This time last year, President Joe Biden’s National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan, put his foot in a rabbit hole writing an essay before October 7 in Foreign Affairs about how the Middle East was more at peace than it had been for decades. Hamas, of course, sent that peace into free fall.
In the November-December issue of Foreign Affairs, his colleague, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, has an essay, plainly written and sent to press before the presidential election, extolling “America’s strategy of renewal”. He will shortly have to find another job. The electorate has given Donald Trump a thumping mandate to seek renewal on different lines.
It seems worth capturing what Blinken sees as the US resurgence under Biden. We seem set for a new world from January likely to differ appreciably from the one he envisaged.
He opens by stating there is now a “fierce competition … to define a new age in international affairs”. He states forthrightly that the challenge comes from an axis of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, “determined to alter the foundational principles of the international system”. “We need,” he roundly declares, “to act decisively to prevent that outcome.”
Now there have long been many – in this country, not least – who have argued that the system must and will be altered, that China will replace the US in Asia, perhaps globally, and that Russia and Iran are “entitled” to their respective “spheres of influence”.
The Biden-Harris administration, Blinken argues, set about buttressing the existing order. And, crucially, it revitalised – so he argues – the American economy. For those who throw around the claim that China’s is now the largest economy in the world, he has news. The US, he declares, is economically stronger than at any point since the 1990s.
What does the data tell us? US GDP sits at a fraction under $US30 trillion ($46.4 trillion) per annum. Then come China ($US18 trillion), Germany ($US4.7 trillion) and Japan ($US4.1 trillion). And US GDP per capita, at $US86,600, is seven times that of China (just under $US13,000). Inflation and unemployment are down, household wealth is at a record high. One might ask, of course, why, if all his claims are true, the Democrats got swept away in the elections.
Under Biden, Blinken declares, the US renewed and deepened its alliance relationships in multiple ways. He writes of NATO, the Quad, AUKUS, a US-India Strategic Partnership, summits with leaders from Africa, Latin America, the Pacific Islands, Southeast Asia, the “summit: for democracy”. And he insists Biden and his team handled adroitly the war in Ukraine, the “necessary” withdrawal from Afghanistan, the full-spectrum competition with China and the war between Israel and Iran, with its proxies. Not all would agree.
The Trump administration seems likely to differ consequentially. Blinken writes that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 “was an attack not just on Ukraine but also on the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity at the heart of the UN Charter” and, therefore, “stoked fears beyond Europe”. That China, Iran and North Korea have backed Putin shows they are issuing a systemic challenge to the international order the US has led and policed since 1945, especially since 1991.
He writes of the need for expanding the UN Security Council, pushing reforms at the World Bank and kickstarting new International Monetary Fund initiatives. He declares “in poll after poll, most Americans see principled and disciplined US leadership … as vital”. “Although the party in power in Washington can change,” he concludes, “the pillars of US foreign policy will not.”
That, it must be said, could be his rabbit hole moment. Certainly, it seems probable that the Trump administration will come in seeing competition with China as its single biggest foreign and defence policy issue. But beyond that there is a great deal that remains uncertain and there is a broad concern Trump may actually pull down a few of the pillars to which Blinken refers.
The first and most crucial is that which Blinken states regarding the defence of Ukraine against Russian aggression. If Trump leans on Ukraine to bow to Putin’s territorial and geopolitical aggression, the principles that have undergirded the international order under Pax Americana will be gravely abridged. That question is one prompted by Trump’s rhetoric and previous behaviour.
His attitude to NATO does not bode well for trans-Atlantic relations or European security. His critical and ill-informed remarks about Taiwan have raised concerns he might seek to cut a deal with China that would leave Taiwan swinging in the wind. And whereas Blinken writes that the Biden administration made clear it did not seek regime change in Iran, only an understanding that Iran refrain from building nuclear weapons, Trump may well take a different tack entirely – as in his first term.
Blinken writes positively of AUKUS. It remains to be seen how high it sits in Trump’s priorities. We have a lot of skin in this game. We’re about to discover whether Blinken has just done a Jake Sullivan – stuck his foot in a geopolitical rabbit hole.
Paul Monk is a former senior intelligence analyst and the author of a dozen books, including The West in a Nutshell (2009).
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