By all accounts, Biden’s foreign policy team is shaping up to be Obama 2.0. That comes with pros and cons of course. The biggest advantage is embodied by Antony Blinken as Secretary of State. He seems to be committed to wielding decades of foreign policy experience toward continuing the pivot to Asia, which to me is nice and if anything behind schedule. He says all the right things about American leadership and the free world and uniting against the rising authoritarian threat of China:
The picture gets a bit murkier, though, when combined with musings from national security adviser Jake Sullivan:As geopolitical competition intensifies, we must supplement diplomacy with deterrence. Words alone will not dissuade the Vladi*mir Putins and Xi Jinpings of this world. Recognizing their traditional imperial “spheres of interest” will only embolden them to expand farther while betraying the sovereign nations that fall under their dominion. Because we face real budget constraints, we have to make tough choices about how best to defend our interests. We’ll have to strike the right balance of modernization, readiness, asymmetric capabilities and force structure. Whatever formula we choose, we must convince rivals and adversaries that trying to achieve their objectives by force will fail and that they have more to gain through peaceful cooperation and economic development than through aggression.
Going forward, we have to be judicious in our use of force; to focus on the aftermath of war, as well as the war itself; to involve allies; to work with Congress and insist that it play its constitutional role. Americans need to know that if we use force, it has been carefully thought out — and by more than just a handful of officials. They deserve to know what our objectives are and to have reasonable confidence that we can achieve them.
Americans have never backed away from the challenges posed by competition and innovation. Trying to revive the industrial economy of the 1950s is impossible; nor should we embrace the protectionism of the 1930s that helped destroy the global economy and hasten world war. When we pull out of trade agreements, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, we hand a win to countries such as China. If we opt out, they will shape global trade and innovation to their benefit, not ours.
We should insist on competing in a rules-based system that protects our people from the aggressive state capitalism of modern autocracies. We should use our market power to set the highest standards for protecting workers, the environment, intellectual property and middle-class wages, while insisting on transparency and basic commercial reciprocity. In other words, we’ll treat you the way you treat us.
We also need to stay ahead of the competition in new technologies, especially artificial intelligence, which will reshape the future global balance of power. We cannot cede to China or anyone else a technological sphere of influence. To maintain our edge, we must preserve the free flow of ideas and international collaboration that spark innovation, but we also need to crack down on espionage, technology transfer and intellectual property theft. Our tech firms need to take more responsibility for national security, both in preventing foreign efforts to manipulate our political system, and protecting data and privacy. If they won’t, government will.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...820_story.html
What can be seen here is an emerging pragmatism that talks a big game when projecting a restoration of American leadership, but in fact suggests managing US decline by shying away from preserving free trade and military security commitments, and adopting a “if you can’t beat em join em” approach to competing with China’s state-run economy. This is deeply unsettling, but then, so was Trump’s protectionism. Whether or not Blinken’s “free trade/TPP is good” narrative, or Sullivan’s “free trade is bad for workers” narrative wins out, the fundamental shift away from American global leadership toward an inward focus seems here to stay.Today’s national security experts need to move beyond the prevailing neoliberal economic philosophy of the past 40 years. This philosophy can be summarized as reflexive confidence in competitive markets as the surest route to maximizing both individual liberty and economic growth and a corresponding belief that the role of government is best confined to securing those competitive markets through enforcing property rights, only intervening in the supposedly rare instance of market failure.
U.S. firms will continue to lose ground in the competition with Chinese companies if Washington continues to rely so heavily on private sector research and development, which is directed toward short-term profit-making applications rather than long-term, transformative breakthroughs. And the United States will be more insecure if it lacks the manufacturing base necessary to produce essential goods—from military technologies to vaccines—in a crisis.
Third, policymakers must move beyond the received wisdom that every trade deal is a good trade deal and that more trade is always the answer. The details matter. Whatever one thinks of the TPP, the national security community backed it unquestioningly without probing its actual contents. U.S. trade policy has suffered too many mistakes over the years to accept pro-deal arguments at face value.
A better approach to trade, then, should involve more aggressively targeting the tax havens and loopholes that undermine many of the theoretical gains from trade. It should also involve a laser focus on what improves wages and creates high-paying jobs in the United States, rather than making the world safe for corporate investment. (Why, for example, should it be a U.S. negotiating priority to open China’s financial system for Goldman Sachs?) And it should connect foreign trade policy to domestic investments in workers and communities so that trade adjustment is not a hollow promise.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/02/07...erts-can-help/
It’s conspicuous that Sullivan’s “good debt/bad debt” narrative avoids discussion of the military, while Blinken talks about “balance” and “budget constraints.” Combine this with Biden’s choice to announce diplomatic posts ahead of military, and the message is clear. While a focus on diplomacy is a foregone conclusion in almost any Democrat Administration, talk of boosting public investment in just about everything but the military could hardly come at a worse time. In terms of “good debt,” ROI on global security commitments seems to be at least as solid as the nebulous plans to increase the government’s involvement in the economy:
Meanwhile, US military infrastructure and readiness is in crisis.U.S. overseas security commitments have a positive, statistically significant effect on U.S. bilateral trade. Doubling U.S. security treaties would expand U.S. bilateral trade by an estimated 34 percent, and doubling U.S. troop commitments overseas would expand such trade by up to 15 percent.
Trade losses from a 50-percent retrenchment in overseas commitments would reduce U.S. trade in goods and services by approximately $577 billion per year. This reduction in trade would likely reduce U.S. gross domestic product by $490 billion per year.
The economic losses from retrenchment are conservatively estimated to be more than three times any potential gains.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9912.html
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/201...-worse/155858/
https://www.defense.gov/Explore/News...y-leaders-say/
The best case seems to be a return to the Obama era, when the “budget constraints” Blinken talks about, and uncertainty as to the Administration’s level of commitment to basic priorities had a marked effect on military readiness that continues to impact the DoD today and going forward.
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/DOD_budgetary_turmoil_final.pdf
https://breakingdefense.com/2016/08/...eus-are-wrong/
A return to diplomatic engagement and multilateralism will be a breath of fresh air as the Biden Admin gets off the ground, and the calibre of personnel being brought forward suggests that effort will be at least somewhat successful. However, an equivalent commitment to restoring the US military doesn’t seem to be there, and China has meanwhile sustained an increasingly serious commitment to military investment to facilitate the regime’s expansionist plans.
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/202...-looks/164060/
All the diplomatic pressure in the world won’t deter rising authoritarian powers so long as the USM is more suited to preserving the peacetime status quo of yesterday’s unipolar world than to warfighting, and this is a key area to which the Biden Admin seems deliberately averse.