, whether it’s climate change, whether it’s a pandemic, whether it’s the spread of bad weapons — to state the obvious, none of these have unilateral solutions. Even a country as powerful as the United States can’t handle them alone.”

You’ll search in vain, however, for any awareness that the multilateral solutions in which he places so much stock will have content. As a result, countries with different strengths and weaknesses, with differing histories and social and economic priorities will be pushing for outcomes likely to differ significantly from those optimal for America. So achieving those optimal outcomes is fanciful without the leverage to compel or to bribe, or some combination of the two.

But there’s another maxim of globalism possibly exemplified by Blinken (and other likely Biden appointees) that’s potentially even more dangerous for the United States. It’s the notion that striving for and achieving triumphs in the international arena are much nobler as well as much more important endeavors than seeking success in domestic affairs. Indeed, globalists have become so convinced of the paramount stakes of foreign policy not only out of sheer necessity but for moral reasons as well that they have crowned foreign policy ambition as nothing less than the ultimate test of the nation’s character and worth.

In this vein, back in 1993, as Americans and especially their leaders were still struggling to grasp the implications of the Cold War’s end, I wrote that that epic contest

“generated some troubling theories about America’s national identity and purpose which have become all too uncontroversial. Specifically, many of us have come to believe that America will never be true to its best traditions unless it is engaged in some kind of world mission, that creating a more perfect United States is not a noble or an ambitious enough goal for a truly great people, that we will be morally and spiritually deficient unless we continue to be the kind of globe-girdling power we have been for the past half century.”

In fact, I was always struck by the fact that even a major foreign policy decision-maker and thinker such as George F. Kennan – who for most of his career was not much of a globalist at all – fell under this idea’s sway (or did during his most globalist period). Why else would he have ended his famous 1947 Foreign Affairs article outlining the anti-Soviet containment strategy with this description of the upcoming challenge:

“The issue of Soviet-American relations is in essence a test of the over-all worth of the United States as a nation among nations. To avoid destruction the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation.

“Surely, there was never a fairer test of national quality than this. In the light of these circumstances, the thoughtful observer of Russian-American relations will find no cause for complaint in the Kremlin’s challenge to American society. He will rather experience a certain gratitude to a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.”

In the Blinken context, I was reminded of these claims by this sentence from someone as embedded in the think tank-centered globalist foreign policy Blob as the likely Secretary-to-be has been. Biden, writes this author, “will be flanked and assisted by a group of ambitious, sophisticated, and energetic aides eager to leave their mark on American foreign policy—and the world.”

This observation isn’t exactly the same as identifying Blinken as a foreign policy-uber-alles type. But it’s close enough to unnerve me, and raises the question of what makes these Biden staffers believe that the vast majority of Americans want them to “leave their mark on…foreign policy – and the world,” as opposed to expecting them to reserve blood and treasure for genuinely, and nationally, vital purposes, and hoping that they’ll avoid major blunders?

The answer, of course, is “nothing,” and makes clear that if Biden foreign policy team members are is thinking of shining in the history books, they’ll lower their sights, keep their collective noses to the grindstone, and view America’s international business as a sacred trust rather than a vehicle for their personal — or even the nation’s — reputation.