Foreign policy is typically a secondary issue in presidential campaigns. In 2020, it hasn’t even been that: Between Covid-19, the future of the Supreme Court and President Donald Trump’s inimitable antics, substantive debate about US diplomacy has been relegated to the political margins.
Yet there’s good reason to examine what has gone wrong and what has gone right over the past four years. And while there is a preponderance of failure and self-harm in Trump’s foreign policy, in a few important places the administration has constructed a foundation of strategic progress. The Trump administration could perhaps build on those gains in a second term — but a President Joe Biden would actually be better placed to exploit them.
In 2017, Trump took office promising to shatter the status quo in US foreign policy. America had squandered the position of prominence it had occupied at the end of the Cold War, he and his advisers argued. The president scorned alliances, trade agreements and other pillars of Washington’s global strategy since World War II.
Trump delivered on his promise to disrupt the inherited order. Alas, many of his chief innovations — demanding extortionate rents from allies such as South Korea; withdrawing from or simply hobbling international institutions such as the World Health Organization and World Trade Organization rather than competing for influence within them; putting solicitude for dictators over solidarity with democratic friends; widening nearly every seam within the coalitions America has typically led — amount to a harvest of strategic woe for a superpower facing growing major-power threats. Countries around the world are questioning whether the US can still be trusted to use its tremendous power in responsible ways.
The most significant involves China. Until recently, Trump himself was seized mostly with a small sliver of the China portfolio — the bilateral trade imbalance. Yet his willingness to transform the rhetorical and strategic context of the relationship, from a paradigm of engagement to one of competition, created bureaucratic space for hawkish policy entrepreneurs across the US government.
The resulting policy shift is incomplete. There is still nothing to replace the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement that Trump abandoned in 2017, and the president has too often absented himself from the effort to focus global attention on China’s appalling human-rights record. Engagement with nations in Southeast Asia, where geopolitical alignments are fluid and Chinese influence is increasingly pervasive, remains far too weak.
The administration does, however, deserve credit for resurrecting the so-called Quad (a partnership between Australia, India, Japan and the US that was conceived in 2007 and then disbanded in 2008) and making it the nucleus of a multilateral response to Chinese assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific.
The Defense Department is pushing, incrementally but seriously, to reorient the US military around the demands of competition and potential conflict with Beijing.
And if Trump’s broad-based trade tariffs haven’t meaningfully changed China’s behavior or improved America’s balance sheet, they have jump-started an overdue debate on where economic interdependence with a rival is desirable and where it creates intolerable vulnerabilities. That Democrats and Republicans now disagree mostly on the particulars, rather than the principle, of competition with Beijing is a testament to how much the Trump administration has changed that debate.
A second area of constructive innovation involves cyberspace. Here, too, the Trump administration has helped US policy catch up with the demands of a more contested world.
Well into Barack Obama’s presidency, US cyber posture featured, with some very important exceptions, an emphasis on cultivating norms of restraint in this emerging domain of competition. The problem was that these norms were shared mostly by friendly democracies, but not by hostile autocracies.
Russia and China, along with North Korea and Iran, have used cyberspace as an arena for hacking, espionage and political meddling. Since 2017, US Cyber Command has shifted to a more aggressive strategy featuring “persistent engagement” and “forward defense” — getting inside rivals’ networks and using disruptive action, or at least the threat of it, to keep them off balance.
This shift might well have happened had Trump not been elected, and the president hasn’t helped by continuing to downplay the threat of Russian interference in US politics. But in a domain where the attacker seems to have the advantage, the US is now using offensive capabilities to create a stronger defense.
Third, there is the administration’s outside-in approach to Middle East peace. This has entailed downgrading negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians in favor of brokering rapprochements between Israel and Arab states such as Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
The idea isn’t entirely original. A Hillary Clinton administration might have tried something similar.
Trump himself has sometimes been a barrier to making the most of needed changes. The irony is that a Biden administration may be better suited to capitalizing on these shifts, by adding executive heft to a more aggressive cyber strategy, or by devising a China policy that is no longer encumbered by Trump’s penchant for erratic, amoral unilateralism.
Indeed, there is already a certain alignment between the Democratic candidate and key Republican senators on elements of a more holistic China strategy, one that would place priority on the unity of the world’s democracies and mounting a multilateral response to the Chinese technological challenge.
New presidents always face the temptation to jettison their predecessors’ most prominent initiatives. If the polls hold and Biden wins, there will be plenty of pernicious policies to cast aside and diplomatic damage to repair. Yet because Biden would cut such a different figure as president, and because America would reap a diplomatic dividend just by moving past the Trump era, he might have more leeway to appropriate some of the prior administration’s good ideas, while dispensing with particularly Trumpian presidential pathologies.
Bloomberg
