Dr. James Lindsay — an expert on the domestic politics and process of U.S. foreign policymaking — joined ITS’ Liam Kraft (Director, U.S. Foreign Policy Programme) and Melissa Ballard (Research Associate, U.S. Foreign Policy Programme) to discuss U.S. diplomatic strategy and the domestic politics shaping America’s foreign policy and international position at the 7-month mark — just over 200 days — into the Biden administration.
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Dr. James Lindsay is Senior Vice President, Director of Studies, and Maurice R. Greenberg Chair at the Council on Foreign Relations. At the Council on Foreign Relations, Dr. Lindsay oversees the work of the more than six dozen fellows in the David Rockefeller Studies Program. He is a leading authority on the American foreign policymaking process and the domestic politics of American foreign policy. Dr. Lindsay has written widely on numerous aspects of American foreign policy and international relations. His most recent book, co-authored with Ivo H. Daalder, is The Empty Throne: America’s Abdication of Global Leadership.
Liam Kraft: Jim, thanks so much for your time, I really appreciate you speaking with us.
James Lindsay: My pleasure to be here with you, Liam.
LK: So I’ll start off with a look at the overall U.S. foreign policy situation. We’re seven months into the Biden administration. How do you assess this administration’s foreign policy? What have been the successes, where do you see significant change from the previous administration — both in a positive and perhaps even in a negative direction — now that we're seven months in?
JL: There’s a lot in that question Liam, and I’m probably not going to be able to explore all of the various avenues, but let me make three broad observations.
One is that the Biden administration’s foreign policy is still a work in progress. Yes, we’re six-plus months into the administration, which is about one-eighth of Joe Biden’s presidency (or at least the first term of his presidency) and there’s a lot on the President’s agenda that he hasn’t yet gotten to. I’ll just take one example because it’s a focal point of his foreign policy, and that is U.S. policy towards China. Joe Biden came into office and made it very clear that when it came to foreign policy, job number one would be to build a coalition to balance or counter China. But we’re six months into the administration and the Biden administration still has not revealed its strategic plan for dealing with China. It is still a work in progress. And again, people who follow these issues closely will note that the administration still isn’t fully staffed up, whether you are talking about positions in the State Department, or ambassadorships and the like. In that sense, the Biden administration is a little bit slow, a bit behind other administrations. But it’s not unprecedented.
The second point I would make about the Biden administration, which is clear from Joe Biden’s first six months in office, is that he has changed the tone of American foreign policy compared to his predecessor, Donald Trump. But he hasn’t necessarily changed the substance. Again, a very different approach to the world, certainly a very different approach to talking to the rest of the world with Joe Biden than with Donald Trump. Joe Biden has talked about how America is back, that it wants to work with its allies, and how it values its allies. On a number of issues, whether we’re talking about Asia or we’re talking about Europe, the United States under Joe Biden has sought to take certain issues that had been irritants and get them off the table. So, for example, in the case of Germany there had been a confrontation over Nord-Stream 2 [and] the Biden administration came to a resolution with the German government. Likewise with South Korea: disagreement over what’s called “host country support”, that is, South Korean support for U.S. military forces based in South Korea, has been resolved.
But on substance there’s a fair amount of continuity with the Trump administration. And I would note most notably, the Biden administration has accepted the essence of the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, which identifies China and Russia as geopolitical challenges to the United States. In that sense, arguing that the period of engagement — where there was a hope that China, and to a lesser extent, Russia, could be engaged to accept the rules of the American-led order — is behind us now. We now are facing countries that are aspiring to be peer competitors.
The third thing I would say about Joe Biden’s foreign policy, and it’s important to keep in mind when evaluating it, particularly if you’re not an American: for Joe Biden, foreign policy is important, but it takes second place to domestic policy. So for the Biden administration, domestic policy — in particular, getting control of the pandemic — has been job number one. And that’s been no secret; the President’s very clear about that. And it actually is a decision that has important foreign policy consequences, not just in that certain things Joe Biden won’t get to right away, but it’s part of Joe Biden’s theory that in foreign policy, if he wants to be able to rally others to Washington’s leadership, if he wants to persuade people that America is back, what he has to do is demonstrate American competence. Because American competence — the sense that the United States was a can-do nation — has suffered some very big hits over the last two decades. Think the invasion of Iraq, and all of the negative consequences that flowed out of that. Think about the “Great Recession” of 2008-2009, because of the sub-mortgage lending crisis in the United States. And then think of the mishandling under the Trump administration of the response to the pandemic. All of that suggested that the United States was a country that no longer could get things done, and I think Joe Biden is trying to address that issue. And it is a very big challenge to try to meet.
Melissa Ballard: You predicted a little bit what one of my questions was going to be about, which was about this change in tone and rhetoric between the Trump administration and the Biden administration. I think that change is quite evident, and the change in behavior as well. You had these images from the G-7 meeting in Cornwall last June. Biden was seen smiling and laughing with other world leaders in a way that we never really got to see from Trump. You had, as you said in your book, this disastrous [G-7] meeting in Quebec — and so there really was a change in tone, rhetoric and behavior from the Biden administration. And I wonder, even though we have this change in rhetoric and tone, if the substance hasn’t changed so much, do you imagine this being something that will eventually change, just due to the fact that the Biden administration has been a little slower in staffing up critical national security positions? They have been a little bit slow in the transition, they were a bit hindered by the previous administration not being very helpful in that transition. And if it’s not going to change substantively, how would allies see this change in rhetoric and tone being so important versus how they were able to deal with the Trump administration’s more belligerent rhetoric?
JL: I want to be clear here, Melissa. I’m not arguing that there has been no change in substance from the Trump administration to the Biden administration. I’m arguing something slightly different, which is that there is some continuity on a meta-level, particularly in dealing with China, and the diagnosis, if I can use that phrase, of the situation that the United States confronts — that we’re now in an era of great power competition, and we’re going to need to respond accordingly. I think when you get beyond that and talk about a number of other issues, perhaps the most notable one would be Iran and the issue of the Iran Nuclear Deal, another notable one would be climate change, the Biden administration’s in a very different position than the Trump administration had been. So I don’t want to suggest in any way that in terms of substance the Biden administration is merely a carbon copy of the Trump administration, or is the Trump administration with better manners. I think there are important issues on which the substance of what the Biden administration is seeking to do is very different.
I do think that for the Biden administration, seeking to persuade others that America is back, that the United States is looking to work with them, and the belief that the United States shares common interests and values with them is only part of the equation. Yes, the United States has to demonstrate that it has a plan that fits with others, that it’s interested in the issues that they are interested in. But there is one challenge there that the Biden administration by itself can’t solve, and perhaps only time can solve, and that is: can America’s traditional friends, partners, and allies really count on the United States? And here’s the rub. It’s reasonable if you’re a European, it is reasonable if you are a citizen of any country in Asia, the Middle East, or Oceania to say, “the United States’ foreign policy changed dramatically from Barack Obama to Donald Trump. It’s changed again from Donald Trump to Joe Biden.” For those people who did not like Donald Trump’s approach to foreign policy — and to judge by lots of public opinion polls, a lot of people in a lot of countries didn’t — the reasonable question they have is, “how can I be assured that three years from now I’m not in a situation where America’s foreign policy both substantively and rhetorically changes.” I think that’s a big challenge. And of course, aligned with it is the concern or doubt about America’s ability to exercise its power in a competent fashion, but also real questions about whether the United States is a power that is going to continue to have weight in the world, or whether it’s a declining power.
Those are, again, issues that a Biden administration is trying to address. It’s part of their general diagnosis of the case. But it’s one thing to be able to identify the challenge that you have to meet. It’s quite another to be able to actually implement those changes and to make them stick. And that gets you to the connection between domestic politics and foreign policy, because while American elections very seldom turn on foreign policy, American foreign policy quite clearly turns on the outcome of American elections.
MB: So I want to turn to this idea of presidential transitions. I want to go into detail about this difference in transition from the one the Trump administration had, to the one the Biden administration had. Because the Trump administration, as soon as they won the election, threw out [thirty] binders worth of prepared transitional material that Chris Christie and his team had put together, and decided to go into a completely different direction. And I know that with the Council on Foreign Relations, you were able to do some work on examining the transition with the Biden administration through the Transition 2021 series. How did you see the differences in these two transitional approaches affecting the first six months of foreign policy for the two different administrations? What type of differences did those make? And what led us to the point where the presidential transition poses such a heavy burden on the executive branch as it attempts to avoid slow starts in fleshing out its foreign policy?
JL: Well they’re great questions, Melissa, and let me respond by making a general observation and a specific observation.
The general observation is that the U.S. presidential transition is unique among countries. It is one in which you have a president who remains in office for roughly eleven weeks while his successor gets ready to enter. Most other countries — particularly those with parliamentary systems — have a turnover immediately, at least when you can form a coalition government and make it stick. But it’s also different not just because of the time, but because in the United States, virtually all the senior positions in government change out. Pretty much everybody who works in a policymaking position in the White House is no longer employed. Pretty much everyone in the upper echelons of the U.S. government — the State Department, the Defense Department, the Justice Department — they all rotate out. That is, personnel at senior levels are selected by the president at the time, and so, when Joe Biden is finally certified the winner in November of 2020, he, like all of his predecessors before him, has to put together a team. And you have to keep in mind, you have to put together a team of people who can take the job you give them, because they work directly for you. Think National Security Advisor.
But you are also appointing people who, under the terms of the United States Constitution, have to be confirmed by the United States Senate. So that then gets you into questions of not just, are people really talented, do you like the work they do, does their agenda go along with your agenda; you also have to ask very practical political questions: will the United States Senate vote to confirm them? Because one of the things you want to minimize as an incoming president is spending a lot of your political capital very early on trying to get somebody through a Senate [vote]. And again, [this is] particularly difficult in the Biden case because it’s a very closely divided Senate and, indeed, it wasn’t until about two weeks before Joe Biden was inaugurated that it was clear that the Democrats would have a majority of the Senate. Even then, [it is] by the smallest of margins with a 50-50 Senate and you have to rely on the Vice President, Kamala Harris, to cast the deciding vote.
The second observation that I want to make specifically is against that background, Joe Biden suffered from three problems. One, he got off to a relatively slow start because it took awhile before his victory was certified. Here is an esoteric element of the way that the United States handles this. The Director of the General Services Administration has to say “yes, the election has been decided,” before the money that makes it possible for the incoming team to start doing all the things that get the transition ready can take place. And that decision was quite delayed.
The second problem specifically that Biden had is that the Trump administration wasn’t as cooperative as the incoming team might have hoped. In many ways, the great transition, the most successful one simply in terms of its civility and level of cooperation, was from George W. Bush to Barack Obama. And President Obama has said many times that he greatly appreciated how much (the younger) President Bush accommodated him and made it possible to make those decisions.
The third problem that Joe Biden in particular encountered is that he had promised that he was going to make his appointments in these positions throughout the U.S. government look like America. And when you add in the challenge of the political optic of being able to get the Senate to go along, that turned out to be pretty challenging. And that’s one of the reasons — it’s not the only reason but it’s one of the reasons — why it wasn’t until this summer that President Biden began to announce who his ambassadorial appointments were. And again, even though we’ve announced who the Ambassador-Nominee to Germany will be, or who the Ambassador-Nominee to India will be, or to Japan will be, we still have the whole issue that the Senate has to vote affirmatively for that to happen. And the Senate is not known as an institution that moves very quickly, especially when in the United States’ system, we have a very slow and laborious vetting process to make sure people can have access to classified material and things like that.
LK: So when it comes to Congress, in terms of that slowness, you’re basically saying that that’s baked into the system, that there is going to be an element of slowness. But I want to touch on as well the polarization and partisanship that’s going on right now in American politics and how we see that affecting U.S. foreign policy and the ability to reset and strengthen America’s diplomatic engagement. Congress is obviously one place where we’re seeing the effects of such hyperpartisanship playing out every day? You once said that “expecting Congress to be devoid of politics is sort of like asking a dog to purr,” which is a quote that I found very interesting. But basically, that being said, it seems like the obstructionism and political gamesmanship and partisanship is only growing. So to what extent do you see this as a concern for U.S. foreign policy, and on which areas of U.S. foreign policy do you see these politics being more or less of a problem?
JL: It’s a great question, Liam, and people have written lots of books about Congress and foreign policy, the interaction between the two ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. I've contributed to some of that debate. And there are no simple answers or simple summary statements about the nature of the relationship. But let me really try to make two points. The first one is getting back to your observation that Congress wasn’t designed to be fast, and that’s true except when Congress chooses to act rapidly. The Congress of the United States is capable of moving with extreme speed. And just to offer up two examples in foreign policy: one would be the passage of the gulf of Tonkin Resolution back in 1964. Another one, if you go back in the days following the September 11th attacks, which we’re about to witness the 20th anniversary of, when Congress passed the so-called AUMF (Authorization for the Use of Military Force). Those both took place incredibly quickly. So Congress, it can go fast, it can go slow, it depends upon the issue, the state of play. And I should note that the fact that Congress acts quickly doesn’t necessarily guarantee you a good outcome. There are a lot of people who would argue that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was a very bad idea, and there are a lot of people — including members of Congress right now — who think that the AUMF was a really bad idea, at least in the way that it was drafted and written.
The second point about polarization is an important one because it affects foreign policy on at least two levels. One is what I’ll call the meta-level, and that is the extent to which the United States can get others to cooperate with it because they look at the United States and have confidence in its ability to get things done, and they believe that the United States embodies their values, that they share something with the United States. [This] depends in part upon being confident that they like the United States’ system — that is, its political system. And again, no secret, there are a lot of people around the world, particularly our traditional allies in the advanced democracies, that look at American politics today and say, “what has happened? The United States seems to be increasingly dysfunctional and cannot get things done. But even beyond that, it seems to be increasingly less democratic.” As you know, Liam, there’s a number of organizations — Freedom House being one — that go out and rate countries in terms of their degree of freedom, and the United States is showing some wear and tear, shall we say. And obviously what happened on January 6th was horrible for America’s reputation as the oldest continuous democracy in the world, and for the idea of peaceful transition because for the first time in American history, we did not have a peaceful transition. So seeing American politicians always bickering, unable to come to agreement, is going to be, and always will be, bad for America’s brand and its soft power overseas. Just to flag for you an issue coming up: follow the debate over the debt ceiling over here in the United States. Because of this arcane system we have where Congress can allocate or appropriate all the money that it wants, but periodically it has to raise the cap so it can borrow the money to pay for the things it has already approved. We’re now in one of our periodic times in which that’s going to be an issue and the Republicans have so far been saying, “we want nothing to do with it, we want major cuts in spending.” And so there is going to be a lot of wrangling about that, and as the old saying goes, “two things never to watch. One is the making of sausages, the other one is the making of laws.” And I think this is going to be a particularly painful session.
Second issue, specifically in terms of foreign policy: the real problem you have when Congress can’t work with itself, it is in a sense paralyzed, it can hamper the ability of an administration to act. And one of the things that can happen is if administrations can’t get Congress to do what it wants Congress to do — to pass laws necessary to do things — the pressure often comes on an administration to go out and try to find ways to accomplish those things without the sanction of legislative statute. Now, sometimes that is permissible in the American political system again under the United States Constitution and the development and practice of two hundred-plus years. Presidents probably have more discretion in foreign policy than they do in domestic policy. But if Congress can’t work or produce things, then you have a President both acting on constitutional authority, but oftentimes reading the law as they wish to read it, expanding the power of the presidency to do things. Now, most people look at that and say: “well if the President is sort of pushing the powers of the office and he’s doing something that I like, two thumbs up. Go for it.” And of course conversely, “if the President is sort of stretching the law and doing things I don’t like, it’s a constitutional affront,” which plays into the debate and is why when the party in power changes, people’s positions on whether the President is acting unconstitutionally changes as well.
MB: One of the points you made there was how Congress can act quite fastly, though it seems to move more slowly. And one of the examples that you used in your book is when Former President Trump refused to recertify in October 2017 that Iran was complying with the rules of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and that it was in America’s best interest to adhere to the deal, a process that I guess in my understanding should’ve been rather routine — and that it became Congress’ responsibility to act. They now had sixty days to introduce legislation that would reimpose U.S. sanctions on Iran. You write: “With no one pushing congressional leaders to pick up the baton that Trump handed them, Congress did what it did best - nothing. And I think this is really interesting because you mentioned this trend as well: power’s been increasingly falling to the White House to act. Why is it that (a) this is happening. Is this a political choice on the part of the Members of Congress? Is it politically good for them to continue to let the White House take the lead? As you mentioned, when they take the lead, when the fall out happens, it falls on the President more than on the Congress and individual members. So is this a political choice simply on their part, or (b) is it that Congress just doesn’t have enough power to act more forcefully on foreign policy?
JL: One option you didn’t offer me Melissa is D, all of the above, and I would take that. Let’s sort of go back to the founding. When the framers met in Philadelphia back in 1787, they actually spent very little time allocating powers between the President and the Congress, or between the President and the Senate. Those decisions came at the tail end of the Constitutional Convention. After three-plus months, a lot of the delegates wanted to get back home. They were largely driven, or had in the back of their mind the notion that the first President was going to be George Washington; everybody trusted him, and they would work out some of the particulars. And almost immediately, what you discovered with the first Washington administration was that that expectation in which Congress would work with the President ran into immediate obstacles. And one obstacle is that people just legitimately disagree on what the problem is, and what to do about the problem, even if they agree on it. So if you want to call that politics, fine. Certainly a lot of people back in Washington’s [day] saw it that way. Washington and others often fulminated against so-called factions, what we would call political parties today. And indeed the first political parties in the United States sprung up during the Washington administration, oddly enough over a foreign policy issue — that is, whether to favor France or England in the war that had broken out between the two countries.
So policy differences are at play here, political differences are at play here, but beyond that, think about the way the American political system is constructed. The Constitution creates all kinds of veto points in the United States Congress to getting things done. We tend to talk about Congress as an “it,” but Congress is a “they.” It’s two chambers. One chamber has 100 people, the other chamber has 435 people. Well it can be very difficult to get those people to all agree. And then you add on the fact that if Congress is trying to stop the president from doing something, it has to pass a law. Certainly, members can go to the floor of the House and Senate and give impassioned speeches, but that does — in and of itself — nothing. Typically, if Congress wants to reverse a president, what it has to do is pass a law. Then again, keep in mind that if you pass a law, under the Constitution, presidents can veto it. And then of course you can say, “well, we’ll override the veto.” Well that’s a pretty herculean task because it requires you to essentially get two-thirds plus one in both houses of Congress to reverse the president. And that’s difficult to do — so difficult in fact that it has happened only once on a foreign policy issue, and even that was marginal whether or not it was foreign policy, in the last 35, 36 years. You really have to go back to 1985 and the case of Congress overriding Ronald Reagan’s veto of the sanctions bill against apartheid South Africa to really find an instance in which Congress could marshall the numbers needed to overcome a presidential decision. And that’s, again, partly because some people may agree with what the president’s decided to do, but also because of politics.
There’s a general rule: the president’s party in the Senate and the House try not to vote in ways that would damage the political prospects of the president. And certainly, overriding a presidential veto can be seen as hurting the president’s political prospects. That’s why it’s not surprising to find when the Democrats impeach Donald Trump, that large numbers of Republicans did not wish to vote to impeach the President, or in the case of the Senate, to vote to convict him. Those are the dynamics of the congressional system.
Now let me just leave with one coda. One thing to keep in mind in foreign policy, which is that Congress’ power in foreign affairs is at its greatest when the president needs Congress’ approval to proceed. Two obvious examples there would be appropriations (presidents can’t spend money Congress hasn’t appropriated), and second would be treaties. The flip side of the coin of course is that where in foreign policy, the Constitution doesn’t clearly say the President needs to get Congress’ consent are precisely those areas where presidential discretion is at its greatest.
LK: I want to come back to, as we think about the executive branch becoming more and more powerful in foreign affairs, but also linking that back to what’s going on politically in the country. And you touched on the reputational damage resulting from the Trump administration, and presumably with Congress playing less and less of a check role on the executive, all the more damage if the executive is that unpopular internationally. When we look at the domestic political situation in the United States, to what extent do these domestic developments — where we have January 6th, institutionalization of the stolen election lie, and some of the voter suppression efforts and developments with regards to election laws — factor into your concerns about America’s image abroad and upholding the liberal order on an international level? And then, if the United States is less and less seen as a model of democracy, human rights, etc. at a domestic level, where does this connect back to the role of other countries that are upholding those liberal values and what they can be doing more of internationally?
JL: Well there’s a lot there, Liam. Perhaps I can begin by making an observation about international politics which is, if you are a leading country like the United States, it helps to be liked by other countries. Soft power is real. However, soft power is not the only ingredient in geopolitics. So too is hard power, so too is self interest. And while we talk about the importance of foreign publics liking the United States, trusting the leadership offered by an American president, that is not to say that somehow that translates directly into other countries saluting what the United States does, or saying they want their leaders to follow the United States. I will note in world politics, two other elements are important besides having people like you, in terms of changing their behavior: one is having people fear you, and the other one is having people need you. Countries often do things in their self interest. To some extent, all of foreign policy should be about pursuing your self interest. It’s a question of how narrowly or broadly you interpret that. So I think that’s an important thing to keep in mind; for the United States, soft power is an important ingredient, but so too is hard power.
That’s why you get into questions about whether or not U.S. power is declining. It certainly is declining relatively, not necessarily absolutely. I think the question becomes one of, how quickly is it declining relatively, and what is the consequence of that decline? And those are questions being debated in lots of foreign capitals, and the answer people come to depends. It’s not the only ingredient in the mix. Again, you’ve got to talk about how reliable or predictable the United States is. Even if you think the United States is likely to be a superpower for decades to come, if you’re worried that you can’t count on the United States when you need it, or that it’s not going to be predictable in what it does, that can lead you to heavily discount what the United States has to offer. But certainly, for the kind of world order that the United States created and led in the wake of World War II — being able to make the case that it is promoting democratic rule, understood broadly as the ability of people to have a choice in how they are governed, and to try to expand the zone in which human rights, liberal values are observed — is actually being reflected by what’s happening in the United States, I think is really important. Because if you’re selling a brand and you don’t live up to your brand, it makes it really hard to make the case.
LK: When it comes to thinking about the liberal world order and the role of the United States in upholding it, as well as U.S. allies and the role that Trump’s disruptions played, you a few years ago mentioned that America First “could be a productive detour that reminds Washington and its allies why the order was created in the first place.” With Trump no longer being in office, are we seeing that sort of recognition amongst both Washington and its allies of the need to strengthen that order in light of what happened? If yes, in what ways? And if no, where does there need to be a more concerted effort both from the Biden administration as well as its allies — whether it be the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, South Korea, so forth?
JL: You asked, Liam, perhaps the most important question, and that is, now that Joe Biden says the United States is back and has extended his open hand and said, “let’s roll up our sleeves and work together,” are America’s traditional friends, partners, and allies going to be willing to do the hard work? Are they going to be willing to meet the Biden team, more or less, halfway? And I think the jury is still out on that, in part because the Biden administration in its first six months has, as we discussed earlier in our conversation, largely been focused on the rhetorical aspects of its foreign policy. Big chunks of what it wants to do it hasn’t really put on the table. So in that sense for other countries, there’s the question of, “okay, we want to work with you. But what exactly are we working on and what are we going to do on those topics?” So you still have that and it’ll take time for that to unfold.
The second thing is, even when you agree that something is an issue — reform at the World Trade Organization, improving global pandemic governance — that’s just the first step in a multi-mile journey. Because then you have to agree on, “okay, do we agree on what our diagnosis of the problem is? And if we agree on the diagnosis, do we agree on what the right solutions are going to be?” And I think on a lot of issues — climate change, trade come to mind most rapidly — we really haven’t gotten to that point of necessarily agreeing on, “okay, this is what’s wrong, this is what we’re going to do. Country A is going to do this, Country B is going to do this, Country C is going to do that.” That still has to be worked out.
We shouldn’t make diplomacy into this sort of sentimental exercise where people do favors for one another because they’ve known each other for a while. Countries pursue their self interest, and part of the exercise in diplomacy is you’re trying to persuade the other side that they need to adjust their understanding of their national self interest and it’s too narrow — that they can better serve their interests by doing X, Y, and Z. Or if they want to achieve this, they’re going to have to give up something else. That’s what diplomacy is about, and it’s what we exercise in our day-to-day lives anyway. You’re negotiating with people to find some common outcome on which you can agree. And so there’s a lot more work that has to be done by the Biden team, by the Europeans, and the Asians. And again, if you want me to give you an optimistic view, I can point to lots of places where we’ve begun to move the needle so we’re gaining momentum. Or I can just say, “hey look, there’s so much we haven’t done that nobody should celebrate.”
I think if I can sort of impart one meta-lesson about foreign policy is that we often talk about problems, and what we’re really dealing with are challenges. The problem with talking about problems is it implies that somehow they can be solved and then sort of taken off the table and not worried about. But much of what we deal with in foreign policy is really about managing challenges, about reducing challenges, reducing threat, reducing risk. We can’t make things like terrorism go away, we can’t make things like infectious diseases disappear. What we have to do is to try to create agreements and arrangements and structures to minimize the chances that they’re going to disrupt or upend our way of life.
And so I think going forward the real test, I think in the next two years but certainly in the next 10 years, will really be a test of whether or not that world order that the United States created and led in the 75 years after World War II can be adapted to a changing dynamic situation, or whether we really are going to move into a very different kind of world. Now, perhaps if we were to move into a different kind of world, things could work out in such a way that we saw even more peace and prosperity. World history suggests that that’s not the most likely outcome — that what we’re much more likely to see is more conflict and less prosperity. And that’s not even taking into account some of the more reasonable predictions about how climate change might play out.
Climate change remains the world’s sort of number one existential threat. Lots of great words have been said about what countries are going to do about it; it hasn’t happened. So much more needs to be done. The momentum that has built up in the physical system by heat trapping gases already released is going to be with us for a long time, even if we stopped emitting them today. I don't think we fully understand or have come to grips with the nature of those challenges and what is required of all of us to do. And I will note that China talks about making its country carbon neutral by 2050 or 2060, but right now, China is the biggest financier of domestic and foreign coal-fired power plants which are going to lock us into some of the doomsday scenarios on climate change rather than take us away from it.
LK: Well I think you definitely raised a lot of important points and I know we’ve reached the end of our time, but I think there’s a lot there that gives us a lot to look out for over the next 2 years. So I think that’s a great place to close!
JL: Well thank you Liam, thank you Melissa, for having me on your show to have this conversation. I really appreciate it. Tip of the cap to you and the work you do, and keep having these conversations and involving people, because again I do think that the challenges in international relations and world politics are big; they are significant, and while they may seem intractable they can and on more than one occasion have yielded to well-informed people trying to make a difference. So again, thank you for having me on.
After hearing many perspectives from James Lindsay on U.S. foreign policy, the intersection of domestic politics and foreign policy, and various continuities and differences between the Biden administration and the Trump administration, a few takeaways come to mind.
As Dr. Lindsay elaborated, it is evident that President Biden faces an uphill challenge in creating trust amongst allies that America is not only back, but that it can also get things done in a competent fashion. Citing the dangers posed by the rise of authoritarianism globally, Biden repeatedly stated that democracies must deliver for their people. This is, of course, true for the United States as well. As Ali Wyne presciently underscored in our 2020 interview, democratic renewal at home is a key aspect of ensuring America’s strength internationally is upheld.
The partisanship, gamesmanship, and polarization evident in Congress and the wider American polity does not appear to be going away anytime soon. Governing effectively in spite of these challenges is Biden’s greatest challenge, both in mitigating their adverse effects on domestic policy and in the reputational harm they bring to America’s brand.
Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to keep in mind Dr. Lindsay’s counsel: that, while it’s helpful for the United States to be liked, there are other sources of national power on the global stage — namely to be feared, or needed. Looking ahead, it is worth asking how these domestic trends contribute to these feelings internationally. Does the political dysfunction, partisanship, and weakening of American social cohesion affect other countries' perceptions of American state power? Perhaps it is not a coincidence that Chinese leaders display a growing confidence in challenging Washington. Does political dysfunction affect how countries perceive the importance of engagement with the United States on certain issues? Comparing the wider world’s track record of engagement with the United States on issues like climate change against the fluctuations in U.S. policy between Republican and Democratic administrations may provide a valuable data point here.
Another critical theme is the degree to which Joe Biden has made strides to repair relationships with allies whilst maintaining the general diagnoses the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy presented regarding China and Russia as key strategic competitors. To realize a more cohesive coalition with American allies, Joe Biden resolved several grievances, or in Dr. Lindsay’s words, “irritants,” between the United States and various allies that the previous administration was unable or unwilling to remedy. By resolving these, and continuing to channel diplomatic effort into resolving others, the Biden administration is betting that it can build up enough goodwill to convince allies and partners to press a bit harder on China, in particular, than they would otherwise. This will continue to be a key area to watch as the next several years unfold.
Edited by: Cameron Vaské
The U.S. Foreign Policy Programme at The International Scholar is dedicated to fostering conversation and creative thought, analyzing issues and challenges, and ideating and postulating innovative approaches to the role of the United States in the world.
All views expressed in this article are solely those of the author, and do not represent the views of The International Scholar or any other organization.
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