It didn't take long for the Chinese government to weigh in, with mocking solemnity, on the chaos at the US Capitol this week. “China hopes that Americans can enjoy peace, stability and security as soon as possible,” the Chinese foreign ministry stated. Peace and stability with Chinese characteristics, of course, is the sort that comes from widespread human-rights violations, suppression of civil liberties, systematic repression of minorities and even, it appears, forced sterilization campaigns.
Nonetheless, Beijing’s schadenfreude raises an important question: How do America’s multiple, intensifying domestic disorders influence its foreign policy?
That’s not the most important question, which would be how the US makes it to Inauguration Day and then addresses the accumulating failures that brought it to this point. But weighing the geopolitical ramifications is unavoidable, given that the primary guarantor of international order is suffering from an out-of-control coronavirus pandemic, surging political violence, slackening commitment to democratic norms and other serious domestic disorders. The reality is that, although the US must set its house in order to be effective abroad, it must not — and need not — retreat from the world to do so.
No serious observer can deny that America’s global prestige has suffered because of its domestic dysfunction. Polls in other advanced democracies show that President Donald Trump’s illiberal governance and disastrous mishandling of Covid-19 have had stark effects on the esteem the US inspires overseas. In the coming years, any US diplomats who chastise a would-be autocrat will have Trump’s presidency thrown back in their face.
They might respond, reasonably, that America’s democratic institutions held because most public servants remained loyal to the Constitution rather than a corrupt president. Yet that’s not the argument that representatives of a democratic superpower that has long aspired to be a model to the world should have to make.
Recent events also underscore a sobering strategic truth — that strength abroad is ultimately a reflection of strength at home. The US remains a far more stable, just and inclusive society than Vladimir Putin’s Russia or Xi Jinping’s China, which gives it a profound, long-term competitive advantage. But instability in American politics creates instability in American geopolitics, whether in the form of domestic polarization that produces head-snapping changes from one administration to the next, or in the sense that a society that increasingly lacks common standards of truth will struggle to muster the purpose and unity necessary to prosecute long struggles against determined rivals. Xi and especially Putin know this, which is why they seek to weaponize America’s grievances and divisions through influence campaigns, disinformation and other meddling.
The severity of the US predicament has led some analysts to the conclusion that Washington must dial back its global ambitions until it conquers its internal demons. As Emma Ashford put it in Foreign Policy, “Ambitious foreign-policy goals are completely out of step with the realities of the country’s domestic political and economic dysfunction.”
That’s misguided. No true US ally is advocating that Washington turn its back on the world (although many presumably worry about it), and for good reason. It’s not as though the need for American engagement has become any less pressing: As we have seen during Covid-19, the likely alternatives to constructive US leadership are a breakdown of international cooperation on pandemics and other issues and a vacuum that less principled, less democratic actors such as China will fill.
Richard Nixon, another corrupt president who governed at another time of alarming domestic and geopolitical turmoil, warned that “if America were to become a dropout in assuming the responsibility for defining peace and freedom in the world … the rest of the world would live in terror.” Nixon’s own transgressions notwithstanding, a post-American world seems unlikely to be any more stable or benign today.
The premise of retrenchment is flawed in other ways, too. Unless foreign policy is a principal cause of America’s divisions and injustices, as it was during Vietnam, then it’s not immediately evident that a less ambitious foreign policy would help address those problems. Withdrawing from Europe’s strategic affairs after World War I didn’t allow the US to avoid a wave of nativism and racism in the 1920s or the profound polarization of the Great Depression.
One can plausibly argue that the relationship runs in the other direction. During the Cold War, America’s commitment to combating Soviet influence globally helped motivate it to address its worst domestic sin, state-sponsored segregation.
Finally, domestic perfection has never been a prerequisite for purposeful international action. The US protected the world from aggressive autocracy in two global wars despite being a deeply flawed society that fell far short of its founding ideals. It contained the Soviet Union, thereby supporting an unprecedented flourishing of democracy worldwide, while struggling with issues from racial injustice to economic turmoil to bitter political disputes. Had Americans instead insisted on resolving domestic problems before acting internationally, the result would have been a disaster for liberalism everywhere — including, ultimately, in America itself.
The US should emerge from the Trump era with greater humility about its own shortcomings and the dangers they pose to its diplomacy as well as its democracy. Yet it cannot fall into despair about its ability to shape a healthy world. The domestic reckoning America requires should be seen as a complement to the American leadership the world still needs — not as a substitute.
Bloomberg
