Source: https://carnegieendowment.org/middle-east/diwan/2026/08/a-strategic-disaster-that-devalues-us-military-prowess

Diwan can be accessed at: https://carnegieendowment.org/middle-east/diwan

A Strategic Disaster that Devalues U.S. Military Prowess

By Michael Young

Published on Aug 31, 2026

Diwan, a blog from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Middle East Program and the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center, draws on Carnegie scholars to provide insight into and analysis of the region.

Learn More

Charles “Chas” Freeman is a retired U.S. diplomat, who was ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1989 until 1992, after having earlier served as principal deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs in 1986. In 1997, Freeman became president of the Middle East Policy Council. His other great center of interest is China. He served as deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing in 1981–84, after having served as director of Chinese affairs at the State Department, less than a decade after having been the principal interpreter during President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. From 1993 to 1994, Freeman was assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. Diwan interviewed him in late August to discuss developments in the Gulf region, particularly after the recent signing of the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement by Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Pakistan.

Michael Young: Some have described the recent Mecca Joint Defense Agreement as a cornerstone of a new regional security architecture. Do you agree, and more generally what do you think the agreement seeks to achieve?

Charles Freeman: Yes, but it is not one that fits familiar models of alliance. Unlike NATO, to which it is often mistakenly analogized, it is a cooperative rather than a collective security pact. It has no unified military command, no patron or enemy external to the region, and no unifying ideology or commonality of political systems. It is an entente. It will evolve, but it is unlikely to embrace the unconditional mutual defense commitments that define alliances.

The goal of the Mecca Defense Agreement is not collective defense but the promotion of strategic autonomy. Its current and future members aim to balance powers that aspire to regional hegemony. The pact marks an effort by the three principal Muslim security partners of the United States in the region to reduce politico-military reliance on Washington, which has proven unable to restrain Israel or protect them from Iran. It provides a basis for diversifying defense relationships with other great powers. It envisages developing indigenous military industries to reduce unreliable dependence on imports from the United States and other Western suppliers. In addition to bolstering industrial self-reliance, this agreement, plus the diversification of imports, should, its members believe, reduce vulnerability to politically motivated supply chain interruptions by partners with interests they do not share.

Much commentary purports to interpret this tripartite entente in terms of the U.S. rivalry with China and Russia. As American influence recedes, both countries will certainly see their levels of engagement with the region rise. But so will India, Indonesia, Japan, and other rising Asian and other great powers. The world is no longer regulated by bipolar dyadic relationships. It is becoming multi-nodal, and variably networked. In the emerging world order, nations once constrained by the contest between the United States and the Soviet Union have increased their agency, freedom of maneuver, and ability to form coalitions to advance or defend their interests as they see them.

MY: You’ve been highly critical of the U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran in your public remarks. Do you believe the Trump administration has any way out of what appears to be a humiliating defeat in this war? Can stronger economic sanctions make a difference?

CF: Sadly, no. The joint Israeli-U.S. attacks on Iran have produced an unprecedented strategic disaster for both Israel and the United States that demands an admission of defeat, retreat, and a fundamental rethinking of both countries’ policies. The war has left Israel essentially defenseless against a renewed onslaught by Iranian missiles. Israeli aggression against Iran, genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, territorial expansion in Syria, and devastation of southern Lebanon have made Israel a global pariah. Israel’s role in encouraging the United States to join it in a war on Iran and to back its other acts of aggression have discredited it with growing majorities in the United States, without whose continuing support it cannot survive. By attempting to preempt what it portrayed as an existential challenge from Iran, Israel has placed itself in actual existential jeopardy.

The war has devalued the military prowess of the U.S. armed forces. It has revealed that they are incapable of mounting an effective defense against a resourceful middle-ranking power such as Iran. The U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf is now untenable. The war led the United States to deplete its offensive and defensive weapons stockpiles to levels that prevent it from supplying Ukraine with essential defenses or responding effectively to contingencies in Pacific Asia. It will take years to restore the capabilities the United States has lost.

Less urgently but more importantly, the Iran war has destroyed the reputation of the United States for steadfast statecraft and leadership, discredited American diplomacy, and led to global hedging against perceived U.S. unreliability. The United States has lost the semiautomatic followership of allies and client states. When it now calls for others to join it in its economic warfare against Iran, few, if any, respond.

Beyond this, Iran is now in effective control of the Strait of Hormuz, with a strategic hammerlock on one-fifth of the world’s oil and gas supplies. Repeated efforts to bludgeon Tehran into relinquishing this control have failed. Israel continues to call for the continuation of the U.S. war with Iran, which it has now temporarily abandoned in favor of consolidating its rule in Palestine and adjacent areas. Nevertheless, the United States appears reluctantly to have accepted that the further bombing of Iran will not dislodge it from the strait. Washington has therefore launched an economic war of attrition against Iran that depends on the institution of punitive measures against countries, including U.S. allies, that trade with Iran. This has the potential to upend American global financial hegemony, but no credible prospect of succeeding.

Finally, the war has given Iran the most powerful arguments imaginable to develop a nuclear deterrent. The joint Israeli-American massacre of the Iranian leadership eliminated most of those opposed on theological grounds to weapons of mass destruction. Israel has long feared that Iran would follow it in the clandestine development of nuclear weapons. The war has greatly increased the probability that it will now do so. The constraint to that is no longer Tehran’s acceptance of international safeguards, but its judgment that, if it were to emulate Israel by going nuclear, this would stimulate others in West Asia, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, and Türkiye to do the same, reducing rather than enhancing its national security.

MY: One consequence of the war is that the U.S. base network in the Gulf states appears to have been devastated by Iran. Do you feel the Americans will be able to reconstitute it, or has the thinking in the Gulf states turned decisively against such an option?

CF: The bases in the Persian Gulf region are not owned by the United States, though they are operated by the U.S. armed forces. The Gulf Arab monarchies have lent them to America. These bases have now been destroyed and the U.S. has been forced to retreat to Jordan and Israel.

The Gulf Arabs now understand that the United States, while justifying its bases on their territory as a means of defending them, has in fact seen them primarily as platforms from which to project power against Iran. The Trump administration, acting on behalf of Israel and without consulting the Gulf Arabs, implicated them in a war with Iran they did not want and from which they have suffered severe physical and economic damage. They are highly unlikely to facilitate a postwar American military presence on their soil. There is circumstantial evidence that they are quietly discussing with Iran how to comply with its demand that they dissociate themselves from U.S. hostility toward Iran and expel the U.S. forces that menace it.

MY: Israel has emerged as major regional destabilizer. Can regional states contain Israel, and would U.S. disengagement from the region make such containment easier?

CF: The Gulf Arabs are risk-averse realists. Most but not all governments in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have appeased domestic rage with Israeli cruelties directed against their fellow Arabs by posturing against these, but none has taken specific actions to counter Israel. This is due, in part, to their recognition of the Israel lobby’s enforcement of the U.S. commitment to Israel. They fear that the United States would punish them were they to act. Unable to contain Israel by themselves, the Gulf Arabs, like Egypt and Jordan under the Camp David Accords, have looked to the United States to constrain the Israelis. They now realize that Washington is incapable of mustering the political will to do so. They are looking at alternatives to reliance on the United States. Saudi Arabia’s sponsorship of the Mecca Defense Agreement with Pakistan and Türkiye is a case in point. It is open to expansion and will likely achieve it.

MY: How would you assess Iran’s role in the emerging regional order? The Iranians, on the one hand, seek to preserve their regional power, but at the same time share an interest with other states, such as Saudi Arabia and Türkiye, in containing Israel. How will Iran square the circle of collaborating with states that also view the Iranians as regional destabilizers—the Turks in Syria and possibly Lebanon, and the Saudis in Yemen, elsewhere in the Gulf, and Lebanon and Syria?

CF: We will only learn the answer to this excellent question after the end of U.S. hostilities with Iran. The Gulf Arabs have already suffered greatly from the war and are fearful that it could yet resume as a result of American missteps. They are understandably angry and vengeful toward Iran. On the other hand, they also realize that they must find a modus vivendi with the Islamic Republic. One GCC member, Oman has become a reluctant collaborator with Iran in the management of ship transit through the Strait of Hormuz. The other members will need to make their peace with that and with Iran itself.

The tripartite entente established by the Mecca Defense Agreement has the potential to expand. Depending on how things shake out, it could develop anything from a consultative relationship with Iran to inclusion for it. At the moment, Israel’s relentless pursuit of territorial expansion and the subjugation of its West Asian neighbors has overshadowed concerns about Iranian ambitions for regional hegemony. Iran has welcomed the Mecca agreement. There are rumors that Asim Munir, Pakistan’s military leader, has initiated a dialogue with Tehran about how it might relate to the Mecca agreement. For now, this remains an open question.

About the Author

Michael Young

Editor, Diwan, Senior Editor, Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center

Michael Young is the editor of Diwan and a senior editor at the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center.

Remarks to the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs and the Harvard Middle East Seminar

Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Senior Fellow, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
Providence, Rhode Island, 11 March 2019
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 28 March 2019

By now it is widely accepted that U.S. influence in the Middle East is in something approaching freefall. The Arab uprisings of 2011 overthrew the governments in Tunis, Egypt, and Yemen, stimulated bloody miscalculations by both the Syrian government and its opposition, and destabilized Bahrain. They prompted greatly increased transfer payments to pacify the people of the conservative Arab Gulf monarchies and midwifed their adoption of policies designed to evoke militarized nationalism. The aftermath of these events has been complex and confusing. It has not yet run its course. The Middle East kaleidoscope is still turning. The patterns it is creating are not auspicious for either the region’s inhabitants or the United States.

It is hard to make sense of a region that consists of family-run kingdoms, thugdoms, police states, military dictatorships, democratically directed ethnoreligious tyrannies, and societies in near-Hobbesian states of nature. But unless we make the effort to do so, we risk exacerbating rather than mitigating the problems that the Middle East creates for the United States and our place in the world. Things may be getting better for women in some places, and religious extremism may be suffering a backlash. But overall the trends are not favorable to American interests. They are complicated. Bear with me as I review them.

The almost gleeful U.S. abandonment of longstanding protégés like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak served to discredit America with the region’s autocrats. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood won free elections, only to demonstrate its sociopolitical narrowmindedness, lack of economic vision, and incompetence at governing. Ballot-box Islamism soon fell to a coup d’état, which the United States then hypocritically refused to recognize as such. Americans joined Israel and the region’s autocratic Sunni states in supporting the restoration of military rule in Egypt. The U.S. endorsement of the overthrow of Egypt’s first freely-elected government alienated the region’s democrats. No matter: The United States is no longer pushing the democratization of the Middle East or anywhere else. The European Union (EU) has also toned down its advocacy of human rights in the societies across the Mediterranean from it.

The United States has fallen into a pattern of military-driven, diplomacy-free policy in the Middle East. By contrast, astute uses of force by Russia in Syria, agile Russian diplomacy with Iran, Israel, Egypt, and Turkey, and Russian willingness to engage with all parties to disputes in the region have made Moscow the go-to great power capital for major and minor actors there. But Russia’s recent return to relevance in West Asia and North Africa does not mean that great power competition again drives events there, as it did during the Cold War.

In the 21^st century, the traditional power centers in the مَـشْـرِق (the Arab East) – Baghdad, Cairo, and Damascus – have been supplanted by Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, with Tehran, Jerusalem, and Ankara playing some of the outsider roles in the Arab world that European imperialists and the United States once did. But the region’s global strategic importance has not diminished. It is still where Africa, Asia, and Europe meet, a chokepoint for travel between the Indo-Pacific and the Mediterranean and Atlantic, the hub of the world’s energy supply system, the location of important new capital markets, and where Judaism, Christianity, and Islam originated. Awkward as it may be to deal with the Middle East, the world’s great powers have no alternative to some degree of engagement with it.

The challenge of such engagement is greatly complicated by the fact that regional actors have largely replaced their former passivity and fatalism with assertive pursuit of their national interests as they see them. Pan Islamism earlier overtook pan Arabism as a potential organizing principle for the region. Now both Arabism and Islamism are yielding to notions of nationalism and “Islam in one country” – as in Tunis. Nationalism has taken hold even in Saudi Arabia, which long rejected it as verging on idolatry. Many – myself included – mistakenly supposed that the national identities of the countries defined by the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement and its aftermath would dissolve as a result of the Arab uprisings. They have instead proved durable. The imprint of European colonialism on the Levant – Iraq, Israel-Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria – has survived and even strengthened.

But most countries in West Asia and North Africa no longer see much reason to defer to foreign patrons. Egypt, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) pay lip service to the views of external powers like the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China, and India – whose support they traditionally courted and whose views they once took as guidance. They now proceed without regard to these patrons’ interests and advice.

Calculations by local actors about the region’s geopolitical dynamics drive most of its antagonisms, but ideology (now almost exclusively in the form of theology) is still a significant factor. Secularism is in retreat. Aspirations for a democratic Islamism, supported by Qatar and Turkey, are under attack by a league of conservative Arab autocracies led by the UAE and including Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The Sunni-Shi`i schism has intensified. Despite Iran’s pretensions to leadership of Shi`a Islam, Shi`i outside Iran have for the most part rejected its theology of ولاية الفقيه [walayat al faqih or clerical guardianship of the state]. Sunnis are split between cosmopolitan moderates and hardline Salafis.

America’s catastrophically ill-considered military interventions in the region at the turn of this century laid low the traditional balancers of Iranian power in Afghanistan and Iraq. Related Israeli actions in Lebanon had earlier fundamentally altered Lebanese politics. Hezbollah is a quasi-fascist political party formed to resist the Israeli occupation of Lebanon in the 1980s. Israeli actions have elevated it to the commanding heights of Lebanese politics. External interventions both to overthrow the government and to bolster contending opposition factions in Syria helped devastate that country and reinforce its dependence on Iran and Russia. No longer constrained by external patrons, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE separately took actions that also inadvertently entrenched Iranian influence in Gaza, Bahrain, and Yemen.

The United States has now effectively franchised its major client states in the Middle East – Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE – with the power to determine most American policies in their region. Washington has become stridently committed to these three countries’ objective of regime change in Tehran. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have effectively set aside the issue of Palestinian relief from ongoing Israeli abuse and encroachment to focus on countering Iran’s expanded political and military influence in the region. This has facilitated the formation of a previously unthinkable entente between the two Gulf Arab countries and Israel.

Israel’s primary concern has been less Iran’s expanding sphere of influence in West Asia than the threat that Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program poses to its nuclear monopoly in the region. Now, however, the presence of Iranian forces in Syria and their support of Lebanese Hezbollah is a source of increasing alarm to Israelis. The Gulf Arabs’ limited partnership with Israel has gained them intelligence exchanges, new surveillance technologies, training in assassination techniques, and cooperation focused on combatting the Iranian foe. Equally importantly from their point of view, it has enlisted the powerful American Zionist Lobby in their support, giving them a near hammerlock on the U.S. Congress that their money could never buy. The most eloquent defenses of the need for the United States to maintain cordial ties with Saudi Arabia have come from elements of the U.S. Zionist Lobby.

History’s longest-running diplomatic deception – the so-called “peace process” in the Holy Land – has been superseded by an Israeli-dictated “one-state, many-zones” dispensation that demands Palestinian emigration or submission to the Zionist version of apartheid. American diplomacy toward Israel-Palestine has been firmly placed in the hands of ardent supporters of Jewish colonialism. The “peace process” has been reduced to a real estate mogul’s notion of diplomatic маскировка[1], an operational disguise that gains time for expanded Jewish settlement and ethnic cleansing of Arabs and their emigration or warehousing in “projects.” This has left Palestinians with no path to self-determination other than violence, compounding the potential for widening resort to terrorism on their part.

Unconditional support from the United States for Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE has facilitated a series of unspeakable humanitarian disasters in West Asia, including Israel’s quasi-genocidal siege of Gaza, the multinational vivisection of Syria, and the devastation of Yemen. Before Saudi Arabia carried out the gruesome murder of a dissident journalist in its consulate in Istanbul, it kidnapped the Lebanese prime minister and held him hostage. Each of these horrors evokes highly selective outrage abroad that generates blind spots to simultaneous atrocities elsewhere. Turkey and the Muslim world are obsessed with Gaza, Europe and Russia with Syria, and the United States is increasingly focused on Saudi unilateralism in Yemen and elsewhere.

U.S. policies toward Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE directly or indirectly assist their military operations directed at terrorizing and immiserating the inhabitants of Gaza, the West Bank, and Yemen. Washington continues to violate Syria’s sovereignty and to maintain a military presence on its soil, aimed in part at regime change. The United States is once again working toward abandoning the Kurds to their millennial Arab, Persian, and Turkish overlords. Taken together, these elements of U.S. policy leave it without any traction to speak of in the region, while severely eroding American moral standing outside it.

A serious deterioration in US-Turkish relations has exacerbated this decline in U.S. influence. This has consequences beyond the region. Turkish support or acquiescence is essential to the successful conduct of U.S. policies toward Iran, Iraq, Syria, Russia, Greece, Cyprus, Israel, the Balkans, the Black Sea region, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, not to mention NATO, the EU, and the Islamic world. Ankara can no longer be counted upon to back or facilitate U.S. diplomatic or military maneuvers.

Turkey was for a time an inspiration to proponents of popular sovereignty in Egypt and elsewhere. Its political evolution appeared to demonstrate the feasibility of a democratic Islamist flowering to parallel the birth of “Christian Democracy” in Western Europe. But the rise of Islamophobia in Europe has now made it clear that Muslim Turkey will never be accepted as European, Turkey’s goal for the past two centuries. Rejected by Christendom, the Turks have turned away from Europe and toward the Middle East. In the process, they appear to have traded parliamentary democracy for presidential “caudillismo” – rule by a demagogic populist strongman.

Turkey continues – in partnership with Qatar – to support democratic Islamist movements in the region, like the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. But, as in Turkey itself, the regional trend is toward less consultative, more autocratic systems of governance. In Saudi Arabia, شورى‎ (“shura” or “consensual decision-making”) and oligocracy (“government by the few”) have given way to a form of monocracy (decision-making by a single person). In Israel, the free expression of ideas is ever more constrained by intensified ethnoreligious identity politics that seek to reinforce the Jewish democracy’s military dictatorship over its captive Arab Muslim and Christian populations.

Fear of Islamist democracy and its consequences for the region’s rulers has sparked the formation of an informal coalition of Sunni-majority states committed to traditional Islamic systems of oligarchic government and/or to military autocracy. This development parallels the effort by European reactionaries to smother the revolutions of 1848, though it has so far been less successful. The United States and Israel are unashamedly aligned with this anti-democratic coalition. This and the decadence of contemporary American politics have effectively deprived the United States of credibility as an advocate of the democratization of Muslim societies. But, then, as noted, the U.S. no longer expresses much, if any, interest in this cause.

Newly assertive UAE and Saudi policies have divided the Gulf Cooperation Council, created in 1981 to counter the Islamic revolution in Iran. Oman now acts with little regard to the GCC. Kuwait has distanced itself from it. Emirati hostility to Qatar’s alignment with the Muslim Brotherhood and unsuccessful Saudi efforts to compel Qatar to abandon its geographically dictated cordial relationship with Iran have cemented a Qatari partnership with Turkey. Qatar’s new isolation in its own region has driven it to redouble its efforts to develop supportive relationships with great powers like China, India, Russia, and the United States.

Meanwhile, the U.S. effort to isolate Iran and build a worldwide united front against it is failing. Last month’s Warsaw “ministerial” provided a convincing demonstration of US-European disunity on Iran as well as Chinese, Indian, and Russian opposition to the United States on the issue. It also illustrated the decline in American relevance to the principal issues in the Middle East:

• Israel-Palestine,

• the emergence of an Iranian sphere of influence,

• Syrian peace and reconstruction,

• refugee abatement and resettlement,

• the restoration of order in Yemen,

• domestic tranquility in the region’s countries, and

• the faltering efforts of the Islamic world to reinvigorate itself as other previously great civilizations – for example, China and India – are visibly doing in the post-Western era.

Vice President Pence’s and Secretary of State Pompeo’s recent tirades on Iran and the region’s politics were music to the ears of Messrs. Netanyahu, Mohammed bin Salman, and Mohammed bin Zayed. They clearly struck Europeans, Asians, Africans, Turks, Arabs, and Persians as paranoid delusions – policies derived from media-manufactured hallucinations that bear little resemblance to conditions in the real world.

The end of the Cold War’s bipolar order liberated the world’s nations and peoples from the constraints external patrons previously imposed on their independent action. After the Soviet Union’s default on its rivalry with the United States and its subsequent collapse, Americans were left with no existential enemy. But the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington demonstrated that, in the post-Cold War world, the United States is no longer immune to reprisal by aggrieved parties overseas, especially in the Middle East, where American policies are widely resented.

North Korea has shown that the way to be taken seriously by Washington is to be able to “nuke” it. Iran’s potential to follow North Korea in acquiring the ability to strike targets in the American homeland now threatens to escalate the damage policy missteps in the region can inflict on the United States. The multinationally negotiated nuclear arms control agreement with Iran (the “JCPOA”) mitigated this danger before it was repudiated by the United States in favor of pressures directed at regime change in Iran. But such efforts at regime change, once without risk to the American homeland, now entail potentially catastrophic costs to it.

Drone warfare against others is beginning to be answered by drone warfare against American forces deployed overseas. How long before it’s used against the United States itself?

U.S. and Israeli cyber-attacks on Iran and others have already begun to be reciprocated by them. Hybrid warfare – whether Russian-style as in Crimea or American-style as in Venezuela – could be applied to the United States as well as to others. Some think it already has been used to skew American elections.

Israel has evolved a by-now-routine practice of “targeted killings” as an alternative to diplomatic outreach to compose differences with its ever more numerous enemies in the region.[2] Such assassinations began by taking the lives of Western engineers assisting Arab countries to develop weapons that might be used against Israel. Israel then turned to culling the most promising leaders of the Palestinian resistance to Zionist occupation and settlement activity, thereby ensuring that it had “no one to talk with.” In recent years, in association with U.S. intelligence agencies, Israel has also engaged in the systematic murder of Iranian scientists and engineers. These operations have helped to erode previous standards of morality and international law on the global level. They invite imitation and reprisal.

Since 9/11, the United States has spent or committed to spend almost $7 trillion on wars to control and contain trends and events in the Middle East. These diversions of tax revenues and borrowed capital to warfare abroad account in large measure for the deterioration of U.S. physical and human infrastructure. None of these wars has achieved its objectives. Efforts to end them in the interest of cutting American losses have been repeatedly frustrated by the “Washington playbook’s” warmongers. Now, even as the ability of the United States to control events and limit risks in the Middle East recedes, the potential impact on American domestic tranquility of developments there is increasing.

At the same time, direct U.S. interests in the region – other than the ability to transit through it – are on the wane. The United States’ rationale for protecting the world’s access to Persian Gulf energy supplies reflects its self-appointment as the guardian of global order and prosperity. It is not a response to U.S. domestic energy demand, which can now again be met by a combination of domestic production and sources in the Western Hemisphere and West Africa. The United States is back as an important energy exporter. In some respects, thanks to “fracking,” America has become the global swing producer of oil and gas. Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy continues unilaterally to protect energy exports from the Middle East. The largest market for such exports is China, an officially designated adversary of the United States. The second largest is India, a determinedly nonaligned nation.

Under its new “America First” approach to foreign affairs, U.S. alliances are increasingly troubled. Washington has charged its European and Asian allies with free-riding on its military power. American willingness to protect U.S. Cold War allies and the health of their economies is on the ebb. No one can now be sure how long the United States will remain committed to the unilateral guarantee of worldwide access to Persian Gulf energy exports that compete with its own.

Iran remains deeply unpopular in the United States, but enthusiasm for war with it is limited to a few intensely partisan interest groups. The American people appear to have little appetite for more wars aimed at regime change in the Muslim world. Americans view both Israel and Saudi Arabia with increasing distaste. The ability of U.S. client states in the region to buy support in Congress for their foreign policies does not buy such approval outside the Beltway.

U.S. commercial interests in the Middle East have become less compelling. In the late 20th century, the United States was the largest exporter of goods and services to most countries to the region. Nearly half of U.S. arms exports go there but the U.S. no longer dominates its civilian imports. Almost everywhere, that distinction now belongs to China or the EU.

The major U.S. focus in West Asia and North Africa has become counterterrorism. But this is based on the dubious theory that the best way to avoid being stung by hornets is to sidle up to their nests and poke them. Every indicator we have shows that the so-called “global war on terrorism” has multiplied rather than depleted the ranks of anti-American terrorists with global reach. That is not surprising, given the estimated four million Muslims who have perished from U.S. post-Cold War interventions in West Asia and North Africa. “Fighting terrorists over there” just increases their numbers and encourages them to seek revenge here. It doesn’t keep them at bay.

The world’s interests, including those of the United States, demand peace and stability in the Middle East and a reduction of the threats that emanate from it. Current U.S. policies do not serve these objectives. They prolong wars that debilitate the United States, disturb its and other nations’ domestic tranquility, and corrupt the rule of law at home and abroad. America’s expanding interventions in West Asia and North Africa are connected to no war termination strategies. Many in the United States have come to feel like the chorus on an ancient Greek stage, watching the protagonists march inexorably toward tragedies they cannot prevent.

The usual Washington response to policy failure is to plus up the resources devoted to the failing policy and try harder. Doing this will not correct the trends the U.S. now faces in the Middle East. The United States needs policies that address and protect its interests more effectively than those it has been following.

These policies should recognize the diminished stake Americans have in the Middle East as well as our diminished influence. They should realistically address and seek to leverage the diverse players now influencing the region, not proceed unilaterally. In this, we can learn from the Russians. Our military should support our diplomacy, not the other way ‘round. We should be talking to all parties, not putting labels on some to rule out dialogue with them, as we have done with Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran. We should halt our feckless practice of convening peace conferences that exclude parties whose acceptance or acquiescence is essential to war termination.

The main issues in the region of wider geopolitical importance remain Israel-Palestine, Iran’s role, Israeli-Syrian enmity, refugees, the reconstruction of war-torn societies, the war in Yemen, and the political orientation of Islam. These issues must be the focus of U.S. policy. But the United States no longer has the capacity to go it alone in addressing them. American diplomacy must be redesigned to advance U.S. interests by joining the power and capabilities of others to America’s own.

Even if Israel were prepared to countenance Palestinian self-determination – which it manifestly is not – it has succeeded, with great misguided effort, in making the “two-state solution” infeasible. There is now effectively one state in Palestine. In that state, Zionism has supplanted Judaism as a state ideology. An assertively Zionist minority rules over both devout Jews and three categories of Arabs: second-class Arab citizens of Israel, the disenfranchised and persecuted in the militarily occupied Palestinian territories, and the constantly terrorized inhabitants of the great open-air prison of Gaza. Call this apartheid, if you will. In many ways, it is worse than the South African version because it denies the oppressed any hope of development, separate or otherwise. The Israel-Palestine issue is now one of equal civil and human rights within a single polity. Resolving it requires a moral and political, not a physical revolution.

The movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel (“BDS”) is a global reaction to Israel’s self-delegitimization. But it misses the point. Domestically dictated American subsidies to Israel – not trade and human intercourse with it – are the principal enabler of Zionism’s racist cruelty to Palestine’s indigenous inhabitants. The key to ending that cruelty is to end American official and private endowment of it. Given the way the U.S. political system now franchises interest groups with the formulation and administration of policies of primary concern to them, that will not happen until a new generation of Jewish Americans collectively determines it must. Until then, Israel’s moral decay and departure from the values of Judaism will continue and its international unacceptability increase. This means American Jews and the United States will be held ever more accountable for Israeli actions of which most profoundly disapprove. Both domestic antisemitism and foreign anti-Americanism will intensify. So will American Islamophobia.

Current U.S. policy toward Iran consists of a mixture of ostracism, propaganda to demonize the Islamic Republic, economic pressure for regime change, and threatened military assault. But, without talking to Iran, the United States can constrain neither its nuclear program nor its policies in its region. Name-calling and economic pressure reinforce Iran’s hardliners and retard reform and opening to the outside world that could curtail Iran’s militancy and create a basis for its peaceful coexistence with its neighbors. Threats of military attack stimulate it to seek an effective deterrent in the form of the capability to conduct a nuclear strike on Israel and the United States. It is only better to talk than not to talk if you know what you are going to say. Before we talk to Tehran, the United States needs a multinationally concerted strategy for a course of negotiation that can address American, Israeli, and Gulf Arab concerns about Iran’s current behavior and potential future threat to regional order and to America.

Similarly, to deal with Jihadism, refugees, and reconstruction in Syria as well as with Syria’s role in Lebanon and its conflict with Israel will require dealing with the government in Damascus, whatever Americans, Europeans, Gulf Arabs, Israelis, and Turks may think of it. Trends and events, including some that are the product of self-contradictory U.S. objectives in Syria, have made it necessary to include Iran and Russia in any discussion of how to realign Syria, repair its human losses, and rebuild it. China must also be invited to play a role in Syria’s rehabilitation and reconstruction.

Syria has illustrated the limited ability of great power military intervention to reshape the complexities of local politics. Yemen demonstrates that the same limits apply to regional actors as well. The war there has become not just a calamity for Yemenis, but a burden and an embarrassment to most of its foreign backers. The only winner in Yemen so far is Iran, which has acquired an unprecedented level of influence there. The sooner the external parties – Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the United States – can extricate themselves, the better not just for the people of Yemen but for them.

Finally, U.S. policy must recognize that the Dar al Islam is in a crisis as profound as that which tormented Christendom before the Enlightenment. Radically competing visions of its future are in contention. The ability of non-Muslims to influence the outcome of the debate within Islam is limited. But non-Muslims have a big stake in whether the result is an affirmation of the tolerance Islam once exemplified or of aggressive medievalism and ostentatious religiosity coupled with hypocrisy. The United States must take care to avoid tipping the struggle in the wrong direction. This will require a kind of empathy for the Islamic faithful that is completely absent among contemporary American policymakers.

The trouble with kaleidoscopes is two-fold. When you give them an ignorant knock, the pieces rearrange themselves in unpredictable ways. And, when you fail to turn them, the pieces remain in their current configuration, whatever that may be. The United States needs to cease banging the Middle East kaleidoscope and start working with others to produce realignments in the region that serve American interests, not those of its client states or third parties.

[1] “Maskirovka” is the Russian military doctrine of deception and misdirection, involving disinformation, denial, decoys, misleading maneuvers, and concealment.

[2] See “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations,” Ronen Bergman, Random House, 2018

Senior Fellow, the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University

February 8, 2017, San Francisco, California

At Davos, just before the U.S. presidential inauguration this January, Chinese President Xi Jinping made a bid for global leadership by China of trade and investment liberalization. He quoted the opening of Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities.” He recited the first two sentences and left out the rest. It’s worth citing a bit more. Dickens wrote:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was . . .. like the present period. . . .”

Like the United States, China is now domestically evermore ill at ease. But, unlike America, it’s on a roll internationally. The contrast is striking.

The fading confidence of much of China’s elite in their future stems from many causes. Among these are three thousand, five hundred years of history that strongly suggest that nothing is forever. Progress is invariably succeeded by regression.

As if to validate this historical cycle, more than three decades of remarkable reform, opening, and economic advance in China seem to be giving way to increasingly illiberal, police-state politics, a constipated business climate, and doubts about the prospects for the country’s transition to a new model for continued growth in national wealth and power. Chinese citizens’ attempts to hedge by moving money to safe havens abroad have stimulated Beijing to impose ever-stricter controls on outflows of private capital. Meanwhile, however, declining foreign affection for China is offset by China’s rising prestige and influence.

China’s greater international clout has as much to do with the self-initiated retreat of American leadership as it has to do with China’s return to wealth and power. The indifference of America’s political elite to foreign interests and perspectives as they bear on U.S. policies has grown as the 21^st century has advanced. This indifference has just been formalized in the policy guideline, “America first.”

In terms of its approach to global governance and international interactions, the United States now officially relegates the interests of America’s allies, and partners, as well as transnational institutions, to second, third, or fourth place behind its own parochial concerns. American disregard for the impact on others of U.S. policies gives them no incentive to follow Washington’s lead. The U.S. now wants to cut deals, not make rules.

America has just withdrawn from the international consensus that underpins global efforts to liberalize the rules for international trade and investment and to mitigate manmade climate change. The leadership vacuum that the contraction of the Pax Americana was already creating has taken a quantum leap. Ready and willing or not, China is being drawn into an ever-greater role in global governance.

This is the context within which China has been inventing new international financial institutions like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the New Development Bank, the South-South Cooperation Fund, the China Silk Road Fund, the Maritime Silk Road Management Fund, and the Maritime Silk Road Bank. In the aggregate, these banks and funds are capitalized at almost $300 billion and promise to add $60-$75 billion to annual lending for infrastructure projects in Asia and its periphery. This is considerably more than what Bretton Woods legacy institutions like the IMF, World Bank (IBRD), and Asian Development Bank (ADB) have been able to do. China’s initiatives are game changers.

Most governments other than the United States have been increasing export financing for goods and services companies produced within their borders. U.S. companies that have subsidiaries abroad benefit from this. But, in the absence of some sort of arrangement for U.S. lending agencies to co-finance projects with the new Chinese-led international financial institutions, American companies will find it hard to source goods and services for projects financed by Chinese sponsored institutions from their home market.

The AIIB is off to a fast start, with almost $2 billion in projects already approved. It is not revolutionary in nature. Most of its projects to date have been co-financed with the World Bank and ADB.

Still, the ADB estimates that requirements for investment in infrastructure in Asia are $700 - $800 billion annually, much more than either the legacy or new lenders – or both together – can hope to finance. A lot of money will have to come directly from China, from its partners in infrastructure projects, and from other Asian and international investors and lenders. Some of the money will come from binational joint investment funds with matching bilateral commitments, like the $10 billion fund China has established with the United Arab Emirates. But there will be no shortage of opportunities for independent, non-Chinese lenders to co-finance projects.

The United States has refused to join any of the new banks or funds – apparently to avoid having to appear to defer to Chinese leadership. This has been a foolish forfeiture of U.S. influence. We must hope that the Trump administration – with its emphasis on manufacturing jobs -- will find a way to work with China to the advantage of American business. This will be hard if the United States has started a trade war with China. It is a good argument against doing so.

Our mistake in not engaging with the new Chinese-sponsored institutions has been somewhat mitigated to date by the fact that they have not followed the example of their American-sponsored predecessors by barring companies from non-member countries that want to bid on their projects. Many American companies are already subcontractors for “belt and road” projects. These projects represent an unprecedented set of business opportunities on a wider scale than most yet seem to have grasped.

China has set a goal of $2.5 trillion in trade with “belt and road” partner countries by 2025. In support of this, Beijing is doing more than setting up new institutions. It is encouraging mergers, acquisitions, and green-field investments to create what might be called “multinational companies with Chinese characteristics,” some with headquarters in Europe or elsewhere outside China. And it is promoting uniform standards for trade, transport, and communications.

The belt and road initiative is not just the greatest and potentially most transformative set of engineering projects in history, it is the world’s largest emerging platform for international business collaboration. It is often described as a program directed at China’s neighbors in Central and Southeast Asia. But, as the recently opened rail line between Yiwu and London illustrates, its objective it to connect China to Europe, not just to the countries that lie between Europe and China. Its aim is to integrate the entire Eurasian landmass with a network of roads, railroads, pipelines, telecommunications links, ports, airports, and industrial development zones.

The massive infrastructure projects envisaged by the belt and road initiative promise to deliver major increases in the speed of transport and telecommunications, to lower costs, and to create a great many new jobs. They will integrate Russia and Central Asia with both China and Europe, while connecting South Asia by land as well as by sea to the markets and natural resources of the countries to its north as well as to Africa. There is a very good running account of the state of play of projects in Asia (though, sadly, not in Europe or Africa) to be found at the “Reconnecting Asia” website operated by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSOS).

Most projects will be overland: Kunming to Singapore and, separately, to Kolkata; Kashi [Kashgar] to Gwadar and, separately, to both Tashkent and Tehran; Xi’an to Istanbul and to Moscow, Rotterdam, and Lisbon; from Hunchun ( in China’s Jilin Province) to the Russian port of Zarubino, on the Sea of Japan. By making land transport vastly more efficient and linking it to new ports and airports, “belt and road” programs will alter the balance between land and sea power. Relatively few projects will be maritime, but, given the scale of the initiative, these too will be transformative. including in the Arctic regions now becoming accessible as a result of climate change.

If this concept of Eurasian integration is realized, it will open a vast area to economic and cultural exchange, reducing barriers to international cooperation in a sixty-five-country zone with seventy percent of the world’s population, fifty-five percent of its GDP, and well over half its current economic growth. At $1.4 trillion, China’s declared financial commitment to these projects is eleven times the size of the Marshall Plan, restated in current dollars. Leveraging will likely at least triple the value of this proposed investment between now and 2049.

Not surprisingly, most observers concentrate on the truly awesome physical infrastructure envisaged by the belt and road initiative and overlook its effort to develop common rules and transport regulations for all of Eurasia. Beijing and its partners seek to improve the efficiency of customs clearance, enable interoperability across different rail gauges, reduce tariff barriers, assure security along transport corridors, and harmonize institutional, financial, and regulatory structures. China envisages bilateral agreements with sixty-five countries to reduce impediments to trade, to create and endow new financial institutions, and to execute enormous infrastructure projects.

In May, China will convene a summit meeting of the countries participating in the “one belt, one road” community, which include at least forty with completed bilateral agreements with Beijing as well as another sixty or so who are engaged in active dialogue about projects. This will move the collective effort to adopt common standards across the Eurasian landmass to a new level. The United States and the American private sector should be there alongside others. If our government does not help make the rules, our interests will be ignored. If our companies cannot get into the game Asians and Europeans have begun without us, they cannot hope to score. What is at stake is decades of enormous business opportunities.

At least 890 projects for new roads, high-speed railways (50,000 miles of them!), pipelines, ports, airports, and inland telecommunications links are to boost the efficiency of overland travel and economic transactions across Eurasia. The vast space from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Pacific to the Middle East and the Indian Ocean is to be laced with industrial development corridors and special economic zones that draw on these links to create centers of economic activity. Network effects assure benefits not just to China as the initiative’s leader but to every country touched by it. American companies that make construction equipment and manage construction services should be well positioned to benefit from all this activity. But so are their competitors.

Market-driven extension of China’s expanding logistics system to neighboring countries and beyond had begun even before 2013, when President Xi Jinping first announced his “one belt, one road” concept in Kazakhstan. Today, $20 billion in belt and road-related construction projects (about two-fifths of the Eurasia-wide total) are underway in that country alone. The initiative probably began in part as a measure to alleviate overcapacity in China’s cement, steel and aluminum industries by conjuring up export markets for them. Belt and road projects will let Chinese manufacturing and construction companies continue for a while to do the sort of work abroad that is winding down for them at home. Lending to China’s neighbors so that they can pay for what Chinese companies build for them is a shrewd way both to make friends and to generate better returns than Beijing can get from U.S. Treasury bills.

The initiative may be commercially motivated but it has major strategic implications. It is a way of breaking out of maritime encirclement by an increasingly hostile United States, Japan, and India. It will accelerate the development of Xinjiang and other parts of western China by making them key connectors to Europe and the Middle East through Central Asia and Russia. It gives China’s neighbors to the west a reason to cultivate good relations with it. It will build a huge economic community in which China’s size and dynamism will guarantee it a leading position. It will cement China’s relations with its geographically enormous Russian neighbor.

China’s experience with the impact of expanded infrastructure on its own territory has amply demonstrated the extent to which it can integrate economic geography in an arbitrarily divided super continent like Eurasia. China built its first American-style expressway in 1990. In 2011, the length of China’s expressway network passed that of the United States. It continues to grow. At 123,000 kilometers (76,000 miles) in length, it is now by far the world’s longest. In 2015 alone, China built another 11,050 kilometers (6,870 miles) of expressway.

China’s first high-speed rail line – meaning one that supports passenger or freight trains that travel at 200 kph (124 mph) or more – opened in 2007. At more than 20,000 kilometers (12,500 miles), China’s high-speed rail lines are now by far the most extensive in the world. They have an annual ridership of over 1.1 billion passengers. China expects to lay another 15,000 kilometers of track by 2025.

All these new roads and railways in China connect to vastly expanded airports and ports. In the last five-year plan (which ended in 2015), China built 82 new airports and expanded 101 existing ones. Over eighty percent of Chinese are now within 100 kilometers (62 miles) of an airport. By the end of this decade, this percentage is to rise to nearly 90 percent. A similar wave of expansions has given China seven of the world’s ten largest and busiest ports.

Accompanying the explosive growth of Chinese transportation infrastructure, which includes some of the world’s longest oil and gas pipelines, have been fiber optic cable and power transmission lines. Last year, China laid 2.6 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) of fiber optic cable. 80 percent of Chinese broadband users are now on fiber, making China number one in the world in terms of the proportion of broadband users on mobile devices. Meanwhile, China is the first nation in the world to build a grid based on long-distance ultra-high-voltage power transmission, a technology in which it has become the global leader.

China has reaped many of the same economic benefits from this expanded infrastructure that the United States did in the last century from the combined effects of the opening of the Panama Canal and the interstate highway system. But China’s gains have come in a much compressed time frame and their momentum has yet to flag. There is a logic to China’s connection of internal networks to external ones and, where these don’t exist, building them.

It should be obvious that the “belt and road” initiative also carries significant economic and political risks for China, as well as for recipient countries and local communities. The availability of credit does not guarantee the availability of financially attractive projects. The institutions China has created to support it expect to make a profit on their investments. At the moment, there is still more money on offer than there are economically viable projects. That is a recipe for corruption.

Then, too, China has a record of making extravagant offers of credits abroad that are then underutilized. This justifies a certain measure of skepticism about the numbers China has attached to its aspirations. Not all of the money China is making available will find projects. Still, given China’s emphasis on collaborative planning with foreign partners, a good deal of it seems certain to be used actually to build things.

A majority of Chinese private sector and state-owned enterprises in the construction, mining, and telecommunications sectors have built utilization of belt and road credits into their business plans. Every province and megalopolis in China is developing specific plans to support “one belt, one road” projects. A large part of the work on these projects – as much as seventy percent, if past practice is a useful guide, but far from all of the work – will be done by Chinese companies.

China’s economic planners want to make private enterprises the backbone of the scheme – to leverage their energy, flexibility, and sensitivity to investment efficiency. But the initial emphasis on state-owned enterprises replicates the infrastructure-investment-led approach to development that has run out of steam in China’s domestic economy. The best that can be said for this is that it gives such SOEs an opportunity to ease their transition to a new system with new rules and practices. They can continue for a while to do abroad what they will have decreasing opportunities to do at home.

China’s private sector companies are very good at exploiting opportunities for investment fueled by credits from the Chinese state. But, for the program to succeed over the long term, the planning process that is getting under way will have to begin to develop new models for Chinese investment that empower private enterprise along the Silk Road as well as in China itself. Perhaps the key to accomplishing this is partnership with foreign companies and lenders with greater experience in risk-based lending and turning a profit outside home markets.

As the late Deng Xiaoping would have put it, China and its foreign partners will have to find their way across the many rivers between the Atlantic and Pacific by feeling their way with their feet as they ford them. Some projects will be financially attractive or made so. Others may be more problematic. The market will decide.

This raises a key question. Many of the countries that lie between China and Europe have troubled political and economic environments and well-deserved reputations for corruption. What return on investment can China and its partners reasonably expect from projects there? There is clearly a risk that projects will fail the test of due diligence or that the money that is lent to smaller countries will create debt that they cannot repay.

In the short term, on the macro level, even under conservative assumptions, investment in Asian and European infrastructure looks like a good bet. Chinese state-owned enterprises have more money for infrastructure build-out than they can profitably deploy in China, where returns on such projects are very low at present. Investing in roads, railways, fiber optic cable, and power generation and distribution assets outside China could enable the productive use of China’s industrial overcapacity, stabilizing employment and the Chinese economy.

One study estimates, for example, that a relatively modest five percent growth rate in such assets from their current base could create 137 million tons of demand for Chinese steel. This would reduce oversupply in the Chinese steel industry from 22 percent to 8 percent. It would expand access to markets and natural resources to China’s West, while linking both to the Chinese economy. It would also offer a new outlet for the investment of China’s huge foreign exchange reserves, which have been concentrated in U.S. Treasury bonds and other instruments with very low yields.

As another example, consider the benefits of shorter, land-based telecommunications routes that connect the two ends of the “world island.” China is connected to Europe at present by 39,000 kms (about 24,000 miles) of mostly underwater cable following legacy telephone links. Digital packets transmitted from Western Europe to Shanghai or Tokyo must either cross Europe, the Middle East, the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, or transit the Atlantic, the United States, and then the Pacific Ocean. Too many cables pass through heavily trafficked choke points like the Strait of Malacca or the Suez Canal. Accidents in these choke points cause several hundred disruptions of the global undersea system each year.

Trans-Eurasian networks will be more stable. They will not just improve connectivity for landlocked countries along the “one belt, one road” routes but also speed up data exchanges between Europe and Asia. Investors are willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to gain a few milliseconds in highly profitable “high frequency trading,” the automated buying and selling of financial instruments by computers. By some estimates, a one millisecond advantage could be worth up to $100 million a year to a single hedge fund company. Shorter routes are the keys to speed – and profit. And routes under Chinese, Russian, and European control will arguably be more secure from exploitation by the much-feared U.S. National Security Agency.

The devil is always in the details, but if China’s vision is realized in any significant respect, in time all roads and other physical linkages in Eurasia will connect to Beijing. China will become the center of economic gravity of a vast, loosely integrated region that already has 55 percent of world GNP, 70 percent of global population, and 75 percent of known energy reserves. The belt and road program includes no explicit military component, but it clearly has the potential to up-end the world’s geopolitics as well as its economics. It is an entirely non-coercive, market-directed means by which to aggregate all of Europe and Asia’s wealth and power to China’s own as China becomes by an ever-increasing margin the world’s largest economy.

If it works, the belt and road initiative will place China in an ever more central position of influence on the Eurasian landmass and the world. It will, in short, make China the most important single national actor on the entire Eurasian landmass. And, if China’s commercial partners, including those in the United States, play our cards right, we will be able to harness China’s rising prosperity to their own. If we don’t, others will.

This is the third and last of three connected lectures on diplomatic doctrine. The series was preceded by an introductory presentation. The first lecture described diplomacy as strategy; the second as tactics. This lecture, delivered in 2018, deals with diplomacy as risk management. It identified counterproductive trends in American foreign relations that, sadly, continue to unfold.

At its most basic level, diplomacy is the management of foreign relations to reduce risk to the nation while promoting its interests abroad. In this task, diplomacy’s success is measured more by what it precludes than by what it achieves. One can never prove that what didn’t happen would have happened if one had not done this or that. But, for the most part in foreign affairs, the fewer the surprises and the less the stress, the better.

The ideal outcome of diplomacy is the assurance of a life for the nation that is as tranquil and boring as residence in the suburbs. And, like suburban life, in its day-to-day manifestation, diplomacy involves harvesting flowers when they bloom and fruits and berries when they ripen, while laboring to keep the house presentable, the weeds down, the vermin under control, and the predators and vagrants off the property. If one neglects these tasks, one is criticized by those closest, regarded as fair prey by those at greater remove, and not taken seriously by much of anyone.

Viewed this way, the fundamental purpose of U.S. foreign policy is the maintenance of a peaceful international environment that leaves Americans free to enjoy the prosperity, justice, and civil liberties that enable our pursuit of happiness. This agenda motivated the multilateral systems of governance the United States created and relied upon after World War II – the Pax Americana. Secretary of Defense Mattis has called this “the greatest gift of the greatest generation.” Institutions like the United Nations. its specialized agencies, like the International Monetary Fund and the World Health Organization, and related organizations like the World Trade Organization sought to regulate specific aspects of international behavior, manage the global commons, provide frameworks for the resolution of international disputes, and organize collective responses to problems.

In the aggregate, these offspring of U.S. diplomacy established and sustained widely accepted norms of behavior for many decades. International law drew on consensus to express these norms as rules. To the extent they were accepted internationally, these rules constrained state actions that could damage the common interests of the society of nations the rules had brought into being. Despite its uneven performance, the Pax Americana assured a relatively high degree of predictability in world affairs that facilitated peaceful international interactions. It did so on the same philosophical basis as the rule of law in domestic affairs – a belief that rules matter and that process legitimizes outcomes rather than the other way around.

Today, that philosophy and its ethical foundations are under attack both at home and abroad. For the time being, at least, Washington has set aside the rule-bound international order and the market-driven economic interactions it enabled. The United States is discarding the multilateral strategic framework that it built to restrain the behavior of lesser states in the last half of the 20^th century. In its place, the Trump administration is experimenting with neo-mercantilist theories that seem to have been crowd-sourced to right-wing talk radio. Washington seeks to maximize U.S. leverage over trading partners by dealing with them only on a bilateral basis. Trade and investment are increasingly government-managed and hence politicized rather than freely contracted between private buyers and sellers. So far, it must be said, bird-brained bilateralism is proving no substitute for the complex regulatory regimes it is replacing and the supply chains it is disrupting.

With the fading of previously agreed codes of conduct and the principle of PACTA SUNT SERVANDA [“agreements must be kept”], what could once be taken for granted in managing relations with other states must now be repetitiously renegotiated and affirmed bilaterally. But Washington has demoted diplomacy as a tool of American statecraft in favor of primary reliance on military and economic coercion. Escalating uncertainties are driving nations toward unrestrained unilateralism and disregard for international law. As this century began, the United States popularized contemptible practices like the assassination and abduction for questioning under torture of foreign opponents. A lengthening list of other countries – China, north Korea, Russia, and Turkey, to name a few – have now brazenly followed this bad example. More issues are being deferred as intractable, addressed ad hoc, or dealt with through the threat or use of force.

In this new world disorder, the need for diplomacy to tend fraying relationships is manifestly greater than ever. The Congress and public, as well as the U.S. military, sense this. They have resisted efforts by the Trump administration to slash budgets for peaceful international engagement by the U.S. Department of State and related agencies. Still, the American diplomatic imagination has not been so myopic and enervated since before World War II. Nor have U.S. investments in diplomacy, Americans’ expectations of their diplomats, or international trust of the United States been so low.

Diplomatic preparedness requires constant attention to other nations and their views. Showing that one’s government is interested in and understands what others think encourages them to be more receptive to one’s own ideas. Attentiveness to their needs, views, and doubts signals willingness to work together and cultivates willingness to cooperate in defending common interests. The regular nurturing and reaffirmation of relationships is what makes it possible to call on a network of friends in times of need. Responding politely and considerately – in the least offensive way one can – to others’ messages conveys respect as well as substance. It invites their sympathetic study of the logic, intent, and interests behind one’s own messages.

Constant diplomatic intercourse promotes stability and predictability. It inhibits inimical change, reducing the risk that amicable states will become adversaries or that adversaries will become enemies. And it provides situational awareness that reduces surprise and enables governments to respond intelligently and tactfully to trends and events.

All this may seem obvious. But it takes a sustained commitment by national leaders, public servants, and well-trained diplomats as well as reliable funding to carry it off. In the contemporary United States, none of these is now assured. The safety net provided by routine diplomacy as I have just described is increasingly neglected. The resulting disarray in American international relationships is shaking our alliances, eroding cooperation with our international partners, raising doubts about U.S. reliability, causing client states to seek new patrons, and diminishing deference to U.S. national interests by friends and foes alike. Increases in military spending demonstrate eagerness to enhance warfighting capabilities. But greater capacity to wreak havoc does nothing to rectify the doubts of foreign nations about American wisdom, reliability, and rapport in our conduct of relations with them.

U.S. military power is as yet without effective challenge except at the regional level. But, on its own, it is proving consistently incapable of producing outcomes that favor our national security. It is a truism that those who cannot live by their brawn or their wallets must live by their wits. Neither war nor the threat of war can restore America’s lost political primacy. Only an upgrade in American competence at formulating and implementing domestic and foreign policies, coupled with effective diplomacy in support of credible American leadership, can do that.

In recent years, Americans have become better known for our promiscuous use of force and our cynical disregard of international law than for our rectitude and aspirations for moral excellence. U.S. foreign policy has featured unprovoked invasions and armed attacks on foreign countries, violations of their sovereignty through drone warfare and aid to insurgents, assassinations and kidnappings, interrogation through torture, the extrajudicial execution of citizens as well foreigners, universal electronic eavesdropping, Islamophobia, the suspension of aid to refugees, xenophobic immigration policies, and withdrawal from previously agreed frameworks for collective action on issues of global concern, like climate change. This sociopathic record inspires only the enemies of the United States. It is not a platform that wins friends, influences people in our favor, or encourages them to view us as reliable.

Foreign perceptions of American society have also deteriorated. Many now see the United States as having evolved a transparently venal government of the people, by the plutocracy, for the plutocracy. They are very aware of the inequality of opportunity, unequal income distribution, and other injustices that now negate the soaring promises of our declaration of independence. They are dismayed by the gun massacres in our schools and public places and the police gun-downs of black Americans, as well as the denial and hypocrisy that our politicians and media habitually display in response to such events.

They know that America’s claims to be a free society are mocked by a prison population that is the highest per capita in the world – at least five times higher than that in notoriously undemocratic societies like China. They are sickened by reports of the bloated costs, gross inefficiencies, labor immobility, lack of insurance for the poor, and the high rates of maternal and infant mortality that result from the uniquely dysfunctional U.S. health care system. And they are not favorably impressed by the partisan political gridlock, fiscal follies, or private affluence and public squalor of contemporary America. They are put off by a society that no longer distinguishes fame from notoriety and appalled by the smug provincialism of the celebrity-strewn American establishment. Foreigners once admired American exceptionalism for its aspirations to moral excellence. Now it is a watchword for self-righteous complacency, thoughtless rejection of global norms of social justice, and unilateral announcements of policy that have not been preceded by consultation with presumed partners.

Leadership without followers is a non sequitur. (No pun intended.) Non-democratic models of governance are currently outperforming ours in a number of ways. To challenge them, Americans need to recognize our deficiencies, address them, up our performance, and return to managing risks to our enjoyment of freedom and prosperity by carrying out the elementary chores of routine diplomacy. Only this can restore the foreign respect for our system of government and its leadership that has been the foundation of our international influence.

Some diplomatic chores yield immediate gains. Others are long-term investments in garnering goodwill and building rapport – laying down strata of fossil friendship that can be mined in the future, or keeping warm memories of past cooperation suggestively alive. As current events demonstrate, when these chores are not done, the nation loses in both the short and the long term.

As an example of diplomatic work that generates near-term results, consider the help diplomats make available to businesses seeking to export their goods and services. Trade promotion is sometimes derided as “corporate welfare” by ideologues. But the support to commerce that diplomats offer can be essential to ease access to foreign markets for American companies and to enable them to deal effectively with foreign laws and regulations. Export promotion is in the national interest as well as that of the companies and their employees who earn a living from exports.

Part of any embassy’s mission is to help American businesses do due diligence on potential customers and partners and to introduce them to foreign officials and local business elites who can facilitate trade and investment. American ambassadors who have been properly trained to represent the United States see themselves as the chief U.S. trade promotion officers in the countries to which they are accredited. They and the officers from the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, State, and Treasury whom they lead do what they can to encourage their hosts to “buy American.” The exports this work supports sustain 10.5 million American jobs.

Diplomats are also central to the facilitation of international travel. Diplomats specializing in consular work issue passports and visas, help citizens who get in trouble abroad, and facilitate educational exchanges. They thus enable travel in both directions for education and tourism as well as trade and investment. There are now almost 1.1 million foreign students in the United States. The tuition they pay funds more than 450,000 jobs in the U.S. educational establishment and contributes just short of $37 billion to the U.S. economy. Meanwhile, foreign visitors spend about $170 billion annually on travel services in the United States, helping to support a domestic travel and tourism industry that directly employees over five million Americans and indirectly generates another eight million or more jobs. And, while they’re visiting, foreigners buy another $80 billion or so in goods and services.

Less tangibly and less visibly to the public, diplomatic interactions are a major element in government awareness of foreign thinking, planning, and actions that affect both national and particular interests in the United States. Reporting and analysis by U.S. diplomats overseas typically provide a substantial majority of the material that intelligence agency personnel charged with all-source analysis rely upon to brief policymakers in Washington. There is no substitute for ground truth, artfully captured and examined in light of U.S. interests, in making sufficient sense of events in foreign countries and cultures to enable officials to respond intelligently to these.

Sadly, even the best diplomatic and other reporting cannot compel Washington policymakers to accept inconvenient foreign realities that conflict with their political prejudices and delusions. As the American statesman, Chester Crocker has remarked, “surprise is what usually follows the collision of intelligence with an entrenched policy consensus.” From time to time, such surprises happen and Washington decision-makers seek to avoid blame for their errors of omission by finding scapegoats, as the fate of “old China hands,” among many others, illustrates. The declining role of diplomats in U.S. foreign relations and our increasing reliance on the U.S. military foreshadow future surprises from foreigners we haven’t bothered to understand. If one relies on overthrowing foreign governments rather than on dealing with them nonviolently, there is no need to bother understanding them or their motives for taking the positions they do.

A diplomatic presence adds value only to the extent that it enables face-to-face communication with the local authorities and their constituents. The cultivation of contacts in the host country is the key to collecting information relevant to statecraft. It is also the most effective means of accurately and persuasively conveying one’s government’s views to the host government. But the global metastasis of anti-American terrorism has led the United States to fear local contact and to build embassies that are heavily fortified and inaccessible to all but their employees.

The growing isolation of our diplomats impairs – even if it does not entirely eliminate – interaction with local officials and populations. It obstructs direct insights into the motivations driving popular opposition to America and makes the U.S. government dependent on information from other governments, some of which is bound to be self-interestedly manipulative. Cowering behind blast walls sends a message of fearfulness that bolsters terrorists’ confidence in their ability to intimidate the United States and reduce its influence abroad. It turns embassies into attractive nuisances. It makes it easier for those seeking to isolate the United States to do so. The principal beneficiaries of the cover-your-ass mentality that drives embassy fortification and isolation are government-contracted security specialists, architects, and construction companies, not the diplomats they have been tasked to protect.

According to both ancient tradition and international law, the protection of ambassadors and their entourages is the responsibility of host governments. Embassies should not be configured to serve as centers of imperial administration. The turn to resident diplomatic representatives that took place in the 16^th century was not motivated by a desire to establish armed enclaves or citadels of extraterritorial power in foreign capitals, but to aid routine communication between sovereign states.

Fortifying diplomatic missions and arming them against attacks by the local citizenry implicitly relieves host governments from their responsibility to keep ambassadors and their entourages safe from harm. It helps them to evade domestic political responsibility for defending the embassies of unpopular foreign states from mobs It may, in fact, incentivize governments to look the other way as protesters assault such embassies.

The United States needs to reconsider policies that generate terrorism against it. But Americans should also be prepared to withdraw embassies from countries that cannot keep them safe. In most cases, there is nothing to gain by condoning the failure of such countries to meet international standards for the maintenance of diplomatic relations and shielding them from the consequences of their irresponsibility.

The physical security of diplomats is important, but information security is truly vital to their work. Honest discourse on sensitive matters requires reliable assurances of confidentiality, whether it is to lawyers’ clients, physicians’ patients, or diplomats’ interlocutors. In democracies, the people have a right to know what policies their government is following and why. They have no legitimate interest in the sources and methods by which their government gains information from foreigners or influences their decisions. Analysis should be disclosed, but the details of diplomatic conversations and reporting on the views of foreign governments and individuals should be privileged.

Breaches of professional privilege degrade the candor and reduce the effectiveness of exchanges of information. Diplomacy consists of professionally privileged exchanges. The indiscriminate release by Wiki leaks of classified cables reporting confidential exchanges between diplomats and their foreign sources degraded U.S. diplomatic intelligence collection capabilities.

The inclusion in the Wiki leaks release of diplomatic evaluations of foreign leaders’ character and political performance titillated and impressed the public with the notably high quality of American diplomatic reporting and analysis. But it did grave damage to U.S. relations with a number of countries, ruined productive relationships with key sources of information, resulted in the expulsion of some American diplomats, and embittered previously cooperative foreign leaders against the United States and the official Americans with whom they had been meeting.

Fear of future leaks has caused American diplomats to report less honestly and fully to Washington than before. The same concerns about information security, compounded by self-centered amateurs playing at diplomacy with an eye on politics back home, have led to meetings with no note-takers or to the bowdlerizing of the records of American officials’ meetings with foreign officials. Nobody has gained from the corruption of diplomatic record-keeping by American officials, except perhaps the foreign competitors of the United States. Unlike us, they have not corrupted their institutional memories and are armed with accurate accounts of their interactions with American leaders. When future disputes arise over what was or wasn’t said in meetings, they will have the advantage. (By the way, what did we tell Mr. Gorbachev about NATO expansion?)

The focus of diplomacy is the ruling authorities – those with the power to make decisions for their polities. But all political systems defer to public opinion to one extent or another. Democratic governments are subject to popular supervision through elections. The democratization of politics in Europe a century or more ago, led to widening recognition of the importance of public diplomacy. It also widened the interaction of legislators with foreigners. Technology then allowed them to travel abroad, allegedly on public business but often for personal enjoyment. Not to worry. Exposure to realities outside the Beltway bubble improves minds.

Foreign deference to American power and support from American embassies have long assured VIP treatment and high-level access for our representatives by foreign officials. But congressional travel abroad creates ill will when – as is all too often the case – members of the House and Senate offer no welcome in Washington to the very foreign officials who had pampered them on their own trips abroad. As foreign deference to the United States continues to ebb, Congress needs to consider how to reciprocate foreign hospitality to its members and staff. The United States would be strengthened were congresscritters to make a serious effort to improve their own poor reputation abroad. As U.S. officials, they too have a responsibility to contribute to U.S. public diplomacy.

Public diplomacy is the patriotic art of making one’s country appear to have the better cause. It is designed to explain policies and institutions in terms that are persuasive to audiences in foreign cultures. During the Cold War, this was the task of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA). Created in 1953, it was euthanized in 1999, when the Clinton administration determined that history had ended, CNN was on the job, and new private sector outlets like Fox News were about to ensure “fair and balanced” American coverage of notable events.

Unfortunately, the extension of these media to foreign audiences has lowered the reputation of the United States abroad by directly exposing foreigners to the global yokelism of American celebrities and the ethnocentric prejudices of American popular culture. USIA’s functions were severely downsized, then transferred to the Department of State, which has little or no credibility at home, still less abroad. There is now no significant corrective for the spillover to foreign audiences of our partisan media’s politically motivated distortions of American policies and realities. Presidential tweets have just exacerbated this problem. With relative U.S. influence on foreign elites in decline, a future, more orderly administration will almost certainly want to restore the capacity of the United States to disseminate reliable information on U.S. policy and introduce the higher elements of American culture to audiences overseas. The secretary of state is probably the right cabinet officer to oversee this function, but the department of State may not be the best place to house it.

A future administration will also want to reconsider the utility of foreign aid – the transfer to other countries of official capital, goods, or services – as a tool of U.S. foreign policy. Originally conceived to promote economic development, build markets, and modernize economic governance in Europe’s colonies overseas, foreign assistance programs entered a new stage with the Marshall Plan. From 1948 through 1951, the United States transferred some $13 billion (about $150 billion in today’s dollars), mostly in the form of grants, to seventeen Western and Southern European countries. The program succeeded in helping them to restore industrial and agricultural production, establish financial stability, and expand trade.

In the Cold War, the United States used foreign aid as a diplomatic tool to foster political alliances and secure strategic advantages, withholding or withdrawing aid from those who seemed too close to the Soviet Union. Washington leveraged multilateral programs like those of the World Bank and regional development banks, building on the donations of other wealthy capitalist nations to spread Western economic norms to developing economies. But development specialists were increasingly marginalized as aid was bent to the service of military interventions and other political projects. U.S. foreign assistance peaked during the Vietnam War.

Since the end of the Cold War, U.S. foreign aid has been used to fund pacification and anti-narcotics programs as well as to support long-term development, subsidize client states, counter pandemics, provide disaster relief, and underwrite foreign military modernization programs. Over time the proportions spent on these functions have shifted. Only seven percent now goes to bilateral programs aimed at long-term economic development. Global health programs get about 24 percent, a good investment, given the threat of pandemics. Israel and those Arab neighbors who have made peace with it get 20 percent. Somewhat over 17 percent goes to foreign militaries and 13 percent to stabilizing countries where the U.S. armed forces are engaged in combat. As the civilian aid budget has shrunk, the armed forces have drawn on the defense budget to fund their own foreign assistance activities.

Military disbursements aside, annual U.S. expenditures on foreign aid now come to about $150 per American or less than two-tenths of one percent (0.17%) of GDP. Per capita, the United States ranks 20^th among donors in the 28-member OECD.[1] The ranks of U.S. experts on development policy, program implementation, and the facilitation of socioeconomic change are rapidly thinning out. In practice, despite the size of the U.S. economy, Washington no longer plays the leading international role in economic development activities.

Lessening investment in foreign assistance is not without adverse consequences for American influence. As one example, China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” is encouraging infrastructure construction and the harmonization of trade and investment regimes throughout the Eurasian supercontinent. Unless Americans find a way to make ourselves relevant to complementary or competing projects in that space, we will be without influence in a huge geoeconomic zone that is central to the global economy of the future. At present, our government no longer has either the institutional capacity or the funds to respond to this or similar challenges.

Abraham Lincoln asked, “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?” Diplomacy is about the cultivation and exploitation of friendship with foreign states and peoples. There is a pertinent Arab saying that: “a friend who does not help you is no better than an enemy who does you no harm.” Friendship rests on empathy and its demonstration in supportive behavior.

As our military commanders have discovered, quite aside from cooperation in building physical and institutional infrastructure, a little “walking-around money” helps to win friends and influence people. In diplomacy, including the parliamentary diplomacy of international organizations like the United Nations, the spontaneous return of a favor, a ration of flattery, a gesture of respect, an apparently sincere effort to consult, a reassuring glance, a respectful retort, a comforting silence, and reliable follow-up to implied as well as explicit undertakings can be worth a lot. Vote-trading and mutual back-scratching cement habits of cooperation at the UN. The same is true in alliance management, a key diplomatic skill at which Americans once excelled.

Diplomacy is relationship management as contact sport. Its conduct depends on the talents and training of the men and women who engage in it. Diplomats learn to see transactions as part of a process that defines relationships. Every negotiation of a specific issue contributes to judgments of character and elements of trust that affect future interactions. Sharp practices earn long-term distaste.

The wisest diplomats cultivate a reputation for integrity, fairness, and determination to follow through on commitments. Demonstrating that their government will back them in delivering on the commitments they make is as important as reaching agreement on the business at hand. Doing so raises the probability of productive future interactions with foreign counterparts. It helps prevent ongoing disputes from solidifying into impasse and irremediable hostility. So does the maintenance of good personal relations with adversaries at the negotiating table. Keeping issues in a state of negotiability rather than accepting deadlock is a key precept of sound diplomacy. Optimism is to diplomats what courage is to soldiers.

Language is the principal weaponry of diplomacy. Interpreters are its foot soldiers. But language is more than words and syntax. The body often speaks before the mouth and even when the mouth is silent. Body language, too, differs across cultures. The widespread use of English as a lingua franca has not obviated the need for diplomats to learn foreign languages and how to communicate effectively with their native speakers. Nor will the perfection of machine translation do so.

Mastery of a language in all its dimensions is a path to the avoidance of the kinds of misunderstandings and miscalculations that give rise to conflict. It is essential to understand how the native speakers of the language think. That is the sine qua non of transnational communication and cooperation. Ability to think in the language of one’s foreign counterparts is also the antidote to the classic sin of home-based analysts and their political masters – the tendency to view one’s foreign partners and competitors as mirror images of oneself. It is a grave mistake to project one’s own values and thought processes onto foreigners rather than considering their perspectives and proclivities in their own terms.

Many instructions for diplomatic démarches written in the political hothouse of the capital are composed as much or more for the domestic policy community as for the ambassadors who must execute them in the field. But the delivery of démarches is ultimately a personal and oral, not an institutional or written, art. Early on, ambassadors learn to focus on the results these instructions aim to produce rather than on the suggestions on how to present their arguments that accompany them. Diplomatic instructions are more often than not written by diplomatically inexperienced courtiers and securocrats, who are seldom aware of locally prevalent prejudices and sensitivities or inclined to be dismissive of them. But, it’s the outcome, not the original packaging of the message, that counts, however appealing it may be to folks back home.

One of the reasons for staffing the State department and other foreign affairs agencies in Washington in part with diplomats – foreign service rather than civil service officers – is to ensure that foreign policy objectives and instructions to the field on what must be done to advance them are realistic and feasible. Sometimes, however, political pandering and bureaucratic brown-nosing of powerful policymakers overwhelm experience and expertise.

In the course of my thirty-year career as a diplomat, I was asked to arrange many things overseas that the local context made obviously counterproductive. Fortunately, I had been born with a sense of the absurd and the gift of laughter. I almost always had fun trying to arrange the ridiculous things I was asked to arrange even if – as was usually the case – I failed. I very seldom questioned an instruction, no matter how bizarre. Occasionally, I actually succeeded in bringing off some maneuver conceived within the Beltway, notwithstanding how preposterous it was. But, there is one instance that illustrates the gap between Washington and foreign realities so well that I can’t resist sharing it..

During the 1990-1991 Gulf War, I was ambassador to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, an austere Islamist state whose ferocious anti-communism had precluded diplomatic relations with the USSR. As the war progressed, a constantly expanding circle of American bureaucrats discovered that the Saudis had a lot of money. (Actually, the war had stripped them of their wealth but no one in Washington was prepared to believe this.) As rumors that the Saudis might be a soft touch spread, requests for their largesse multiplied, becoming more and more outlandish as they did.

In January-February1991, the Soviet Union was in dire straits, with serious food shortages. The Cold War had ended and the United States quite sensibly judged it important to help. Next door, in Poland, there was a surplus of ham. Some bright fellow somewhere in Washington noticed this and brought it to the attention of the deputy secretary of state, an august official for whom I had great personal regard. The next thing I knew, I received a personal request from the deputy secretary to go ask the Saudi king (who – as a Muslim – abhorred pork in any form) to buy up the Polish ham surplus and give it to the starving Soviet communists (for whom he had even less use than ham).

I pondered this imaginative proposal overnight. The next morning I told my boss in Washington that asking the king to buy ham for Russian communists would be like asking the Pope to buy condoms for Bangladeshi Muslims. I said I would not do it. The man never forgave me for that. But diplomats cannot be doormats. They are meant to exercise judgment in the interest of the nation.

Until recently, diplomacy has operated within an autonomic ecology. But these are not normal times. The web of diplomatic interactions that stabilize the global and regional state systems has been disrupted. The institutional memory that permanent diplomatic establishments provide is evaporating in the United States as politically connected amateurs replace professionals in pivotal positions and diplomats are excluded from meetings with foreign leaders and the secretary of state and other senior envoys. Contractors are replacing government employees in key functions. No one seems to know what the policy is, still less what it will be tomorrow. The lack of purposive diplomacy on the part of the United States leaves openings for its many rivals for regional dominion. U.S. influence is being displaced.

Travel to the United States by students, tourists, and business people is in rapid decline. Americans have embarked on a trade war that is likely to hurt our economy as much or more than those we have decided to combat. The United States is ceding ground to its rivals, who are prepared to invest the time, effort, and money to fill the international power vacuums that our erratic behavior and withdrawal from diplomatic engagement are helping to create.

All this awaits correction at a future date. In the meantime, the United States can expect continuing slippage in its prestige and influence overseas. We Americans can and should use this period of diplomatic fecklessness to prepare to recruit, train, and deploy a new generation of diplomats. The next generation will face greater challenges than those who are now leaving the government for greener pastures ever did. They must be more competent and professional than their predecessors if we are to regain the ground we are now losing.

In the three lectures I now conclude, I have sought to explore the basis for a body of diplomatic doctrine that has yet to be compiled. As a nation, we have become over-dependent on our armed forces to defend our interests abroad. I believe that events will eventually compel our elected leaders in Congress and the White House to search for alternative instruments of statecraft with which to advance our national interests beyond our borders. Our diplomatic preparedness, readiness, and capabilities have atrophied to our accumulating detriment. For our country to prosper in freedom, we must fix this.

There is a need for a new breed of American diplomats to meet the challenges of a new and more demanding world order. In my view, interdisciplinary institutions like the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs have not just an opportunity, but a duty, to help develop the knowledge and methodology the United States will need to train and develop men and women to manage and implement our nation’s foreign relations. Our history makes me optimistic that where there is a need, Americans can find a way to meet it. But, as the effort I have put into these lectures has reminded me, using the past to prepare for the future is hard work. It is in the national interest that that work be done, if not here, then somewhere else And soon.

^[1]Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

Remarks to the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs

Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Senior Fellow, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University
Providence, Rhode Island, 5 April 2018

This is the second of three lectures (this one delivered in 2018) directed at laying a basis for the development of diplomatic doctrine. It deals with diplomacy as the tactics of foreign relations. The preface to this series and the first lecture in it set out some thoughts on diplomacy as strategy. The third lecture considered diplomacy as risk management.

In American foreign policy, perpetual warfare, arms races, economic bullying, and derogatory rhetoric seem for the time being to have supplanted diplomacy. This is a profoundly destabilizing approach to foreign relations. Once it has run its course, Americans will need to rediscover, reconstitute, and rebuild diplomatic capacity.

Our objective in doing so should be to train and field diplomats who are as skilled in the profession of persuasion as our military are in the profession of arms. The extent to which we are able to draw on diplomatic doctrine – guidance for the application of judgment to trends, events, and opportunities – will determine the speed and effectiveness with which we can accomplish this. We need to work now on developing such doctrine for application to our foreign policies and practices when that is possible.

Diplomacy is an instrument of statecraft that few Americans have been educated to understand and whose history – even in relation to our own country – most do not know. Diplomacy emphasizes peaceably arranged change, but it is not pacifist. Diplomacy is how power persuades states and peoples to accommodate adjustments in relations they instinctively disfavor. It uses words to portray capabilities and convey intentions in order to shape the calculus of foreign partners and opponents and cause them to make desired changes in their policies and behavior.

Diplomacy is the verbal tactics of foreign relations. It is the alternative to the use of force as well as its prelude, facilitator, and finale. It is both the implementer of policy by measures short of war and the translator of the results of war into durable outcomes.

Americans celebrate our independence on the day of its official declaration, July 4, 1776. Most imagine that we achieved our autonomy then or on October 19, 1781, when we (and the French) defeated the British at Yorktown. But this ahistorical view disregards the essential role of diplomacy in such adjustments of relations. U.S. separation from the British Empire was only secured when the British conceded it. It took John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and Thomas Jefferson nearly two years to persuade the British to accept that the necessary consequence of their military defeat was American independence. This became a legal reality only on September 3, 1783, when Britain and the United States signed the Treaty of Paris.

The failure of Americans to recognize the centrality of diplomacy to war termination, including in our own war of independence, is not inconsequential. Recall the ludicrous triumphalism of President George W. Bush after the defeat of the Iraqi Army in 2003, when he stood on an aircraft carrier under a banner, reading “Mission Accomplished.” Subsequent events in Iraq provided a costly reminder that no war is over until the defeated admit defeat and accept its consequences. Such adjustments do not happen automatically. They are achieved through diplomacy or not at all.

The tragic American experience in Iraq was also a reminder that to achieve peace, there must be a leader among the defeated populace with the authority to commit them to it. This is why the United States left the Japanese emperor on his throne after World War II. The failure to consider, let alone address, the question of who might be able to commit Iraqis to cooperation with their foreign occupiers – and what would be required to persuade Iraqis to do so – accounted in no small measure for the anarchy that followed the removal of the Saddam regime in Baghdad.

Diplomatic tactics for war termination are an essential element of any war strategy. But the translation of military triumph into political victory is a task that the American way of war all too often omits. This reflects a history of pursuing the annihilation of enemies, their unconditional surrender, and their political reconstruction through occupation. Disdain for diplomacy that negotiates postwar adjustments in relations, together with “mission creep,” is a major reason that so many American wars spin on without end or abate, only to resume in altered form.

Most Americans seem to see diplomacy and war as a discontinuous dichotomy. But diplomacy does not halt when war begins. Nor does the role of military power end when peace replaces war. Effective diplomatic communication is essential to escalation control. It is also necessary to convince enemies to make concessions that justify ending wars with them on agreed terms.

War is the pursuit of policy through violent coercion up to and including mass murder. It does not supplant the need to pursue policy by other means. Enemies must be made to see that it is in their interest to agree to terms rather than to suffer devastation or annihilation. This makes diplomatic communication more important than ever in times of war. One should never lose contact with the enemy on the battlefield or at the negotiating table. Even when the objective of war is unconditional surrender – generally, a counterproductive posture that incentivizes maximum resistance by the enemy – diplomacy is important to lay the basis for the postwar order. It is not the military end state that vindicates strategy, it is the political end state.

For wars with limited objectives to end, the combatants must be able to end their combat through a negotiated resolution of differences on terms they consider acceptable. The fact that they are fighting makes it all the more important that they talk. This consideration is why the Chinese – contrary to Western practice – wisely left their embassies in place during their conflicts with both India and Vietnam. The need to preserve the negotiability of differences is also why Bismarck counseled that one should be polite even when conveying a declaration of war.

Diplomacy in the run-up to war and during it serves to prevent still other adversaries from becoming enemies, to preclude the formation of hostile coalitions, to deny alliances to adversaries, and to divide enemies from their allies and partners. Wartime diplomacy works to bolster one’s own alliances and partnerships, to extract concessions from actual and potential belligerents, and to lay the groundwork for order and stability to succeed mayhem. Far from ending during warfare, diplomacy complements military operations and enables them to fulfill their political purposes. It is how the warring parties translate the results of their combat into adjustments in relations between them.

As important as diplomacy is to the fruitful conduct of war, it is also the principal and most effective alternative to it. In some respects, diplomacy can be likened to ju-jitsu [柔术] – the use of an opponent’s energy, strength, desires, preconceptions, and mode of coercive action to match, misdirect, disarm, and counter him. Success depends on knowing what one wants, understanding one’s opponents’ preoccupations, being prepared, seeing one’s objective through one’s opponents’ eyes as well as one’s own, exemplifying stamina and resilience, and knowing when to exploit openings as they appear.

For the most part, Americans have not thought about the role of diplomacy in the expansion of the United States to its present borders. Some of the diplomacy that built America was peaceful. Some involved financial transactions. Some represented the translation of military success into territorial adjustments and other concessions. American diplomacy opportunistically exploited strategic calculations on the part of the foreign nations with which the United States was negotiating to make America great. Here are a few examples.

In 1802, President Thomas Jefferson authorized James Monroe and Robert Livingston to try to buy New Orleans and Florida from France for up to $9.375 million. Napoleon had just suffered a dispiriting defeat in Haiti and written off French colonial ambitions in the Western Hemisphere. He needed money. On April 11, 1803, Napoleon unexpectedly offered to sell the United States all of France’s remaining territories in North America.

Without waiting for further instructions, Monroe and Livingston set about negotiating a treaty purchasing France’s “ Louisiana” territory for $11.25 million, plus the forgiveness of $3.75 million in French debt. It took them two weeks to reach agreement with the French. Their opportunistic diplomacy peacefully doubled the size of the United States at a cost of about 3 cents an acre. (Had Americans tried to take this territory by force rather than diplomacy, we could have succeeded, if at all, only at vastly greater expense in treasure as well as blood.)

In 1844, President James K. Polk was elected on an aggressively expansionist platform. At the time, the border between the United States and British Canada west of the continental divide was in dispute. Polk threatened to go to war with Britain over the issue. Negotiations between his secretary of state and the British envoy to Washington began in the summer of 1845. Britain made a deliberate decision to appease the United States rather than entrench a hostile relationship with it. In 1846, the two sides concluded the “Oregon Treaty.” This confirmed U.S. sovereignty south of the 49^th parallel everywhere but on an undivided Vancouver Island.

Polk’s diplomatic success enabled him to turn his combative attention to Texas. In 1846, he provoked war with Mexico. In the negotiations that followed the U.S. Army’s victory, the United States insisted on maximum terms from Mexico, softened by financial inducements. The resulting Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, signed on February 2, 1848, ended Mexican resistance, resigned Mexico to the U.S. annexation of Texas, and compelled it to sell California and the rest of its territory north of the Rio Grande. In 1853, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, James Gadsden, was able to buy additional territory from a still-intimidated Mexico through which to route a southern transcontinental railway.

In 1859, Russia offered to sell Alaska to the United States, hoping that this would position Americans to counter British power in the North Pacific. The U.S. Civil War intervened. But, in 1867, Secretary of State William Seward took up a renewed Russian offer and was able to arrange terms for the territorial transfer. The U.S. acquisition of Alaska ended Russia’s presence in North America and ensured American access to both the Pacific’s northern rim and the Arctic.

In normal times, diplomacy is not concerned with redefining frontiers but with arranging and policing the terms of trade, investment, and other citizen and corporate interactions across borders. The first treaties American diplomats negotiated were “treaties of commerce and navigation.” These were bilateral agreements designed to outflank British and other colonial mercantilism. They typically ensured “most favored nation” treatment with respect to trade, enshrined “national treatment” and prohibited discrimination, offered access to local courts or arbitration tribunals, exchanged consular officers to promote trade and investment and protect citizens, and established the rules for commerce and shipping in times of war.

Sixty-three such treaties remain in force in the United States today, despite the late 20^th century replacement of their primitive bilateral regulation of trade and maritime commerce with the more sophisticated and efficient multilateralism of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. These and other treaties define the multilateral framework of globalization from which the Trump administration is now withdrawing the United States. The American abandonment of multilateral trade and investment diplomacy, combined with aggressive protectionism that ignores previously prevailing norms, foreshadows future U.S. isolation and irrelevance in global economic governance.

Other major trading nations show no interest at all in replacing multilateral institutions and the globalized economy they regulate with new bilateral arrangements with the United States or each other. On the contrary, they are going ahead with new multilateral schemes that bypass or exclude the United States. Examples include the Japanese-led revival of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), burgeoning arrangements under China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and policy harmonization and standard setting under the Paris Climate Change Accord. Future American administrations will find themselves on the outside of these arrangements, trying to get in. Resentment of American unilateralism is replacing allegiance to U.S. leadership. Readmission to the councils of governance in an order that has been redefined without U.S. input will demand an unprecedented level of American diplomatic skill.

It is not new for the United States to exempt itself from global norms. What is new is the relative decline in American power in relation to others and the norms they have accepted. As an example, the United States is now the only country not to use the metric system. This ensures that American products cannot meet the standards of foreign markets without redesign or conversion.

This difference has not been much of an impediment for the U.S. economy, given its size, dynamism, and ability to print dollars instead of exporting goods and services to pay for imports. But, as the U.S. absents itself from multilateral institutions, others will see an opportunity to use differences like this to their competitive advantage. (I have personally seen American industry lose billions of dollars in markets abroad to the combination of U.S. complacency and foreign exploitation of standard setting to exclude the import of U.S. products.) In a globalized world, lack of alertness to such issues soon makes one uncompetitive.

The pseudo-populist plutocrats of the Trump administration came into office asserting that the open world economic order that successive previous administrations had fostered was unfair and had victimized American workers. The United States has now set the rules it created and enforced for so many decades aside. This is not just isolating America, it is severely undermining global order and governance. Meanwhile, alliances are becoming conditional, transforming themselves into ententes. Protectorates are decoupling themselves from their protectors, as confidence in the reliability of their security guarantors wanes. Client states are cynically abandoning allegiances and repositioning themselves between patrons. New trade pacts are coalescing even as other, more inclusive regimes cleave asunder. In the new world disorder, survival amidst prosperity will demand proficiency in the tactics of diplomatic maneuver.

If the key to sound strategy of any kind is whether one is asking the right question, the key to sound tactics is to ask “and then what?” before taking action. Strategy must be set at the top but tactics are best driven from the bottom up and from the field in. Those on the front lines are best positioned to judge the most effective tactics for pursuing strategic objectives in the circumstances they face. But the current trend is toward the centralization of American decision-making in Washington, the substitution of deductive reasoning from ideological presuppositions for inductive reasoning, and the disparagement of expertise and experience.

Often this sort of “narcissistic policy disorder” – to quote George Will – results in resort to attempted economic coercion through sanctions. Sanctions are politically attractive. They sever relationships and unravel ties that bind parties together. The immediate damage they do is regrettably almost always reciprocal. Groups and activities on both sides suffer. But the pain usually falls directly on parts of the private sector and very indirectly on the public at large – not at all on the politicians demanding punitive action or on the government of which they are part. Thus, sanctions are effective political theater even if they almost never work. There are numerous reasons for this.

The first is the nature of economic power. Unlike military power – which persuades by menacing the life, liberty, and happiness of those to whom it is applied – economic ties draw their power from the gains nations, companies, and individuals make from exchanging what they have for what they don’t. Like a string, economic power connects peoples, companies, and individuals and enables them to pull each other together. It induces cooperation through mutually beneficial trade and investment. This makes economic measures ideal tools of any strategy aimed at building communities or other cooperative international relationships, as the political effects of removing trade barriers in the European community or the growth of the Sino-centric supply-chain economy in East Asia both illustrate. But the fact that economic power links and encourages rather than sunders or discourages profitable exchanges of goods and services between nations also makes economic power a very poor tool of coercion. You can pull on a string. You can’t push on it.

Second, sanctions can be essential bargaining chips to be traded for concessions by their target. But this requires that they be part of a negotiating strategy, not a punitive end in themselves. At the bargaining table, sanctions are useful as threats. The fear of sanctions, the precise effects of which can seldom be modeled with accuracy, is generally more compelling than their actual effect. If sanctions are in fact imposed, their only utility becomes their removal in exchange for concessions that are part of a deal. But the longer sanctions are in place, the more difficult they are to remove.

Third, once sanctions are put in place, two things routinely happen. Their efficacy begins to be measured not by their effect on the policies and behavior of their target but by the pain they are seen to inflict on it. Their original purpose of compelling changes in behavior by their target is effectively forgotten. While the politicians grandstand, markets quickly adjust to the distortions in supply and demand that sanctions create. The government that is the object of the sanctions engages in import substitution, finds other suppliers, and institutionalizes smuggling to meet the demand for whatever it has been deprived of. This is good for its domestic industry, the economic competitors of the power imposing sanctions, and the profits of organized crime.

Fourth, as new patterns of commerce set in, some in the country imposing sanctions come to count on the protection from foreign competition that sanctions afford. As an example, consider the opposition of American sugar producers to the lifting of sanctions that preclude Cuba, which is a much lower cost sugar producer, from selling sugar in the United States. Some in the target country or in third countries also acquire a vested interest in the continuation of sanctions. Consider the growth of the armaments and other industries under sanctions on apartheid-era South Africa or the emergence of Brazil as an alternative source of soybeans for Japan and other importers after the Nixon administration restricted their export in 1973.

Fifth, like war – for which it is spuriously touted as a substitute – sanctions punish but do not automatically translate into changes in policy or behavior on the part of their target. Ostracism does not persuade, it enrages. Unacceptable demands are not made acceptable by maximum pressure and attempted public humiliation unaccompanied by a credible negotiating process. Nations are at their most dangerous when they perceive an existential threat or an injustice from which there is no potential relief through diplomatic dialogue. Japan reacted to such sanctions with a desperate attack on Pearl Harbor.

Finally, even when integrated into a negotiating process, sanctions increase public pressure but thereby encourage resistance, exacerbate recalcitrance, facilitate shifting the blame for everything going wrong domestically to those imposing them, rally nationalists against perceived foreign bullying, and make compromise more rather than less difficult. So sanctions typically retard rather than speed agreement at the negotiating table. In the end, as the Iran nuclear non-proliferation deal illustrated, the only utility of sanctions is their removal. This can seldom produce a deal resolving the dispute that justified them, but it can serve as a bonus to one.

In the new world disorder, the American advantages that once gave unilateral U.S. sanctions their unique impact are disappearing. In 1950, the United States provided 16.7 percent of the world’s exports and took a whopping 81 percent of its imports. In 2016, these figures had fallen to 9.1 and 13.8 percent, respectively. A disproportionate percentage of American exports now consist of financial and other services for which there are an increasing range of alternative non-American sources. This makes America a very powerful but no longer dominant force in international trade and investment. Americans have fewer followers internationally and a declining ability to impose economic and financial isolation on our foreign adversaries.

In these circumstances, the United States, as the issuer of the principal currency for settling international transactions, has come to rely on its sovereignty over the dollar to block trade and investment with countries like Iran, north Korea, and Russia. But this effectively imposes U.S. policies to which they object on economic powers like China, India, Japan, and south Korea. As these countries see it, the United States is abusing its power as the issuer of the preeminent global currency. This is driving them to explore work-arounds and substitutes to the dollar in their own trade with countries under U.S. sanctions. If they succeed, the consequence for Americans could be a catastrophic loss of the “exorbitant privilege” of printing money to pay for imports that we have long enjoyed. In any event, current trends guarantee that future generations of American diplomats will have less financial coercive power to work with. This will test their negotiating skills in ways that previous generations have not experienced.

Diplomatic negotiation is a teachable art. It differs from negotiation in other contexts because it takes place between nations, not citizens subject to coercion by the sovereign authority of their government through litigation in its courts. The participants in diplomatic negotiation have the option of resorting at any time to the use of force against each other. They can choose to accept or ignore the prevalent norms and rules of international law. Implicit agreement on rules by one side cannot assure that the other side will adhere to them. If diplomatic negotiations fail, the result is protracted impasse, escalating tensions, or armed conflict, not a lawsuit leading to a court decision and penalties. The stakes in international negotiation are higher than those in domestic transactions. All the more reason to demand excellence from those charged with conducting it.

Diplomatic negotiation should be viewed as an application of national power by measures short of war. The object is to persuade one’s opponent to embrace the need to accommodate one’s demands, faute de mieux. The purpose of diplomacy is not to reach agreement with the other side but to achieve the end state one’s strategy requires.

Very occasionally, not talking is a form of negotiation. It can allow time to ripen circumstances conducive to concessions by one’s adversary, for example, by inciting quarrels between it and third parties, encouraging insurrection against it, or demonstrating one’s coercive capabilities against a third party. Or it can mean using talks to shelve issues, stall for time to strengthen one’s position, allow the situation to evolve in one’s favor, create a crisis that forces the other side to make decisions it would otherwise evade, or make the other side appear to have been so unreasonable as to leave no alternative to the use of force against it. Stalling for time can also mean entering talks but conceding only minor points, insisting that the major issues or principles be reserved until they can be resolved to one’s advantage.

Diplomatic intercourse should never be seen as a favor to the other side but as a convenience to one’s own. It is a means by which to convey one’s position directly to an adversary, to listen to its reasoning about its position on the issues in contention, to argue for changes in that reasoning, and to warn, cajole, and probe for evidence of willingness to concede specific points. Direct dialogue can lend gravitas and the credibility of body language to threats or carefully articulated offers to compromise in ways that written messages or communication through intermediaries cannot. It can help develop constructive ambiguity, repair bruised amour propre, facilitate cooperation on issues of common concern notwithstanding confrontation on other matters, develop personal relationships that ease the resolution of disputes or enable collusion once opportunities ripen for it, and provide a distraction for the media. Meetings with adversaries are the theater in which diplomacy best struts its stuff.

The major task of diplomacy is the management of relationships. In the new world disorder, these seem certain to be more fluid than they were in the last century. Transactionalism seems set to replace fixed friendships and animosities. The progressive debilitation of the (admittedly imperfect) protections of international law is leaving countries with no alternative to defending themselves as best they can with whatever weaponry they can build or acquire. Relationships embodying obligations are diminishing, freeing states to maneuver in accordance with their interests as they see them. There are likely to be many ententes, but progressively fewer alliances and protectorates. The rivalries in a multipolar state system are unlikely to support many client states – free riders on the ambitions of a single great power patron. Smaller states are likely to consider strategic promiscuity a safer course than bonding with a particular patron.

Where interests for a time coincide, nations will cooperate. Where and when they do not, they will not. This environment will penalize diplomatic immobility and incompetence and reward agility, flexibility, versatility, and responsiveness to change that underwrites adaptation, resilience, and innovative approaches to deal with new problems and opportunities.

Some international relationships are bound to be adversarial. Diplomacy must seek to forestall the transformation of adversaries into active enemies. That is, unless – as is rarely the case – overt hostility by one foreign party can stimulate rapprochement by a larger, more capable nation whose support would facilitate the pursuit of other, more important interests. It is usually in the national interest to inhibit the evolution of relations from skepticism to passive resistance to active opposition on issues. Such evolution can lead to broadly adversarial relations. Adversarial relations easily become broad hostility or outright enmity.

During the Cold War, the United States learned to rely on deterrence rather than diplomacy to address potentially explosive situations. This made sense in a world order with essentially fixed frontiers between two great blocs of states in which the United States enjoyed unmatched coercive power. But, in the context of disorder and fluid relations between states, it should not be the first resort of statecraft. Deterrence leaves the causes of potential conflict to evolve for the worse, stimulates arms races, invites countermeasures, generates “security dilemmas,” and often precludes cooperation on unrelated matters. Its effect is to prevent problems from exploding now but to leave them to explode later. Sometimes the passage of time erases or alleviates the danger that disputes might erupt in armed conflict. But it can also permit them to fester and enlarge their potential to produce catastrophe.

Delay makes sense when one’s power is growing relative to that of others. But, strong as the United States is and will remain, others are growing ever stronger. The balance of economic and military power is shifting away from America. In these circumstances, deferring problems for later resolution assures that when and if they come to a head, U.S. leverage will have weakened even as the outcome of conflict has become more uncertain.. Future American diplomacy must focus first on resolving disputes, not perpetuating them.

“Ignorance is the cause of fear,” Seneca reminds us. Fear generates suspicion. This easily becomes hostility. Mutual familiarity may not breed affection but it is the best cure for imagined security dilemmas, in which each side’s defensive responses to the other are seen as threatening and requiring an escalatory response.

Losing contact with the enemy on the battlefield risks surprise, flanking, or encirclement. Halting communication with a diplomatic opponent carries similar risks. The principle of statecraft embodied in what the Arabs call “Muʿāwiyah’s Hair” applies. The second Umayyad Caliph, Muʿāwiyah ibn Abī Sufyān, famously declared: “should there be but one hair between me and the others, I would not have it cut: for if they slacken it I would pull, and if they pull I would slacken it some.”

The dangers of substituting protracted deterrence for diplomacy are well illustrated in the current confrontation between the United States and the so-called Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. For sixty-five years, U.S. policy toward the north Korean regime has consisted of containment through ostracism, embargo, confrontation, and military shows of force. There is no gainsaying the despicable cruelty and thuggish belligerence of the Kim Dynasty. But at no point has the United States, which is unquestionably the stronger party, developed a strategy for coexistence with north Korea. There has been no American initiative to seek replacement of the 1953 armistice with a peace, despite the commitment of its signatories to do so. Instead, American policy has consistently projected the collapse of the north Korean regime or its conquest if large-scale combat on the Korean Peninsula recurs. The north Korean response has been a desperate drive to develop nuclear weapons to deter direct or indirect U.S. imposition of regime change. This effort has now achieved – or is nearing – success.

It has also produced a breakthrough for north Korean diplomacy in the form of American agreement to a summit meeting – something that Pyongyang has long sought. The mere fact of this meeting confirms the importance of the DPRK, its new status as the possessor of a nuclear deterrent, and – by implication – the legitimacy of both its state and its security concerns. President Trump agreed to this meeting on the basis of a south Korean read-out of a private conversation with Chairman Kim Jong-un to which no Americans were privy. So far as we know, Chairman Kim has not confirmed the president’s interpretation of his words directly or indirectly. They have not left the realm of hearsay.

Talking with adversaries is usually better than not talking, provided you know what you’re going to say and are confident you know what your counterpart can and cannot accept. Direct communication with north Korea’s leader on terms that convey respect for his power (but not his policies) may prove to be the key to a breakthrough. But it could also produce a catastrophe.

That is bound to be the case if the president simply repeats past American positions and does not address the fears that underlie north Korea policy. From Chairman Kim’s perspective, the United States has been saying: “if you don’t disarm yourself, we reserve the right to kill you, so give up your deterrent now, and we’ll see what we can work out.” Libya’s Colonel Qaddhafi took a chance on a similar offer and gave up his weapons programs. A few years later, he was memorialized by the U.S. secretary of state with the words, “we came. We saw. He died.” It will be very difficult to persuade Kim Jong-un to place his trust the United States.

Summits between adversaries are the diplomatic equivalent of single combat to decide battles between armies. Summits risk everything on the outcome of a single encounter. They add a direct clash between egos to a contest of interests. If they are well prepared, summits can ratify or finalize agreements and consolidate new relationships. But they can also exacerbate and further entrench confrontation. Given the stakes, summits are seldom, if ever, undertaken without extensive prior consultation and negotiation between subordinates. They proceed only when such dialogue has confirmed that an encounter between leaders has a high probability of producing a breakthrough rather than a setback in relations.

In some ways, despite the vast superiority of U.S. military power, President Trump will find himself at a disadvantage at any summit he may have with Mr. Kim. The United States has never had many experts on the DPRK. The past year has seen an exodus from the U.S. government of most of the American diplomats and officials with experience of direct contact with north Korean counterparts. By contrast, the north Korean side is staffed with officials who have spent decades dealing with Americans. The balance of expertise favors Pyongyang, not Washington. So does the balance of fervor. The issues for Chairman Kim and his country are existential. President Trump’s personal prestige may depend on the outcome of a meeting with Chairman Kim, but the future of the United States does not. As Mr. Trump often says, we will see what happens.

Whatever that is, American diplomats need to learn from it. The U.S. military has the healthy habit of after-action reviews to learn from what went right, what went wrong, and what might have been done better in an engagement. Sometimes what is learned is sufficiently important to be incorporated into doctrine. More commonly, it provides insights into how training can be improved. A reconstituted, more professional United States Foreign Service should institutionalize similar reviews of its own performance and make them as mandatory and routine as the inspection of management functions in embassies and other diplomatic organizations now is.

The constant review of experience is essential to extract and test the hypotheses that constitute the doctrine – the institutional memory and essential skill set – of any profession. The substance of diplomacy involves maneuvers between states and peoples. These are both intellectually fascinating and emotionally engaging. Much ink is spilt describing and analyzing them. Diplomats – even retired diplomats – easily become fixated on the issues with which diplomacy must grapple and fail to focus on the process and methodologies by which such grappling must be done. But such a focus is the sine qua non of mastery of the diplomatic arts. Such mastery will be essential for the recovery of American leadership once the current, self-inflicted weakening of the United States politico-economic role in world affairs is behind us.

Diplomacy is a universal skill, not the preserve of any particular nation or its history. There is a great deal to be learned from the ways in which the statesmen of other countries manage – or fail to manage – the issues that confront them. But the American experience alone is rich in examples of effective diplomatic tactics. It is time for Americans to start mining that experience for the lessons it contains and to incorporate what we learn in a teachable body of interrelated operational concepts. The raw materials to build such diplomatic doctrine are before us. We just need to exploit them.

Senior Fellow, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University
By video link from Washington, DC, 10 January 2022

I’d like to thank the Washington International Diplomatic Academy for inviting me to speak about diplomacy as an instrument of statecraft. I envy you the practical training in diplomatic work you are receiving here. When I entered the Foreign Service of the United States in 1965, I had very little idea what I was getting into. It took me a while and a lot of help from colleagues and supervisors to figure it out. But eventually I had a very fulfilling career.

The word “diplomacy” is used in many different ways but most of them come down to “the tactful management of human relationships.” The great Filipino diplomat, Carlos Romulo,[1] once observed that, where a bureaucrat might say to an ill-favored woman, ‘Madam, you have a face that would stop a clock,’ a diplomat would say, ‘when I look into your eyes, time stands still for me.’ Dr. Romulo was not just making a point about how to win friends and influence people, he was drawing a distinction between home-based officials, who tend to rely on their authority to order others around, and diplomats, who must rely on tact and empathy to persuade foreigners to do what they otherwise would not believe to be in their interest.

What distinguishes diplomats from courtiers, securocrats, and other bureaucrats in a national capital is a reliance on empathy: the ability to see the world through other eyes and to use this insight to induce others to see their interests the way the diplomat wants them to see them. It takes more than a diplomatic passport, position, or title to make someone a “diplomat.” Diplomacy, like other skilled work, requires knowhow gained through training, mentoring, on-the-job experience, and awareness of historical precedents. It is a calling and a role, not a job title.

Yet diplomacy remains at best a proto-profession in the United States, thanks to the uniquely American reliance on the political spoils system to staff even key national security functions. This makes diplomatic appointments to benefit appointees and their political parties rather than the country. It thereby enshrines amateurism and incompetence. As the New York Herald-Tribune put it in 1857, in the United States “diplomacy is the sewer through which flows the scum and refuse of the political puddle. A man not fit to stay at home is just the man to send abroad.” Only one thing has changed about this in the last 165 years. Female campaign donors and celebrities now compete with men for appointments to what they imagine are ambassadorial sinecures in plummy places abroad, leaving seedy and dangerous places to lifers.

Professions embody expertise that defines a distinctive approach to the issues with which it deals. The French, who have thought more about diplomacy than most, call this la déformation professionelle – meaning a predisposition imposed by one’s occupation. Confronted with offensive foreign statements and behavior, political operatives will consider how to condemn those foreigners and demonstrate their unflinching rectitude to their constituents. Soldiers will calculate how to punish or deter further instances of foreign misbehavior. Lawyers will contemplate how they might make a case to a court of public opinion that the injury is illegal and so egregiously unjust as to merit compensation by the offending party. But professional diplomats will ask why the offending party is behaving as it is and what statements and actions on the part of their own government might move it in ways that serve their nation’s interest, mitigate the problem, solve it, and eliminate or reduce the danger of it festering into future conflict.

All professions rely on the accumulation of specialized knowledge that seniors can convey to junior members through training and mentoring. No profession can hope to emerge if its leading positions are allocated to amateurs whose only qualification is the wealth to buy them and the titles that go with them. As a result, the U.S. diplomatic service remains only partially professionalized. Not only is it less effective than it might be, but its members are debilitated by a constant struggle to sustain their morale.

Given the diminished margin for error of the United States in the new world disorder, there is reason to wonder how much longer America can rely on political dilettantes with little loyalty to anyone but themselves to manage relationships with foreign friends and foes. Until the American spoils system is curtailed, those foreign friends and foes will almost all be more experienced and skilled at diplomacy than many of their American counterparts.

Quarterbacking a team with someone who has never played the game is, of course, a sure path to futility. But, to look at the bright side, team members usually learn more from analyzing the reasons for failure than from complacency born of success. And sometimes political appointees have experience or skills that enable them to excel at a particular task. As an example, you would be hard-pressed to think of anyone more effective at the bargaining table than Leonard Woodcock,[2] the former head of the UAW[3] who negotiated the normalization of U.S. relations with China in 1978. Diplomats cannot help but learn a great deal from backstopping someone so masterful at a core diplomatic competency.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of professionals out there below the level of ambassador or serving as ambassador in places that plutocrats wisely do not covet. Many countries’ diplomatic services are highly professional. Notwithstanding our spoils system, so too is a remarkable portion of the U.S. diplomatic service. Whatever diplomatic service you join, you can and will learn a lot from both your diplomatic colleagues and your opponents.

And there is a good chance that, whatever country you come from, you will serve under someone who knows and can teach you the differences:

• between a démarche and a diatribe,

• between a nod of agreement and one of respect,

• between empathy and sympathy,

• between when to ask a question and when not to,

• between what was said and what was pointedly not said,

• between an unconditional and conditional concession,

• between a strategic concession and a tactical play for time,

• between a commitment and an equivocation,

• between a package deal and its component understandings,

• between a deal and an agreement ad referendum,

• between when to stay and when to walk out,

• and so forth.

The world’s diplomatic services are well stocked with men and women who have mastered the uses of listening, speech, and body language as tools with which to influence foreigners to redefine their interests to enable a measure of consensus. They know how best to preserve amicable relationships with foreign officials even as they cross verbal swords with these officials on behalf of their own government. Personal rapport and a reputation for reliability are the keys to being able to deal effectively with counterparts despite sharp official differences. A reputation for discretion and probity, once lost, is almost impossible to recover. Like everyone else, diplomats have only one reputation to lose.

Diplomats may prefer to keep “the whole truth and nothing but the truth” to themselves, but they seldom lie. Doing so would destroy the credibility that is their stock in trade. As François de Callières,[4] the authoritative 17^th and 18^th century French commentator on the profession of diplomacy put it: “A lie always leaves in its wake a drop of poison. The negotiator should recollect that he is likely for the rest of his life to be constantly engaged in diplomatic business and that it is essential for him to establish a reputation for straight and honest dealing.”

There is honor among thieves in large measure because they can’t refer attempts to cheat each other to the courts. Just so, there is honor among diplomats because there is no godfather or other supra-sovereign authority to resolve their differences or quell their disputes. These must either be left to fester unsettled or find resolution in power plays – perhaps on the battlefield. PACTA SUNT SERVANDA – “agreements must be kept” – is good advice for diplomats as well as the countries whose interests they seek to advance.

In the end, diplomats are only as effective as their personal rapport with their counterparts and the respect these counterparts have for their ethical standards. Every negotiation is both an effort to produce a transaction and the crafting of a relationship. A reputation for sophistry, haggling, and hairsplitting cripples diplomatic effectiveness as surely as one for backstabbing and slandering opponents.

Diplomats have a duty to keep relationships open to future dealings. This makes them wary of insulting opponents. Former Secretary of State “Mike” Pompeo and China’s wolf warrior spokespersons have provided the most recent proof that, as appealing as insults may be to folks on the home front, they foster foreign indignation and recalcitrance and preclude rather than encourage international cooperation. Discourtesy manifests arrogance, envy, belligerence, fear, and contempt. It buttresses hostility, resentment, distrust, anger, and obstinacy. As the savvy British diplomat, Harold Nicolson,[5] advised: “Negotiation should never degenerate into an argument; it should always be kept on the level of discussion.”

This is not to deny that, on rare occasions, a well-crafted insult can have a place in diplomacy. The great German statesman, Otto von Bismarck,[6] famously offended the French to goad them into a war he correctly calculated would unite Germany under Prussian leadership. Even so, Bismarck also advised that one should “be polite. Write diplomatically. Even in a declaration of war one observes the rules of politeness.” Diplomats seldom insult others inadvertently, and never without calculating the consequences of doing so.

This is because, as the American scholar Kenneth Thompson observed: “The aim of the diplomat is to get as much as he can for his country while giving as little as he can. His unfailing courtesy in this process is not the result of a spineless desire to make himself agreeable to foreigners or to bargain away his country’s good name for good will. It is rather grounded upon a mutual recognition that current negotiation is a mere incident in a continuing relationship, that both parties will have an unending series of matters to settle in the future, and that any agreement will be facilitated through maintenance of objectivity, good will, and good temper.”

Relationships embody mutual expectations and commitments, explicit or implicit. They are the warp and weft of the canvases on which international maneuvers are embroidered and strategies weave their way. Statesmen look to diplomats to manage foreign relationships even as they look to spies to induce foreigners to betray their governments or to the armed forces to break their will and force their capitulation. But the distinctions between these three instruments of statecraft are less than clearcut.

Diplomats are major contributors to the collection of intelligence on foreign societies and their governments. Spies conduct international liaison relationships with foreign intelligence agencies that supplement and can occasionally supplant overt diplomacy, but they also seek to stimulate treason and to carry out covert actions, proxy warfare, and assassinations. In addition to making war and to backing diplomacy with shows of force, the nation’s armed services collect intelligence and engage in diplomatic dialogue through their attachés and exchanges of visits with foreign counterparts. These activities are often poorly integrated by policy processes in the capital. They must in the end be coordinated by ambassadors empowered to do so as the only officials charged with representing the whole government, not just the foreign ministry, intelligence agencies, defense establishment, or domestic bureaucracies.

Diplomats, spies, and soldiers are agents of the state and, as such, bound by raison d’état, the doctrine that agents cannot substitute their own judgment for that of the duly constituted national authority from which they receive policy directives based on considered judgments. But they must exercise their own judgment in their efforts to implement and advance them with foreign officials. As the men and women on the spot, they are the officials best able to assess how to persuade foreign counterparts to see things the same way their own government does.

Diplomacy seeks to apply measures short of war and subversion to influence the decisions of foreign governments. Diplomats do this with a mixture of charm and discourse informed by empathy and precise diction. As Demosthenes remarked, “ambassadors have no battleships at their disposal, no heavy infantry or fortresses; their weapons are words and opportunities.” Opportunities are often fleeting. And when ultimata are issued, it is up to diplomats to exact the desired changes in foreign behavior. This requires them to explain the policies of their government persuasively but meticulously, without misleading embellishment.

Diplomats use their understanding of local circumstances and personalities to frame arguments and to time their presentations to maximum advantage with the foreigners with whom they have cultivated relationships. Building such ties is a social activity that seeks intimacy by various means. Countless diplomatic discussions have occurred over good food and drink, centered at well-dressed dining tables in embassies and diplomatic residences. Food brings people together, and the dining table makes for an excellent setting to develop cordial and productive relationships with others. But sometimes this isn’t enough.

It is rumored that Francis Dana, the first American envoy to Russia, slept with Catherine the Great. (It must be admitted that this was not the distinction it might have been.) In any event, if so, this personal intimacy proved unpersuasive. The Czarina never accepted Dana’s credentials as the ambassador of the self-proclaimed American republic. But this should not be taken to mean that relationship-building activities can be more effectively conducted by policy wonks and bureaucrats back home than by the man or woman on the spot. Diplomats are marginal figures in domestic politics but experience in domestic politics and government is not per se a qualification for the management of foreign relations.

In practice, despite being called “plenipotentiary,” ambassadors usually have only the authority with which their state has explicitly entrusted them. Instructions to them are most effective when they focus on objectives and let them, as those closest to the officials who decide others’ policies, figure out best how to achieve them. One should not underestimate the ability of sycophantic officials back home to come up with utterly outlandish instructions just to show that they are “doing something.”

Ambassadors are not letter carriers. They are expected to exercise independent judgment about what will or will not serve the national interest. As ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the collapse of the Soviet Union,[7] I was instructed to ask the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Fahd,[8] to buy surplus Polish ham for the starving communists in the USSR. That would have been like asking the Pope to buy condoms for the suffering Muslim inhabitants of Bangladesh, and I said so. The senior official who had backed this harebrained idea was not much taken with my metaphor, but both he and the United States were spared an unnecessary embarrassment and rebuff.

Diplomats are the main managers and implementers of state-to-state communication and participants, along with intelligence analysts, in helping national leaders understand and deal with foreign governments and societies. But domestic political opinions on foreign affairs have multidimensional densities that give them inertia. Blowing away domestic preconceptions is hard. However much they may fail to describe reality, politically convenient narratives are not easily shifted. In times of crisis, homegrown politicians and their minions instinctively throw the experts out of the room and sever dialogue with the enemy. It is more emotionally satisfying and politically profitable to posture and apportion blame than to analyze foreign opponents’ motivations and agendas. But this is a well-attested mistake.

Diplomats pride themselves on providing a calm, direct means of communication with allies and adversaries alike. Their utility is as great – or maybe even greater – in times of war as in times of peace. In wartime, diplomats nurture their own side’s alliances even as they disrupt the enemy’s. Losing contact with enemy forces on the battlefield risks tactical or strategic surprise. Losing touch with foreign opponents in times of tension deprives one of useful intelligence and makes it hard to detect or exploit a ripe moment to facilitate the accomplishment of war aims without embittering bloodshed.

As General William Tecumseh Sherman[9] wisely observed, the purpose of war is a more advantageous peace. But wars do not end until the defeated accept the consequences of their defeat by internalizing it and agreeing to necessary behavioral and other changes. Translating the results of war into a peace – a new status quo post bellum acquiesced in by all with the capacity to overthrow it – is not as easy as many imagine. It is often forgotten that the United States did not achieve independence at Yorktown in 1781 but only in 1783, when, after two years of difficult negotiations, Great Britain grudgingly agreed in the Treaty of Paris to end its claims to its rebellious colonies in America and recognize them as sovereign states.

What has not been gained on the battlefield can almost never be won at the negotiating table. But what was won on the battlefield can easily be lost if it is not consolidated in new political arrangements. The “mission” is not “accomplished” until the enemy has accepted terms and laid down its arms.

This is a reminder that military outcomes are not automatically translated into desired adjustments of enemy territory or behavior. They require an agreed adjustment in relations between victor and vanquished. To produce and implement such an agreement, someone must be able to speak for and reconcile the defeated to the new realities. Unless a war aims at outright conquest, annexation, or genocide, decapitating the enemy government is counterproductive. Unconditional surrender makes the victor responsible for the domestic tranquility and wellbeing of the enemy populace. Administering foreign societies is not something armies – or diplomats – are good at.

Of course, not all victories involve warfare. Normally, ambassadors have no mandate to reach agreements they have not been authorized to offer or accept. But in 1803, the U.S. minister to France, Robert Livingston, had the gumption to seize an opportunity neither he nor his superiors had anticipated. He had been tasked and allocated funds to buy the city of New Orleans from the French. Instead, the French proved open to selling all their claims to territory on the North American continent. For fifteen million dollars, rather than the ten he had been told was the most he could spend to buy New Orleans, Livingston bought the rights to the entire Mississippi Valley and points as far north and west as Montana, nearly doubling the size of the United States. Sometimes it’s better to act within the spirit of one’s instructions and to risk having to apologize later than to miss an obvious opportunity.

On the other hand, if diplomats have poor or no instructions, they cannot respond effectively to unexpected developments. Sadly, this was the case with the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, April Glaspie, when she met Saddam Hussein on the eve of his attempted annexation of Kuwait in 1990. She could not take a position on his complaints against Kuwait without authorization from Washington, and she had none. Diplomats make easy scapegoats. Like many before her, Ambassador Glaspie ended up taking the fall for officials back home who had ignored her warnings and failed to respond to her repeated requests for instructions.

As advocates, diplomats seek to persuade foreign leaders, counterparts, and elites of the merits of their government’s policies. In this role, they are like lawyers, but with a sole client – the government they represent – and no court from which they can seek a ruling. Like lawyers, they need not believe in the innocence of their client to defend it. They have a professional obligation to make the best case they can for their government’s views, whether they agree with these or not. They may well dissent and argue for different policies in classified internal channels, but not in public or where they might be overheard by someone not in their chain of command.

In ancient times, diplomats were expected to be orators, addressing the legislators and citizens of other states. Today, the audiences range from academics and think tankers to the media and the public at large. Diplomats are supposed to make appearances before all. This leaves them, in Harold Macmillan’s words: “forever poised between a cliché and an indiscretion.” It is also a reminder that as Abba Eban, one of the last century’s greatest diplomats, said: “A capacity to use words with precision and a highly developed sense of their potential effect on listeners are of substantive importance and are not just a matter of ritual elegance. The semantic obsessions of diplomats deserve more respect than they generally receive. What statesmen and diplomats say is often as vital as what they do. It would not be farfetched to go further and declare that speech is an incisive form of action.”

Diplomacy is, after all, a political performance art. Diplomats are not just on stage but under near constant surveillance by their host country’s intelligence services (as well, sometimes, those of third countries or even, in some cases, their own). They are role players and on duty 24/7. Diplomats risk undermining their own credibility and that of their government if they confide their doubts about the missions they have been assigned to others – including the ears and cameras so often concealed in the walls where they live or work. And, in speaking with their foreign counterparts, they must take care to ensure that there is no confusion between their own views of situations on which they have no instructions and those of their government.

It can be stressful for diplomats to remain closely aligned with their government’s views regardless of their own. If their involvement in policies with which they fundamentally disagree goes beyond public advocacy of them and comes to include responsibility for the direct implementation of these policies, diplomats must make a choice between continuing to serve or resigning in protest. In such circumstances, it helps to have a fallback career. As the Chinese say: 狡兔三窟 – cunning rabbits always have three escape routes. Diplomats who give no thought to alternative employment risk being trapped in place.

Fortunately, diplomacy is a career that schools its practitioners in skills that provide a solid basis for other careers and that accustoms them to frequent job changes and relocations Aside from the satisfactions of serving one’s country, one of the attractions of diplomacy is that your tasks, cultural and linguistic environments, colleagues, counterparts, and friends are all subject to kaleidoscopic change. As a diplomat, you are always learning something or going somewhere unexpected. Most of all you learn how to operate in other countries’ languages and cultures and how to make things happen in them. This is knowhow that entrepreneurship can apply to a wide range of endeavors.

The greatest enemy of both diplomacy and intelligence analysis is “mirror-imaging,” the lazy supposition that foreigners see their interests or reason and make decisions the same way as one’s own political culture and government. For example, to get things done in Japan, it helps to understand that government ministers or corporate chief executives seldom make decisions on their own. They see their role as the ratification of recommendations that have percolated upward from mid-level experts in the institutions they head. In the case of Japanese government ministries, almost no decision is made without final vetting by the “administrative vice minister” — the senior career official in the ministry. Raising an idea at the ministerial level in Tokyo without ensuring that it has first gained support at lower levels is almost invariably a waste of time.

In China, decisions are made by the Party apparatus. It is a culturally parochial mistake to assume that the state president and head of the Chinese Communist Party has personal executive authority equivalent to that of the U.S. president and can engage in similarly freewheeling discussion. Chinese officials, however senior, have no authority to commit their country to actions that its state and party apparatuses and their relevant comrades have not reviewed and approved.

Each country has its own ways. Most often, these differ from the preconceptions of diplomats’ compatriots and government officials, who are prone to imagining that other societies do things the same way they are done at home or that, if they don’t, they should. But what works in one political culture may very well be ineffectual or off-putting in another. To be able to advocate their governments’ policies effectively, diplomats must rely on developing expertise that enables them to nudge the decision-making processes of the governments whose decisions they seek to guide in the desired direction. Resisting micromanagement – the so-called “eight-thousand-mile screwdriver” – is often essential to get the job at hand done.

Of course, diplomats are not just advocates and actors, they are also reporters charged with helping those from whom they receive instructions to accept that the art of the possible differs from country to country. This aspect of diplomatic tradecraft demands superior analytical and writing skills as well as fluency in local languages. Diplomatic reporting must be vivid as well as insightful and accurate if it is to be to be able to achieve a serious readership back home, where officials are deluged with data from many sources but looking for inside information on which to base policy recommendations.

One of the first things you learn as a diplomatic reporter is not to direct your analysis into the void, but to write it to a specific audience. The objective of reporting and analysis by embassies and consulates is to help responsible officials of your government gain a more up-to-date and accurate understanding of often exotic foreign realities. Some reporting is simply a summary of encounters and events plus a comment to relate them to your nation’s interests. But much resembles journalistic feature articles. The best of it draws on restricted intelligence reports as well as direct observation to illuminate the subjects it addresses. And it recognizes the demands on busy officials back home by putting the “bottom line up front” and being succinct.

What appears in newspapers and magazines is intended to attract readers and generate revenue. In contrast, the purpose of diplomatic analysis is to illuminate the probable consequences of trends and events for the diplomat’s nation, its government, its foreign relationships, its socioeconomic wellbeing, and its policies. The sources of information journalists rely upon often speak in confidence. They expect protection from public exposure that might embarrass or injure them. So do diplomatic and intelligence sources. If either are “burned,” they quite naturally feel betrayed, and retreat into silence.

Wikileaks’ indiscriminate release of American diplomatic reporting and analysis violated the privacy and endangered the wellbeing of multiple sources who had relied on assurances of confidentiality. This usefully uncovered various forms of military misbehavior, including war crimes. But it was unprofessional and irresponsible. Had Wikileaks done the same with reporters’ notes, rather than filtering the information in them into stories that protected sources and methods, professional journalists would rightly have condemned it. In the event, many useful informal channels of communication between Americans, foreign officials, and other informants were compromised and ended by this unprofessional impropriety.

Intelligence is best defined as information that is useful to statecraft. Much of it is public knowledge or verification of widely presumed facts, and most of it is collected overtly rather than through espionage. The internet is no substitute for direct conversation with those making decisions for foreign governments and entities or direct questioning of those in the know. In this regard, I commend the wise approach of my political counselor in Beijing to managing his section. In the afternoons, he would make the rounds and tell anyone he saw sitting at a desk that they didn’t need to be in Beijing to do that and that the value they added to our understanding of China was their ability to get out and about. He would suggest that they either make an appointment to see a Chinese official or go sit in the park and talk to ordinary Chinese.

Staying abreast of trends and events where you are stationed makes you a valuable resource not just for your government but for your country’s business community. A good deal of diplomatic work involves supporting the expansion of your nation’s export of goods and services and the promotion of profitable investments for its companies and citizens abroad.

Companies compete and so do foreign and third-country diplomats and trade officials. This makes them reluctant to divulge much about their affairs or the difficulties they may be encountering in conducting them in a particular country or region. Just as discretion is a prerequisite for rapport and honest dialogue with knowledgeable sources of insight into developments in the country where you are assigned, so, too, it is essential to the conduct of trade promotion and to effective advice and counsel to your country’s businesses and investors. The Arab saying: “If I’ve regretted my silence once, I’ve regretted my words a thousand times” is sound, cautionary advice for diplomats and others engaged in negotiations.

Diplomats must be concerned not only about how foreigners interpret what they say. They must be careful not to foster distrust among officials back home. Their effectiveness as envoys depends on the host country’s confidence that they have the support of their own government. Sustaining such support is more difficult than it might at first appear. Most capitals are prone to groupthink and averse to dissenting views. Officials with no experience on the ground are likely to have false images of its topography and mistake descriptions of it for “clientitis.”

Central to diplomatic work is the duty to help officials back home formulate feasible objectives and policies that have a chance of attaining them. Retaining credibility requires avoiding frontal assaults on the often-unrealistic narratives that dominate discourse in your own government. You must constantly bear witness to your focus on your country’s national interests even as you interpret the incompatible views foreigners have of theirs, explain these to your government, and suggest ways to reshape the foreign perceptions and policy positions you are analyzing. This can be personally perilous, as the China hands who fearlessly predicted a communist victory in the Chinese civil war in the 1940s soon learned. Sometimes it seems that no accurate analysis goes unpunished, and that the worst that can happen to you is to recognize the imminence of unwelcome developments before others do.

Part of retaining a favorable reputation in your own capital is close attention to the needs of your fellow citizens abroad. Consular work – issuing passports and visas and rescuing compatriots in distress – is psychologically rewarding. It also gives you unique insights into the functioning of key institutions like prisons, courts, hospitals, police stations, and ports in the society in which you are stationed. If that society has sufficiently different values, this can be a major part of an ambassador’s job. When I made my farewell call on His Royal Highness Prince Salman bin `Abdulaziz (then the Emir of Riyadh, now the king of Saudi Arabia)[10] I realized that this was the first of dozens of meetings with him in which I did not have to negotiate the release or pardon of “my women” from “his men” in the form of the Kingdom’s religious vigilantes. As ambassador to a country with a substantial number of resident citizens and companies from your homeland, you are in many respects the mayor of a small – or not so small – town and must act accordingly.

You and your spouse – if you have one – are also the keepers of a small inn. Visiting officials and their friends often expect you to put them up and feed them, assuming incorrectly that you have been provided with official funds to do so. In some circumstances, the volume of visitors can become so great that there is no time left for other tasks. In the run-up to the January 1991 coalition counterattack to liberate Kuwait, I had to appeal to Washington to stop treating Saudi Arabia like a military theme park with a general and ambassador as tour guides.

As I have pointed out, diplomacy can prepare you for many other occupations. It is a profession with multiple facets. It is one:

• that is a fulfillment of patriotic service;

• that is all about nations, people, and the management of their relationships;

• that offers a place and sometimes a role on stage in the making of history;

• that holds boredom at bay through kaleidoscopic changes in your workplace, colleagues, linguistic and cultural environments, and tasks; and

• that, while poorly understood, is nonetheless prestigious.

A career in diplomacy has its political and physical perils, only some of which I have had time to address. Success as a diplomat requires training, mentoring, and the seasoning that only experience can provide. It is a calling not to be entered into lightly, but with considered judgment and solemn commitment. It can be a great satisfaction to serve your country in a nomadic career that demands constant adjustment to new environments. If you choose to become diplomats, I wish you every success.

[1] 1899 – 1985.

[2] 1911 – 2001.

[3] United Auto Workers

[4] 1645 -1717.

[5] 1896 – 1968.

[6] 1815 – 1898.

[7] 1991.

[8] Reigned 1982 – 2005.

[9] 1820 – 1891.

[10] Assumed the throne 23 January 2015.

Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
22 May 2013, Washington, D.C

It is a privilege to have been asked to join this discussion of Jacob Heilbrunn’s account of Israel’s fraying image. His article seems to me implicitly to raise two grim questions.

The first question is how long Israel can survive as a democracy or at all. The Jewish state has left the humane vision of early Zionism and its own beginnings far behind it. Israel now rules over a disenfranchised Muslim and Christian majority whom it would like to expel and a significant minority of disrespected secular and progressive Jews who are stealing away to the safer and more tolerant environs of the United States and other Western countries. Israel has befriended none of its Arab neighbors. It has spurned or subverted all their offers to accept and make peace with it except when compelled to address these by American diplomacy. The Jewish state has now largely alienated its former friends and supporters in Europe. Its all-important American patron and protector suffers from budgetary bloat, political constipation, diplomatic enervation, and strategic myopia.

The second question is what difference Israel’s increasing international isolation or withering away might make to Americans, including but not limited to Jewish Americans.

Let me very briefly speak to some of the issues that create these questions.

For a large majority of those over whom the Israeli state rules directly or indirectly, Israel is already not a democracy. It consists of four categories of residents: Jewish Israelis who, as the ruling caste, are full participants in its political economy; Palestinian Arab Israelis, who are citizens with restricted rights and reduced benefits; Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank, who are treated as stateless prisoners in their own land; and Palestinian Arabs in the Gaza ghetto, who are an urban proletariat besieged and tormented at will by the Israeli armed forces. The operational demands of this multi-layered, militarily-enforced system of ethno-religious separation have resulted in the steady contraction of freedoms in Israel proper.

Judaism is a religion distinguished by its emphasis on justice and humanity. American Jews, in particular, have a well-deserved reputation as reliable champions of the oppressed, opponents of racial discrimination, and advocates of the rule of law. But far from exhibiting these traditional Jewish values – which are also those of contemporary America – Israel increasingly exemplifies their opposites. Israel is now known around the world for the Kafkaesque tyranny of its checkpoint army in the Occupied Territories, its periodic maiming and slaughter of Lebanese and Gazan civilians, its blatant racial and religious bigotry, the zealotry and scofflaw behavior of its settlers, its theology of ethnic cleansing, and its exclusionary religious dogmatism.

Despite an ever more extensive effort at hasbara – the very sophisticated Israeli art of narrative control and propaganda – it is hardly surprising that Israel’s formerly positive image is, as Mr. Heilbrunn reports, badly “fraying.” The gap between Israeli realities and the image projected by hasbara has grown beyond the capacity of hypocrisy to bridge it. Israel’s self-destructive approach to the existential issues it faces challenges the consciences of growing numbers of Americans – both Jewish and non-Jewish – and raises serious questions about the extent to which Israel supports, ignores, or undermines American interests in its region. Many have come to see the United States less as the protector of the Jewish state than as the enabler of its most self-injurious behavior and the endower of the many forms of moral hazard from which it has come to suffer.

The United States has assumed the role of protecting power for Israel, which depends heavily on the ability of American Jews to mobilize subsidies, diplomatic and legal protection, weapons transfers, and other forms of material support in Washington. This task is made easier by the sympathy for Zionism of a large but silent and mostly passive evangelical Christian minority as well as lingering American admiration for Israelis as the pioneers of a vibrant new society in the Holy Land. It is noteworthy, however, that those actually lobbying for Israel are almost without exception Jewish. Their efforts exploit the unscrupulous venality and appeasement of politically powerful donors that are essential to political survival in modern America to assure reflexive fealty to Israel’s rightwing and its policies. When it’s not denying its own existence, the Israel Lobby boasts that it is the most effective special-interest advocate in the country. Official America’s passionate attachment to Israel has become a very salient part of U.S. political pathology. It epitomizes the ability of a small but determined minority to extract tax resources for its cause while blocking efforts to question these exactions.

Americans tend to resent aggressively manipulative behavior and have little patience with sycophancy. The ostentatious obsequiousness in evidence during Prime Minister Netanyahu’s address to Congress two years ago and the pledges of fealty to Israel of last year’s presidential campaign were a major turn-off for many. Mr. Netanyahu has openly expressed his arrogant presumption that he can manipulate America at will. Still, thoughtful Israelis and Zionists of conscience in the United States are now justifiably concerned about declining empathy with Israel in the United States, including especially among American Jews. In most European countries, despite rising Islamophobia, sympathy for Israel has already fallen well below that for the Palestinians. Elsewhere outside North America, it has all but vanished. An international campaign of boycott, disinvestment, and sanctions along the lines of that mounted against apartheid South Africa is gathering force.

Those who have lost the support of more than a passionate minority are often driven to defame and vilify those who disagree with them. Intimidation is necessary only when one cannot make a persuasive case for one’s position. As the case for the coincidence of American interests and values with those of Israel has lost credibility, the lengths to which Israel’s partisans go to denounce those who raise questions about Israel’s behavior have reached levels that invite ridicule, parody, melancholy, and disgust. The Hagel hearings evoked all four among many, plus widespread foreign derision and contempt. Mr. Hagel’s “rope-a-dope” defense may not have been elegant but it was as effective against bullying assault as nonviolent resistance usually is in the presence of observers with a commitment to decency. The American people have such a commitment and reacted as might be expected to their Senators’ overwrought busking for political payoffs.

Outside the United States, where narratives made in Israel do not rule the airwaves, the Jewish state has lost favor and is now widely denigrated. Israel’s bellicosity and contempt for international law evoke particular apprehension. Every war that Israel has engaged in since its creation has been initiated by it with the single exception of the Yom Kippur / Ramadan War of 1973, which was begun by Egypt. Israel is currently threatening to launch an unprovoked attack on Iran that it admits cannot succeed unless it can manipulate America into yet another Middle Eastern war. Many, if not most outside the United States see Israel as a major source of regional instability and – through the terrorism this generates – a threat to the domestic tranquility of any country that aligns with it.

To survive over the long term, Israel needs internationally recognized borders and peace with its neighbors, including the Palestinians. Achieving this has for decades been the major objective of U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East. But no effort to convince Israel to do what it must to make peace goes unpunished. Jimmy Carter’s tough brokering of normal relations between Israel, Egypt, and, ultimately, Jordan led to his disavowal by his own party. Barack Obama’s attempt to secure Israel’s acceptance in the Middle East led to his humiliation by Israel’s Prime Minister and his U.S. yahoos and flacks. The Jewish state loses no opportunity to demonstrate that it wants land more than it wants peace. As a result, there has been no American-led “peace process” worthy of the name in this century. Israel continues to ignore the oft-reiterated Arab and Islamic offer to normalize relations with it if it just does what it promised in the Camp David accords it would do: withdraw from the occupied territories and facilitate Palestinian self-determination.

Israel has clearly chosen to stake its future on its ability, with the support of the United States, to maintain perpetual military supremacy in its region. Yet, this is a formula with a convincing record of prior failure in the Middle East. It is preposterous to imagine that American military power can indefinitely offset Israel’s lack of diplomatic survival strategy or willingness to accommodate the Arabs who permeate and surround it. Successive externally-supported crusader kingdoms, having failed to achieve the acceptance of their Muslim neighbors, were eventually overrun by these neighbors. The power and influence of the United States, while still great, are declining at least as rapidly as American enthusiasm for following Israel into the endless warfare it sees as necessary to sustain a Jewish state in the Middle East.

The United States has made and continues to make an enormous commitment to the defense and welfare of the Jewish state. Yet it has no strategy to cope with the tragic existential challenges Zionist hubris and overweening territorial ambition have now forged for Israel. It is the nature of tragedy for the chorus to look on helplessly as a heroic figure with many admirable qualities is overwhelmed by faulty self-perception and judgment. The hammerlock that the Israeli right has on American discourse about the Middle East assures that America will remain an onlooker rather than an effective actor on matters affecting Israel, unable to protect Israel’s long-term interests or its own.

The outlook is therefore for continuing deterioration in Israel’s image and moral standing. This promises to catalyze discord in the United States as well as the progressive enfeeblement of American influence in the region and around the globe. Image problems are often symptoms of deeper existential challenges. By the time that Israel recognizes the need to make compromises for peace in the interest of its own survival, it may well be too late to bring this off. It would not be the first time in history that Jewish zealotry and suspicion of the bona fides of non-Jews resulted in the disappearance of a Jewish state in the Middle East. The collateral damage to the United States and to world Jewry from such a failure is hard to overstate. That is why the question of American enablement of shortsightedly self-destructive Israeli behavior needs public debate, not suppression by self-proclaimed defenders of Israel operating as thought police. And it is why Mr. Heilbrunn’s essay needs to be taken seriously not just as an investigation of an unpalatable reality but as a harbinger of very serious problems before both Israel and the United States.

Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Senior Fellow, the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs

2 April 2016, Barrington, Rhode Island

I’m here to talk about the end of the American empire. But before I do I want to note that one of our most charming characteristics as Americans is our amnesia. I mean, we are so good at forgetting what we’ve done and where we did it that we can hide our own Easter eggs….

Americans like to forget we ever had an empire or to claim that, if we did, we never really wanted one. But the momentum of Manifest Destiny made us an imperial power. It carried us well beyond the shores of the continent we seized from its original aboriginal and Mexican owners. The Monroe Doctrine proclaimed an American sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere. But the American empire was never limited to that sphere.

In 1854, the United States deployed U.S. Marines to China and Japan, where they imposed our first treaty ports. Somewhat like Guantánamo, these were places in foreign countries where our law, not theirs, prevailed, whether they liked it or not. Also in 1854, U.S. gunboats began to sail up and down the Yangtze River (the jugular vein of China), a practice that ended only in 1941, when Japan as well as the Chinese went after us.

In 1893, the United States engineered regime change in Hawaii. In 1898, we annexed the islands outright. In that same year, we helped Cuba win its independence from Spain, while confiscating the Spanish Empire’s remaining holdings in Asia and the Americas: Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. Beginning in 1897, the U.S. Navy contested Samoa with Germany. In 1899, we took Samoa’s eastern islands for ourselves, establishing a naval base at Pago Pago.

From 1899 to 1902, Americans killed an estimated 200,000 or more Filipinos who tried to gain independence for their country from ours. In 1903, we forced Cuba to cede a base at Guantánamo to us and detached Panamá from Colombia. In later years, we occupied Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, parts of Mexico, and Haiti.

Blatant American empire-building of this sort ended with World War II, when it was replaced by a duel between us and those in our sphere of influence on one side and the Soviet Union and countries in its sphere on the other. But the antipathies our earlier empire-building created remain potent. They played a significant role in Cuba’s decision to seek Soviet protection after its revolution in 1959. They inspired the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua. (Augusto César Sandino, whose name the movement took, was the charismatic leader of the resistance to the 1922 – 1934 U.S. occupation of Nicaragua.) In 1991, as soon as the Cold War ended, the Philippines evicted U.S. bases and forces on its territory.

Spheres of influence are a more subtle form of dominance than empires per se. They subordinate other states to a great power informally, without the necessity of treaties or agreements. In the Cold War, we ruled the roost in a sphere of influence called “the free world” – free only in the sense that it included every country outside the competing Soviet sphere of influence, whether democratic or aligned with the United States or not. With the end of the Cold War, we incorporated most of the former Soviet sphere into our own, pushing our self-proclaimed responsibility to manage everything within it right up to the borders of Russia and China. Russia’s unwillingness to accept that everything beyond its territory is ours to regulate is the root cause of the crises in Georgia and Ukraine. China’s unwillingness to acquiesce in perpetual U.S. dominance of its near seas is the origin of the current tensions in the South China Sea.

The notion of a sphere of influence that is global except for a few no-go zones in Russia and China is now so deeply ingrained in the American psyche that our politicians think it entirely natural to make a number of far-reaching assertions, like these:

(1) The world is desperate for Americans to lead it by making the rules, regulating global public goods, policing the global commons, and doing in “bad guys” everywhere by whatever means our president considers most expedient.

(2) America is losing influence by not putting more boots on the ground in more places.

(3) The United States is the indispensable arbiter of what the world’s international financial institutions should do and how they should do it.

(4) Even if they change, American values always represent universal norms, from which other cultures deviate at their peril. Thus, profanity, sacrilege, and blasphemy – all of which were not so long ago anathema to Americans – are now basic human rights to be insisted upon internationally. So are indulgence in homosexuality, climate change denial, the sale of GM foodstuffs, and the consumption of alcohol.

And so forth.

These American conceits are, of course, delusional. They are all the more unpersuasive to foreigners because everyone can see that America is now in a schizophrenic muddle – able to open fire at perceived enemies but delusional, distracted, and internally divided to the point of political paralysis. The ongoing “sequester” is a national decision not to make decisions about national priorities or how to pay for them. Congress has walked off the job, leaving decisions about war and peace to the president and turning economic policy over to the Fed, which has now run out of options. Almost half of our senators had time to write to America’s adversaries in Tehran to disavow the authority of the president to represent us internationally as the Constitution and the laws prescribe. But they won’t make time to consider treaties, nominees for public office, or budget proposals. Politicians who long asserted that “Washington is broken” appear to take pride in themselves for finally having broken it. The run-up to the 2016 presidential election is providing ongoing evidence that the United States is currently suffering from the political equivalent of a nervous breakdown.

Congress may be on strike against the rest of the government, but our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines remain hard at work. Since the turn of the century, they have been kept busy fighting a series of ill-conceived wars – all of which they have lost or are losing. The major achievement of multiple interventions in the Muslim world has been to demonstrate that the use of force is not the answer to very many problems but that there are few problems it cannot aggravate. Our repeated inability to win and end our wars has damaged our prestige with our allies and adversaries alike. Still, with the Congress engaged in a walkout from its legislative responsibilities and the public in revolt against the mess in Washington, American global leadership is not much in evidence except on the battlefield, where its results are not impressive.

Diplomacy-free foreign policy blows up enough things to liven up the TV news but it generates terrorist blowback and it’s expensive. There is a direct line of causation between European and American interventions in the Middle East and the bombings in Boston, Paris, and Brussels as well as the flood of refugees now inundating Europe. And so far this century, we’ve racked up over $6 trillion in outlays and future financial obligations in wars that fail to achieve much, if anything, other than breeding anti-American terrorists with global reach.

We borrowed the money to conduct these military activities abroad at the expense of investing in our homeland. What we have to show for staggering additions to our national debt is falling living standards for all but the “one percent,” a shrinking middle class, a rising fear of terrorism, rotting infrastructure, unattended forest fires, and eroding civil liberties. Yet, with the notable exception of Bernie Sanders, every major party candidate for president promises not just to continue — but to double down on — the policies that produced this mess.

Small wonder that both U.S. allies and adversaries now consider the United States the most erratic and unpredictable element in the current world disorder. You can’t retain the respect of either citizens or foreigners when you refuse to learn from experience. You can’t lead when no one, including you yourself, knows what you’re up to or why. You won’t have the respect of allies and they won’t follow you if, as in the case of Iraq, you insist that they join you in entering an obvious ambush on the basis of falsified intelligence. You can’t retain the loyalty of protégés and partners when you abandon them when they’re in trouble, as we did with Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. You can’t continue to control the global monetary system when, as in the case of the IMF and World Bank, you renege on promises to reform and fund them.

And you can’t expect to accomplish much by launching wars and then asking your military commanders to figure out what their objectives should be, and what might constitute sufficient success to make peace. But that’s what we’ve been doing. Our generals and admirals have long been taught that they are to implement, not make policy. But what if the civilian leadership is clueless or deluded? What if there is no feasible policy objective attached to military campaigns?

We went into Afghanistan to take out the perpetrators of 9/11 and punish the Taliban regime that had sheltered them. We did that, but we’re still there. Why? Because we can be? To promote girls’ education? Against Islamic government? To protect the world’s heroin supply? No one can provide a clear answer.

We went into Iraq to ensure that weapons of mass destruction that did not exist did not fall into the hands of terrorists who did not exist until our arrival created them. We’re still there. Why? Is it to ensure the rule of the Sh`ia majority in Iraq? To secure Iraq for Iranian influence? To divide Iraq between Kurds and Sunni and Sh`ia Arabs? To protect China’s access to Iraqi oil? To combat the terrorists our presence creates? Or what? No one can provide a clear answer

Amidst this inexcusable confusion, our Congress now routinely asks combatant commanders to make policy recommendations independent of those proposed by their civilian commander-in-chief or the secretary of state. Our generals not only provide such advice; they openly advocate actions in places like Ukraine and the South China Sea that undercut White House guidance while appeasing hawkish congressional opinion. We must add the erosion of civilian control of the military to the lengthening list of constitutional crises our imperial adventurism is brewing up. In a land of bewildered civilians, the military offer can-do attitudes and discipline that are comparatively appealing. But American militarism now has a well-attested record of failure to deliver anything but escalating violence and debt.

This brings me to the sources of civilian incompetence. As President Obama recently said, there’s a Washington playbook that dictates military action as the first response to international challenges. This is the game we’ve been playing – and losing – all around the world. The cause of our misadventures is homemade, not foreign. And it is structural, not a consequence of the party in power or who’s in the Oval Office. The evolution of the National Security Council Staff helps understand why.

The National Security Council is a cabinet body established in 1947 as the Cold War began to discuss and coordinate policy as directed by the president. It originally had no staff or policy role independent of the cabinet. The modern NSC staff began with President Kennedy. He wanted a few assistants to help him run a hands-on, activist foreign policy. So far, so good. But the staff he created has grown over decades to replace the cabinet as the center of gravity in Washington’s decisions on foreign affairs. And, as it has evolved, its main task has become to make sure that foreign relations don’t get the president in trouble in Washington.

Kennedy’s initial NSC staff numbered six men, some of whom, like McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow, achieved infamy as the authors of the Vietnam War. Twenty years later, when Ronald Reagan took office, the NSC staff had grown to around 50. By the time Barack Obama became president in 2009, it numbered about 370, plus another 230 or so people off the books and on temporary duty, for a total of around 600. The bloat has not abated. If anyone knows how many men and women now man the NSC, he or she is not talking. The NSC staff, like the department of defense, has never been audited.

What was once a personal staff for the president has long since become an independent agency whose official and temporary employees duplicate the subject expertise of executive branch departments. This relieves the president of the need to draw on the insights, resources, and checks and balances of the government as a whole, while enabling the centralization of power in the White House. The NSC staff has achieved critical mass. It has become a bureaucracy whose officers look mainly to each other for affirmation, not to the civil, military, foreign, or intelligence services. Their focus is on protecting or enhancing the president’s domestic political reputation by trimming foreign policy to the parameters of the Washington bubble. Results abroad are important mainly to the extent they serve this objective.

From the National Security Adviser on down, NSC staff members are not confirmed by the Senate. They are immune from congressional or public oversight on grounds of executive privilege. Recent cabinet secretaries – especially secretaries of defense – have consistently complained that NSC staffers no longer coordinate and monitor policy formulation and implementation but seek to direct policy and to carry out diplomatic and military policy functions on their own. This leaves the cabinet departments to clean up after them as well as cover for them in congressional testimony. Remember Oliver North, the Iran-Contra fiasco, and the key-shaped cake? That episode suggested that the Keystone Cops might have seized control of our foreign policy. That was a glimpse of a future that has now arrived.

Size and numbers matter. Among other things, they foster overspecialization. This creates what the Chinese call the 井底之蛙 [“jĭng dĭ zhī wā”] phenomenon – the narrow vision of a frog at the bottom of a well. The frog looks up and sees a tiny circle of light that it imagines is the entire universe outside its habitat. With so many people now on the NSC staff, there are now a hundred frogs in a hundred wells, each evaluating what is happening in the world by the little bit of reality it perceives. There is no effective process that synergizes a comprehensive appreciation of trends, events, and their causes from these fragmentary views.

This decision-making structure makes strategic reasoning next to impossible. It all but guarantees that the response to any stimulus will be narrowly tactical. It focuses the government on the buzz du jour in Washington, not what is important to the long-term wellbeing of the United States. And it makes its decisions mainly by reference to their impact at home, not abroad. Not incidentally, this system also removes foreign policy from the congressional oversight that the Constitution prescribes. As such, it adds to the rancor in relations between the executive and legislative branches of the federal establishment.

In many ways too, the NSC staff has evolved to resemble the machinery in a planetarium. It turns this way and that and, to those within its ambit, the heavens appear to turn with it. But this is an apparatus that projects illusions. Inside its event horizon, everything is comfortingly predictable. Outside – who knows? – there may be a hurricane brewing. This is a system that creates and implements foreign policies suited to Washington narratives but detached from external realities, often to the point of delusion, as America’s misadventures in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria illustrate. And the system never admits mistakes. To do so would be a political gaffe, even if it might be a learning experience.

We have come up with a hell of a way to run a government, let alone an informal empire manifested as a sphere of influence. In case you haven’t noticed, it isn’t effective at either task. At home, the American people feel that they have been reduced to the status of the chorus in a Greek tragedy. They can see the blind self-destructiveness of what the actors on the political stage are doing and can moan out loud about it. But they cannot stop the actors from proceeding toward their (and our) doom.

Abroad, our allies watch and are disheartened by what they see. Our client states and partners are dismayed. Our adversaries are simply dumbfounded. And our influence is ebbing away.

Whatever the cure for our foul mood and foreigners’ doubts about us may be, it is not spending more money on our armed forces, piling up more debt with military Keynesianism, or pretending that the world yearns for us to make all its decisions for it or to be its policeman. But that’s what almost all our politicians now urge as the cure to our sense that our nation has lost its groove. Doing what they propose will not reduce the threat of foreign attack or restore the domestic tranquility that terrorist blowback has disturbed. It will not rebuild our broken roads, rickety bridges, or underperforming educational system. It will not reindustrialize America or modernize our infrastructure. It will not enable us to cope with the geo-economic challenge of China, to compete effectively with Russian diplomacy, or to halt the metastasis of Islamist fanaticism. And it will not eliminate the losses of international credibility that foolish and poorly executed policies have incubated. The cause of those losses is not any weakness on the part of the U.S. military.

Americans will not regain our national composure and the respect of our allies, friends, and adversaries abroad until we recognize their interests and perspectives as well as our own, stop lecturing them about what they need to do, and concentrate on fixing the shambles we’ve made here at home. There’s a long list of self-destructive behavior to correct and an equally long list of to-dos before us. Americans need both to focus on getting our act together domestically and to rediscover diplomacy as an alternative to the use of force.

Both the president and the Congress now honor the Constitution ever more in the breach. In our system, money talks to such an extent that the Supreme Court has equated it to speech. Our politicians are prepared to prostitute themselves to both domestic and foreign causes for cash.

Policy dialogue has become tendentiously representative of special interests, uncivil, uninformed, and inconclusive. American political campaigns are interminable, uncouth, and full of deliberately deceptive advertizing. We are showing the world how great republics and empires die, not how they make sound decisions or defend spheres of influence.

Spheres of influence entail liabilities for those who manage them but not necessarily for the countries they incorporate. Take the Philippines, for example. Secure in the American sphere, it did not bother to acquire a navy or an air force before suddenly – in the mid-1970s – asserting ownership of islands long claimed by China in the nearby South China Sea and seizing and settling them. China has belatedly reacted. The Philippines still has no air and naval power to speak of. Now it wants the United States to return in sufficient force to defend its claims against those of China. Military confrontations are us! So we’re dutifully doing so.

It’s gratifying to be wanted. Other than that, what’s in this for us? A possible American war with China? Even if such a war were wise, who would go to war with China with us on behalf of Filipino claims to worthless sandbars, rocks, and reefs? Surely it would be better to promote a diplomatic resolution of competing claims than to help ramp up a military confrontation.

The conflicts in the South China Sea are first and foremost about the control of territory – sovereignty over islets and rocks that generate rights over adjacent seas and seabeds. Our arguments with China are often described by U.S. officials as about “freedom of navigation.” If by this they mean assuring the unobstructed passage of commercial shipping through the area, the challenge is entirely conjectural. This sort of freedom of navigation has never been threatened or compromised there. It is not irrelevant that its most self-interested champion is China. A plurality of goods in the South China Sea are in transit to and from Chinese ports or transported in Chinese ships.

But what we mean by freedom of navigation is the right of the U.S. Navy to continue unilaterally to police the global commons off Asia, as it has been for seventy years, and the right of our navy to lurk at China’s twelve-mile limit while preparing and practicing to cross it in the event of a US-China conflict over Taiwan or some other casus belli. Not surprisingly, the Chinese object to both propositions, as we would if the People’s Liberation Army Navy were to attempt to do the same twelve miles off Block Island or a dozen miles from Pearl Harbor, Norfolk, or San Diego.

We persist, not just because China is the current enemy of choice of our military planners and armaments industry, but because we are determined to perpetuate our unilateral dominance of the world’s seas. But such dominance does not reflect current power balances, let alone those of the future. Unilateral dominance is a possibility whose time is passing or may already have passed. What is needed now is a turn toward partnership.

This might include trying to build a framework for sharing the burdens of assuring freedom of navigation with China, Japan, the European Union and other major economic powers who fear its disruption. As the world’s largest trading nation, about to overtake Greece and Japan as the owner of the world’s largest shipping fleet, China has more at stake in the continuation of untrammeled international commerce than any other country. Why not leverage that interest to the advantage of a recrafted world and Asian-Pacific order that protects our interests at lower cost and lessened risk of conflict with a nuclear power?

We might try a little diplomacy elsewhere as well. In practice, we have aided and abetted those who prefer a Syria in endless, agonized turmoil to one allied with Iran. Our policy has consisted of funneling weapons to Syrian and foreign opponents of the Assad government, some of whom rival our worst enemies in their fanaticism and savagery. Five years on, with at least 350,000 dead and over ten million Syrians driven from their homes, the Assad government has not fallen. Perhaps it’s time to admit that we didn’t just ignore international law but seriously miscalculated political realities in our effort to overthrow the Syrian government.

Russia’s deft empowerment of diplomacy through its recent, limited use of force in Syria has now opened an apparent path to peace. Perhaps it’s time to set aside Cold War antipathies and explore that path. This appears to be what Secretary of State John Kerry is finally doing with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov. Peace in Syria is the key to putting down Da`esh (the so-called “caliphate” that straddles the vanished border between Syria and Iraq). Only peace can end the refugee flows that are destabilizing Europe as well as the Levant. It is good that we seem at last to be recognizing that bombing and strafing are pointless unless tied to feasible diplomatic objectives.

There is also some reason to hope that we may be moving toward greater realism and a more purposive approach to Ukraine. Ukraine needs political and economic reform more than it needs weapons and military training. Only if Ukraine is at peace with its internal differences can it be secured as a neutral bridge and buffer between Russia and the rest of Europe. Demonizing Mr. Putin will not achieve this. Doing so will require embarking on a search for common ground with Russia.

Unfortunately, as the moronic Islamophobia that has characterized the so-called debates between presidential candidates illustrates, there is at present no comparable trend toward realism in our approach to Muslim terrorism. We need to face up to the fact that U.S. interventions and other coercive measures have killed as many as two million Muslims in recent decades. One does not need an elaborate review of the history of European Christian and Jewish colonialism in the Middle East or American collusion with both to understand the sources of Arab rage or the zeal of some Muslims for revenge. Reciprocating Islamist murderousness with our own is no way to end terrorist violence.

Twenty-two percent of the world’s people are Muslim. Allowing bombing campaigns and drone warfare to define our relationship with them is a recipe for endless terrorist backlash against us. In the Middle East, the United States is now locked in a death-filled dance with fanatic enemies, ungrateful client states, alienated allies, and resurgent adversaries. Terrorists are over here because we are over there. We’d be better off standing down from our efforts to sort out the problems of the Islamic world. Muslims are more likely to be able to cure their own ills than we are to do this for them.

The next administration needs to begin with the realization that unilateralism in the defense of a global sphere of influence does not and cannot work. The pursuit of partnership with the world beyond our borders has a much better chance of success. Americans need to bring our ambitions into balance with our interests and the resources we are prepared to devote to them.

We need a peaceful international environment to rebuild our country. To achieve this, we must erase our strategy deficit. To do that, the next administration must fix the broken policymaking apparatus in Washington. It must rediscover the merits of measures short of war, learn how to use military power sparingly to support rather than supplant diplomacy, and cultivate the habit of asking “and then what?” before beginning military campaigns.

When he was asked in 1787 what system he and our other founding fathers had given Americans, Benjamin Franklin famously replied, “a republic, if you can keep it.” For two centuries, we kept it. Now, if we cannot repair the incivility, dysfunction, and corruption of our politics, we will lose our republic as well as our imperium. America’s problems were made in the USA, by Americans, not by refugees, immigrants, or foreigners. They cry out for Americans to fix them.

Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr., (USFS, Ret.)
Senior Fellow, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University
By video link from Bristol, Rhode Island, 10 September 2021

The United States and China are no longer on speaking terms. Having put diplomacy aside, these two great powers are engaged in diatribe accompanied by military posturing and preparations for a war in which the only certain outcome is the devastation of Taiwan. But the contest between America and China is not primarily military or ideological. It is about relative national strength and performance. China seems more focused on this reality than the United States.

The Cold War is long over. America’s unipolar moment has passed, and the Pax Americana is no more. With its demise, two changes in the American worldview have provided the geopolitical context for the descent of US-China (and US-Russia) relations into adversarial antagonism. The first was the assertion by Washington securocrats that the world could be understood, and U.S. foreign policy organized, by reference to “great power rivalry.” The second is the claim by think-tank liberal interventionists that an attack on democracy by predatory authoritarianism has become the central dynamic of history and world affairs. The Biden administration has embraced both theses. It presents them as firm convictions, not hypotheses. Together, they have given birth to the new American objective of a 21^st century “rules-bound order” crafted and led by the United States and its Cold War allies. This has no prospect of gaining international traction.

The notion that “great power rivalry” is the core feature of international relations is best understood as a distillation of American militarism. It is a fantasy of the military-industrial complex. “Great power rivalry” is a concept that provides a rationale for unbounded defense spending by analogizing interactions among nations to those on a battlefield. It reduces foreign policy to zero-sum games between great powers, while denying agency to middle-ranking and smaller powers in shaping the world order or determining their own destinies. Positing “great power rivalry” as the central feature of world affairs is an expression of nostalgia for the global feudalism of the Cold War when lesser nations were necessarily caught between competing overlords and forced to defer to alien agendas. Not surprisingly, this premise has not found much welcome abroad.

It is also now clear that “great power rivalry” is not the dialectic that will cure the entropy of post-Pax Americana global and regional disorder. What is emerging is a world of multidimensional interactions between countries in which almost all are driven more by their desire for autonomy than for alignment with the United States or its appointed great power rivals. Asked to choose a superpower as patron, middle-ranking and smaller powers almost invariably hedge and persist in pursuing their own interests as they see them.

Foreign policies based on wistful remembrance of past supremacy and the misperception of contemporary infirmities are doomed to fail. They are hallucinations that preclude successful navigation of the world’s newly fluid geopolitics, frustrate those who adopt them, and vex those to whom they are applied. They are not a basis on which to reaffirm U.S. global leadership.

As for the claim that democracy is under attack by “authoritarianism,” this is good politics but politically warped analysis. It appeals to Americans for many reasons. It appears to explain the deterioration of democratic norms in the United States as entirely the fault of foreigners and to thereby absolve Americans of any responsibility for the increasing decadence of their own political culture. It embodies an unstated presupposition that democracy is the default political system of humankind, absent only when denied to a people by opponents who adhere to a putative ideology of “authoritarianism.”

But long before there were politicians prepared to risk displacement from power by other politicians with more support at the polls, there were societies led by warlords, kings, dictators, and other strongmen. There still are.

Democracy is not celebrated for the wisdom of its decision-making. It is revered as an antidote to social and political repression that, when tempered by the rule of law, enables levels of individual self-governance and orderly succession processes that no other system can match. Democratic norms appear to require many generations to establish themselves in human societies. The 20^th and 21^st centuries provide many examples of how quickly and thoroughly these norms can be discarded.

The world’s strongmen are almost all power-mad narcissists who have nothing in common other than the fear of being overthrown. They are happy to receive foreign support but seek and find no market abroad for their personality cults or their countries’ idiosyncratic nationalisms. Lofty talk notwithstanding, the United States has been just as willing as China, Russia, and other great powers to sell weapons and internal security equipment to authoritarian governments and has, in fact, outsold all others in such markets.

Inventing persistent malevolence for Russia and predatory ideological aspirations for China serves domestic U.S. political purposes. It puts otherwise confusing international politics back into the sort of Manichean framework that animated World War II and the Cold War. Americans used to criticize China for its well-documented indifference to whether other countries were or were not democratic and devoted to the rule of law. Now, we have found it convenient to reverse course and attribute to China a values-based crusade equivalent to and opposed to our own. But there is no evidence that Xi Jinping and the 92 million Communist Party members he leads are trying to erase democracy beyond China’s borders. They are on the defensive against suspected homegrown and foreign efforts to discredit them, subvert their political economic achievements, and topple them from power.

The thesis that China and America are engaged in mortal contention over what political system Americans or others should live under does not survive even minimal scrutiny. Democracy may be doing itself in here and there, but there is no league of foreign autocrats or “authoritarian ideology” seeking to obliterate it. The operative contest between China and America is not between competing political ideals but between the two countries’ abilities to exercise wealth and power, maintain domestic tranquility, and inspire emulation by other states and peoples. It is a contest that neither side will “win.” Flinging politically convenient but erroneous theories at China will not change this.

Ironically, the United States has just fallen to number 25 on the Economist’s annual worldwide “Democracy Index,” and is now categorized as a “flawed” and possibly failing democracy. This is disheartening. It is understandable that Americans prefer blaming Russia and other foreign miscreants to examining the internal causes of our decadence. But it is ironic that the Biden administration should choose this moment to “stand up for democracy” and proclaim the existence of a global struggle between democracy and “authoritarianism.” Few abroad see things at all this way.

The American constitution assigned authority for policymaking almost entirely to the people’s representatives in Congress, but the U.S. president and the electorate have largely given up on the legislative branch. The president increasingly rules by decree[1] and has acquired greater power than any king to make war on other nations[2] and slaughter presumed enemies abroad.

The erosion of constitutional democracy in the United States appears to be the result of a tragic combination of many factors, including

• The outrageous venality, chicanery, and effrontery of contemporary American politics.

• The recent emergence of a largely hereditary American plutocracy and educated elite.

• The disillusionment of those farthest down with the American dream, as equality of opportunity and social mobility visibly disappear from American society.

• Elite condescension and indifference to the views of the uneducated and other members of the new and old American “underclasses.”

• The rise of social and niche media oligopolies with business plans dependent upon the creation and maintenance of communities of shared preconceptions.

• The nurture by such media of social microcosms defined by shared delusions based on common grievances, “alternative facts,” the embrace of conspiracy theories, and other politically relevant affinities.

• The organization through social media of increasingly violent protests by disgruntled white nationalists, black victims of social and police prejudice, those recently demoted from the middle class, and other marginalized Americans.

• The exploitation of expert systems to entrench political privilege through “gerrymandering” and artificial intelligence and “big data” that manipulate the electorate.

• Elite insistence on pretentious standards of political correctness on issues that the more traditional and less fortunate find both intolerant and morally offensive.

• Reactions to political correctness and protests by those devoted to the vanishing status quo.

A few of these factors clearly make the United States more vulnerable to foreign intervention in its internal affairs than before, but they are, without exception, domestic, not foreign, in origin. They can only be fixed by Americans. Scapegoating Russia or China won’t do a thing to remedy them.

The world is rightly disbelieving of the sudden American argument that the dialectic driving history is the contradiction between democracy and autocracy. Those societies proudest of their democratic traditions are notably committed to the tolerance of political diversity both at home and abroad. None sees the overthrow of undemocratic regimes as an existential imperative or believes in the divine right of democracies to proclaim, impose, and enforce their preferred dispensations as a replacement for international law and consensus.

To much of the world, the gathering of the “G7” in Cornwall this June and its talk of the sanctity of an ill-defined “rules-bound order” looked like the convening of a club of superannuated imperialists determined to regain the dominant role in rulemaking they lost along with their empires. The members of the G7 account for 11 percent of the world population, 30 percent of its GDP at purchasing power parity, and 62 percent of its accumulated wealth. The G7 made no case for its members’ renewed stewardship of global order but appeared to claim it as a sort of droit du seigneur. But “non-Western” – meaning non-Euro-Atlantic – societies constitute a very large global majority and are no longer prepared to be treated as vassals. As they rise from poverty, almost all are focused on escape from the trauma of past humiliation by Western imperialism and colonialism

Post-colonial stress disorder is today a major driver of foreign policy in every region touched by imperialism, including Eastern and Central Europe, where the humiliation was done by the Russian-dominated Soviet Union. It plays an outsized role in Hindu nationalism and Great Han chauvinism. Post-colonial hangover is a major explanation for phenomena like the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran and the Arab uprisings of 2011.

European colonialism has locked Africa into a love-hate relationship with its colonizers that is now coming home to roost through illegal migration. Latin America continues to resent ongoing interventions by “the Colossus of the North” in places like Bolivia, Cuba, and Venezuela, even as many from the region look north for a better life. Southeast Asians, too, bear the scars of having been subjugated by European, American, and Japanese imperialism. Most of the world outside the United States and Europe sees the ongoing Israeli ethnic cleansing and settlement activity in Palestine as the last gasp of racist colonialism. Islamists identify “the West” with it and see it as justification for reprisal through terrorism.

The operative division in global politics is manifestly not that between democracy and autocracy but that between former colonizers and the colonized. This is joined as a driving force by the differences between those mainly Western nations who long ago became wealthy through industrialization and those now striving to do the same. The wealthy can protect their populations from phenomena like pandemics. The less developed and poor are left to suffer and die.

The same is true of climate change. The earliest countries to industrialize were able to ignore pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. They now prefer not to allow those embarking on development to do the same. Demands from poor countries that they be compensated for two centuries of accumulated degradation of the climate by their former colonial masters fall on deaf ears. The inability of developing countries to forestall or remediate the catastrophic impact of rising temperatures and seas, flooding and drought, or famine and pestilence promises to create an unbearable future for their inhabitants. The result will be widening chaos.

For all these reasons, to most of the world the arguments that the Biden administration is now making for a reformulated “rules-bound order” ring hollow. Its appeals to other nations for deference to great power rivalry and combat with imaginary authoritarian predators have little appeal. To compete with China or other rising and resurgent powers in shaping the world of the future, America needs to make a case that is relevant to current realities. At present, China seems better aligned with these realities than the United States.

This is truly unfortunate. The world has many problems that cannot be addressed without leadership by its greatest powers, and, as America shirks the burdens of leadership, China remains focused on its own reconstitution, rejuvenation, technological advancement, and self-interested economic outreach. Beijing shows little willingness to lead other nations and has so far demonstrated no competence to do so. America doesn’t want China to replace its global leadership. Neither, for the most part, does the world. But, without at least some degree of accommodation and cooperation with China by the United States and between China, India, Japan, and other great powers, neither the United States nor China will be able to mount an effective response to the planetwide challenges now facing humanity.

China now seems overconfident, while the United States is mired in self-doubt. If, as the Book of Proverbs puts it, “pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall,” China looks like it’s ripe for one or the other. Meanwhile, social and niche media in the United States have sliced, diced, and sorted Americans into disillusioned and mutually distrustful sub-communities that harbor incompatible visions of the American past and future and are no longer even on speaking terms with each other. Lacking unity, America seems politically splintered, scatterbrained, and unable to agree on much of anything except that China must be opposed.

Neither China nor America currently has much tolerance for ambiguity, nuance, or deviance from popular presuppositions or prejudices. Both have administrations that are obsessed with protecting leaders from criticism and that react badly to foreign censure or to homegrown unconventional ideas. Both are therefore prone to persist in error long after they should have been identified and corrected it.

A combination of solipsism and mutual disdain assures that Beijing and Washington no longer listen to each other. Both Chinese and American citizens now receive almost all information through digital filters in the form of media-certified and targeted judgments designed to reinforce established narratives. Neither citizenry is presented with many facts to contradict such judgments. Each finds it difficult to draw its own conclusions about trends and events touching national interests.

In China, the information flow is government-controlled, anodyne but upbeat about domestic matters, self-righteously nationalistic about foreign affairs, and calculated to unify the people politically. In America, it is corporate controlled, discordant, bigoted about both domestic and foreign affairs, and tailored to facilitate the marketing of political opinions as well as goods and services. Both systems treat objectivity as quaint and potentially subversive and indulge in the propagation of claptrap, but the “mediaverse” in America has a much higher percentage of stuff that experts aptly describe with the technical term, “weird shit.”

In large measure to placate nationalistic domestic audiences, both China and America appear to have decided to emulate the foreign policy of the Roman emperor, Caligula. His motto was ODERINT DUM METUANT – “let them hate us, as long as they fear us.” This was former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s idea of diplomacy. It appears to be that of today’s China as well. So much for America “making friends and influencing people” or China presenting itself as “credible, lovable, and respectable!”

China’s ruling Communist Party seems now to imagine that the brilliance of its ideology is responsible for China’s astonishing economic and technological success. But its major contributions were to set aside its ideology, open the Chinese market to competition from foreign companies and their technologies, replace central planning with market economics and industrial policies, get out of the way of entrepreneurs, localities, and state-owned enterprises, curtail wasteful defense expenditures, and encourage the productive reinvestment of Chinese household savings. By stepping aside from micromanagement of the economy, the Party liberated it. The Chinese people then launched themselves into a level of dog-eat-dog economic competition not seen since 19^th century America. This spurred rapid productivity growth and deflated prices while enriching the lives of ordinary Chinese and enabling them to become the producers of one-third of the world’s manufactures.

These were truly amazing achievements. But they were stimulated by judicious withdrawals of state control, rather than assertions of it. Now the controls seem to be going back on. This raises the possibility that, as has happened before in China’s history, rising prosperity could fall victim to the arrogance and corruption of a domineering state bureaucracy. If this happens, who will have the courage to tell the masters of the Chinese political universe that the reimposition of the nanny state risks triggering rather than precluding unrest [乱] and reversing China’s economic advance by blighting the aspirations for self-fulfillment of its enormous and growing middle class?

China leapt into prosperity by embracing ideologically unpalatable realities. Now many see Beijing appearing to reverse verdicts on ideological agendas previously refuted by experience. Are we back to 政治挂帅 — politics in command? What became of 实事求是 –“seek truth from facts” or 以实践为真理的唯一标准 – “practice is the sole criterion of truth”? Doesn’t China need such principles along with further 改革开放 – “reform and opening” – to advance to the next stage of wealth and prestige?

Of course, China now has a highly competitive, self-sustaining economy. China’s development may slow, but it is most likely to continue long enough for a new generation less obsessed with the need for regimentation to rediscover the open-mindedness that catalyzed China’s return to wealth and power.

Sadly, whether China falters or not, the United States is presently in remarkably poor condition to compete with it. The infirmities of contemporary American democracy and its catastrophic inability to mobilize an effective response to the pandemic are telling. But the United States is now overmatched by China or about to be in just about every realm relevant to competition other than the military (and that too is increasingly uncertain).

• Most sectors of the Chinese economy are served by multiple competitive enterprises whereas in the U.S. economy the norm is now oligopoly, monopoly, or monopsony.

• In China, companies still invest their profits in expanded industrial capacity. In the United States, where financialized, shareholder capitalism now dominates, profits increasingly flow into stock buybacks, mergers, and acquisitions.

• China already accounts for over 30 percent of global industrial production vs. America’s slightly more than 16 percent.

• China is the world’s largest trading nation and the top economic partner of three-fourths of the world’s countries.

• China now vies with the United States as the largest recipient of foreign direct investment.

• China has about 2.5 times the savings and investment capacity of the United States and its government has surplus capital to export. America has become dependent on foreign purchases of around 40 percent of its debt just to run existing government operations, let alone launch new programs.

• China is rapidly rising in the ranks of the world’s innovators while the United States, though still formidable, is slowly declining.

• Students in China’s schools rank 1^st in the world in math and science, while American students rank 37^th and 18^th

• There are now eight times as many scientists, technicians, engineers, and mathematicians in China as there are in the United States and if nothing changes, at the end of this decade, there will be fifteen times as many.

• China has provided one-third of the total global growth in research and development expenditures in this century vs. America’s one-fifth. China and the U.S. each account for about one-fourth of worldwide spending on R&D, but China passed the U.S. in 2019 and now spends much more on basic research than the United States, where most R&D is business-funded incremental product development.

• In China, government spending reflects strategic calculation; in America it reflects the vector of vested interests’ lobbying of Congress.

• Chinese transportation and communications infrastructure is the world’s newest and most efficient, while deferred maintenance on America’s roads, bridges, railroads, and air and sea ports is over $2.5 trillion. (The Congress is now crowing over having just allocated about $110 billion annually over five years to additional funding for infrastructure – far, far short of what is required.)

• China now allocates less than 2 percent of its GDP to the military vs. America’s 3.4 – 5.25 percent. (If China were a NATO member, the United States would be berating it for spending much too little on defense.) China can surge defense expenditures and production whereas the United States cannot.

The greatest comparative advantage of the United States has come to be its professional and highly lethal military. This makes it politically convenient for Americans to portray the contest the United States has launched with China in military terms. China is showing that it can match and raise anything the United States does. But military posturing is an exercise in futility. Sino-American war over the much-misunderstood Taiwan issue[3] – the most probable casus belli – would leave Taiwan in ruins and could leave both the Chinese and American homelands devastated. Both would lose from any war if they did not destroy each other outright. They would be mad to go to war with each other. We must do what we can to ensure that they do not.

The Sino-American contest is not about which side can out-posture or out-arm the other militarily. It is about the underlying sources of national strength and performance. These do not currently favor the United States.

American competitiveness vis-à-vis China will not be enhanced by more American defense spending or the pivoting of U.S. armed forces to East Asia. Meeting the challenge will require a level of investment in the future of the United States that is unimaginable without an end to the American hubris, denial, and complacency that have gutted fiscal responsibility, diverted wealth to the plutocracy, attracted the best and brightest to financial rather than real engineering, suffocated competitive markets, atrophied industry, institutionalized inefficiency and rake-offs in sectors like education and health, squeezed the middle class, and decimated the capacity of the government to respond to crises. Nothing less will do.

And that is why it distresses me as an American to say that, while China will not gain from the Sino-American split, the United States seems likely to lose from it.

[1] “Executive Orders,” which are arguably implied but not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, in practice now have the force of law.

[2] Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the U.S. Constitution assigns to Congress the exclusive power to authorize war. The modern American presidency has long since usurped this power.

[3] The international and domestic U.S. media persist in attributing views about Taiwan to China that resonate with Western audiences but that no Chinese has ever expressed or would. China does not see Taiwan as “a renegade province” or “a province in rebellion.” It sees Taiwan as the American-backed bastion of the losing, anticommunist side in the Chinese civil war that U.S. intervention suspended but did not end.

The Foreign Service Club, Washington, DC, 11 January 1995

I am going to talk today about diplomacy as a profession. Is it a profession? Should it be a profession? I think these are not empty questions.

I’d like to start off by drawing from my own book of quotations, quoting Abba Eban, who, in 1983, observed that “The word ‘ambassador’ would normally have a professional connotation but for the American tradition of ‘political appointees.’ The bizarre notion that any citizen, especially if he is rich, is fit for the representation of his country abroad has taken some hard blows through empirical evidence, but it has not been discarded, nor should the idea of diluting a rigid professionalism with manpower from less detached sectors of society be dismissed out of hand. Nevertheless, when the strongest nation in the world appoints a tycoon or a wealthy hostess to head an embassy, the discredit and frustration is spread throughout the entire diplomatic corps in the country concerned.” That was in 1983.

Quite a bit before that, about 130 years before that, demonstrating that this is indeed a lengthy American tradition, the New York Herald Tribune observed, “Diplomacy is the sewer through which flows the scum and refuse of the political puddle. A man not fit to stay at home is just the man to send abroad.”

These American observations, or observations about American diplomacy, contrast quite strikingly with the views expressed by François de Callières in 1716. I’d like to quote from him before I get into the meat of my topic. He said, writing now almost three centuries ago, “Diplomacy is a profession by itself, which deserves the same preparation and assiduity of attention that men give to other recognized professions. The qualities of the diplomatist and the knowledge necessary to him cannot indeed all be acquired. The diplomatic genius is born, not made. But there are many qualities which may be developed with practice, and the greater part of the necessary knowledge can only be acquired by constant application to the subject.

“In this sense, diplomacy is certainly a profession, itself capable of occupying a man’s whole career, and those who think to embark upon a diplomatic mission as a pleasant diversion from their common task only prepare disappointment for themselves and disaster for the cause that they serve. The veriest fool would not entrust the command of an army to a man whose sole badge of merit was his eloquence in a court of law or his adroit practice of the courtier’s art in the palace. All are agreed that military command must be earned by long service in the army. In the same manner, it must be regarded as folly to entrust the conduct of negotiations to an untrained amateur.”

Now, if that is a statement with which probably most in this room would agree, we have to ask ourselves why it is that the learned professions of the clergy, the law, medicine, and military science have emerged exempt from the practice of political appointments but diplomacy is still subjected to it.

It’s worth going back for a moment and thinking about what professions are. They have some common characteristics: beginning with professed expertise in carrying out specialized functions. They have a specialized vocabulary; they use a common ideology to analyze problems; they apply a common set of skills, technical skills, to solving those problems; they have a self-administered code of ethics or system of ethics.

The professions that I cited–the clergy, the law, medicine, and the military–began in the eighteenth century with entry into the profession being through a process of apprenticeship, that is, on-the-job training. There were no standards and there was no system of professional ethics in place. But over the succeeding two centuries, they all developed professional schools, professional associations that would certify the competence of the members of the profession, and they developed a self-regulating system of ethics.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the systems were somewhat mixed. That is, apprenticeship coexisted with professional education as a means of entering the profession. It was only about a decade ago that my home state of Rhode Island abolished the privilege of entering the practice of law purely through apprenticeship rather than graduation from a law school. The professional associations had been formed, but they were still not formalized as a regulatory mechanism. The codes of ethics were there, but they were far less formal and elaborate than at present.

By the early twentieth century, each of these professions had developed the degree of formality with which we are familiar today. This is when the divinity schools, the law schools, the medical schools, the military academies, the staff colleges, the war colleges, reached their current state of definition.

Why didn’t this happen for diplomacy? There are probably many reasons for that, one being the transnational nature of the profession, which makes it difficult for any one country to lead in the formation of a professional doctrine and system. But in any event, it didn’t happen.

In fact, there are competing images of the diplomatic profession which are held even to this day. Back in 1959, Harold Nicholson observed, “There are those who regard the Foreign Service as a kind of bird sanctuary for elegant young men with the milk of Groton still wet upon their lips, arrayed in striped pants, and spending most of their time handing sugar cookies to ladies of high society in Europe and Latin America. Conversely, there are those who regard diplomatists as an international gang of intriguers intent upon ensnaring the Great White Soul of the United States.” I suspect Senator Jesse Helms might actually agree with both of those statements.

I expect this will continue as long as diplomacy does not follow the course other learned professions have followed. They have benefitted greatly in terms of their competence and in terms of their standing from their formal professionalization. So could diplomacy.

Some might see an effort to achieve greater professionalization of diplomacy as merely a ploy. Jeffrey Jackson, in 1981, anticipated this when he said, “Of survival, it has been said that the bird is evolution’s device for the perpetuation of the egg. Diplomacy, too, must sometimes appear to be the diplomat’s invention for the perpetuation of his profession. Hence, the legendary diplomat reposting to the condescension of the generals that they would have no wars to fight were it not for him.”

Is diplomacy up to being professionalized? Does it have within it the aspects which would allow it to become a profession in the sense that the law, the medicine, and the military have become? I’m quite sure that it does.

Let’s go through a series of questions related to this.

Do diplomats profess expertise in a specialized set of functions? Diplomats are agents, advocates, informants, and counselors of their governments which look to them as the stewards of their nation’s interests abroad. There are, I believe, ten unchanging principal functions of the profession of diplomacy. The international situation gives these content, but it doesn’t alter their contours. Diplomats discharge these duties on their own or sometimes in collaboration with members of the allied professions of arms and espionage.

The major tasks of diplomats, as I see them, are, first, linking their government’s decision-makers to foreign counterparts; second, advocacy of their government’s policies and views; third, negotiation on their government’s behalf; fourth, commendation to their government of ways to advance or defend its interests; fifth, promotion of trade and investment; sixth, protection of compatriots; seventh, management of programs of cooperation between governments; eighth, reporting and analysis of relevant foreign developments and realities; ninth, establishment of facilitative relationships with the officials and members of the elites who influence them; and tenth, cultivation of an image for their nation which is favorable to its interests.

These ten functions are inseparably connected. I cite this because inseparable connection of functions is at the heart of any profession.

When decision-makers have positive feelings toward a foreign nation, they’re more receptive to approaches from both its officials and businessmen. They’re also more inclined to give weight to its interests and views.

When diplomats have access to a wide range of influential people, their understanding of local trends and developments is enhanced. So, then, through their reporting, is their government’s situational awareness.

When programs of official cooperation are well conducted, they facilitate access to those in authority and predispose them to cooperate. When diplomats’ relations with such men and women are easy and informed by good understanding of local affairs and mind-sets, they are better able to help their citizens to do business and to protect those who fall afoul of local custom and law.

When these tasks are properly performed, diplomats have the insight necessary to conceive plans of action to further the interests of their country. Their government will be well informed enough to be able to form its policies wisely. That’s no guarantee that it will, but it will have the information necessary to do so, should it choose to heed it.

Diplomats will know how to present their government’s positions in terms that are appealing to local interests and sensibilities. They will be more able to persuade host government officials to conclude agreements favorable to their country’s interests. They will know how to enable effective communication between their head of government and members of his Cabinet and corresponding officials in their country of assignment. They will be equipped to provide uniquely valuable counsel and support to direct dialogue between such officials.

I rest my case on the connection between all of these functions.

Do diplomats have a specialized vocabulary? Well, back in the early nineteenth century, Ludwig Boerne, who was a German diplomat of some renown at the time, said, “Diplomacy is to speak French, to say nothing, and to speak falsehoods.” I wouldn’t go quite that far, but I think over the years many have observed that diplomats do use language in peculiar ways. John Kenneth Galbraith, in 1969, observed, just by way of example, “There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy, but to one there is no exception: when an official reports that talks were useful, it can be safely concluded that nothing was accomplished.”

I think we don’t need to go on about this. Clearly we have a specialized vocabulary in the diplomatic profession. We use ordinary words in extraordinary ways. Of course, we use extraordinary words in incomprehensible ways as well.

Do diplomats have a common ideology of problem-solving? Arthur Goldberg once observed, “Diplomats approach all problems with an open mouth.” This is not an unfair comment, since, as A. Whitney Griswald pointed out back in 1960, “Diplomacy is supposed to keep things in a negotiable state.” Of course, we all know that some diplomatic professionals, those in the former Soviet Union, added a corollary to that, which is, “What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is negotiable.” But in any event, it’s clear that there is a common ideology of diplomats which emphasizes the adjustment of differences between nations through negotiation and peaceful, rather than violent, interaction.

Do diplomats have a common set of skills? I think that the basic skills for diplomats to carry out the functions I’ve alluded to are the same in all times and places. Some derive, as François de Callières said, from natural talent, but most, I believe, are acquired only through professional training and experience. These skills are mutually supportive, also, and they fall into five broad related categories: agency, advocacy, reporting, counseling, and stewardship. I’ll run through these very quickly and come to a conclusion so we can eat.

As agents of their governments, diplomats must cultivate, first, mastery of the arts of negotiation. Second, a demonstrated capacity to elicit prompt, authoritative responses from their own government to the views of their host nation. Third, the ability to add at least the appearance of conviction to the messages they communicate. Fourth, precision of expression both in their own and in other languages. Fifth, a sophisticated grounding in their own nation’s history and culture.

As advocates of their nation’s policies and perspectives, diplomats must embody, first, the credibility that comes from intelligent commitment to its interests and to the policies that derive from those interests; second, a gift for political calculation; third, tact; fourth, the empathy and ability to help their host nation redefine its interests to be compatible with those of their own government; fifth, fluency in the dominant language of their host nation and the principal diplomatic language of its capital; and sixth, affability and poise that shrugs at adversity.

As reporters, diplomats must personify acuity of observation and accuracy of memory; second, discretion; third, graceful adaptability to life in alien cultures; fourth, ease of fellowship with a wide range of individuals and groups, such that they readily share confidences; and fifth, facility as tersely vivid but scrupulously accurate writers.

As counselors of their own governments, diplomats must cultivate a reputation for selfless dedication to their own nation’s interests; second, a knowledge of their host nation’s history, including a record of its relations with their own country; third, a finely honed sense of how policy is made in their own government; fourth, the acumen to judge when and how to present to their government recommendations for altered courses of action or requests for new instructions; and fifth, the knack of allowing others to take credit for notable policy innovation or success.

As stewards of their people’s interests and reputations in foreign lands, diplomats must evidence, first, concern about their compatriots and a dedication to serving them; second, understanding of commerce and finance; third, an appreciation of the essentials of military science; and fourth, knowledge of diplomatic practices and international law.

These twenty-five basic skills which I have outlined are born of training and experience. When diplomats come to possess them in adequate measure, they are able to perform the tasks that their homeland expects of them.

Are there professional ethics to diplomacy? Well, Talleyrand, who was one of the most famous diplomats of two centuries ago, once observed, “The only good principle is to have none.” In fact, the common impression of the diplomatic profession is that it is a tricky one.

But I would argue that, in fact, there is a professional set of ethics inchoate, but very much known to the practitioners of the profession. Consider for a moment the emphasis on the protection of confidences; the operation of collegiality between diplomats in a foreign capital or in a multilateral setting; the sense of duty to one’s own government; the limited expectations that other diplomats will violate these rules; and the commitment, finally, to the construction of an international system which facilitates problem-solving by nonviolent means; attention not simply to reasons of state, but also to reasons of system.

So I would conclude that diplomacy does have all of the attributes of a profession, but that they remain in inchoate form. I return to the thought that François de Callières had, this from an American, Herbert H.D. Pierce, in 1897, who said, “As we would not put a ship into the hands of a commander ignorant of navigation, an army under the control of a general without military training, so we should not put the foreign affairs of our government into the hands of men without knowledge of the various subjects which go to make up the diplomatic science.”

The interesting thing about that statement is that by 1840, it was unthinkable that a politician should be appointed as a brigade commander in the U.S. Army, whereas it had been a common practice in earlier years. By about that time, it was unthinkable that someone who had received his medical training as a barber and part-time butcher should be allowed to operate in a hospital, and it was unthinkable that someone who could not demonstrate any intimate familiarity with the principles of the law should be admitted to practice in court. So it is not a trivial statement that de Callières and Pierce are making.

In conclusion, let me again cite de Callières, who I think is probably the greatest writer on the profession of diplomacy. He observes, “Even in those cases where success has attended the efforts of an amateur diplomatist, the example must be regarded as an exception, for it is a commonplace of human experience that skilled work requires a skilled workman.”

The point here is that not only must the workmen and the workwomen know their skills, but they must be seen as possessing those skills in unique measure. What is at stake in the subject I’m addressing is the question of whether popular and political support can be gained for the rather self-evident proposition that de Callières stated, that skilled work requires a skilled person.

As I said at the outset, diplomacy is, if anything, a transnational profession not unique to any country, and yet if it is to be professionalized, as I believe it should be, there must be leadership from some quarter. I note in this regard that the professionalization of the clergy, of the medical profession, and of the military first emerged in the United States. It is not unusual for the United States to have played a leading role in the formation of modern professions. Why shouldn’t that be the case with diplomacy, too?

Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Linthicum Heights, Maryland, 13 June 2015

The late Arthur Goldberg, who served on our Supreme Court and as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, once said that “diplomats approach every question with an open . . . mouth.” No doubt that’s often true at the U.N., where parliamentary posturing and its evil twin, declaratory diplomacy, rule. But the essence of diplomacy is not talking but seeking common ground by listening carefully and with an open mind to what others don’t say as well as what they do, and then acting accordingly.

Diplomacy is how a nation advances its interests and resolves problems with foreigners with minimal violence. It is the nonbelligerent champion of domestic tranquility and prosperity. It promotes mutually acceptable varieties of modus vivendi between differing perspectives and cultures.

Diplomacy is the translation of national strategy into tactics to gain political, economic, and military advantages without the use of force. It is the outermost sentry and guardian of national defense. Its lapse or failure can bring war and all its pains to a nation.

But diplomacy is not just an alternative to war. It does not end when war begins. And when war proves necessary to adjust relations with other states or peoples, it is diplomacy that must translate the outcome of the fighting into agreed adjustments in relationships, crafting a better peace that reconciles the vanquished to their defeat and stabilizes a new status quo. By any measure, therefore, excellence in diplomacy is vitally important to the power, wealth, and well-being of the nation.

At its deepest level, diplomacy is a subtle strategic activity. It is about rearranging circumstances, perceptions, and the parameters of international problems so as to realign the self-interest of other nations with one’s own in ways that cause them to see that it is in their interest to do what one wants them to do, and that it’s possible for them to do it without appearing to capitulate to any foreign power or interest. Diplomacy is about getting others to play our game.

Judging by results in the complex post-Cold War environment, diplomacy is something the United States does not now understand or know how to do. I want to speak with you today about some of the beliefs and practices that account for America’s bungling of foreign policy in recent years. I will end by offering a few thoughts about how we might do better.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union liberated Americans from our fear of nuclear Armageddon, the foreign policy of the United States has come to rely almost exclusively on economic sanctions, military deterrence, and the use of force. Such measures are far from the only arrows in the traditional quiver of statecraft. Yet Americans no longer aim at leadership by example or polite persuasion backed by national prestige, patronage, institution building, or incentives for desirable behavior. In Washington, the threat to use force has become the first rather than the last resort in foreign policy. We Americans have embraced coercive measures as our default means of influencing other nations, whether they be allies, friends, adversaries, or enemies.

For most in our political elite, the overwhelming military and economic leverage of the United States justifies abandoning the effort to persuade rather than muscle recalcitrant foreigners into line. We habitually respond to challenges of every kind with military posturing rather than with diplomatic initiatives directed at solving the problems that generate these challenges. This approach has made us less – not more – secure, while burdening future generations of Americans with ruinous debt. It has unsettled our allies without deterring our adversaries. It has destabilized entire regions, multiplied our enemies, and estranged us from our friends.

South America no longer defers to us. Russia is again hostile. Europe questions our judgment, is audibly disturbed by our belligerence, and is distancing itself from our leadership. A disintegrating Middle East seethes with vengeful contempt for the United States. Africa ignores us. Our lust for India remains unrequited. China has come to see us as implacably hostile to its rise and is focused on countering our perceived efforts to hem it in. Japan is reviewing its inner samurai. Some say all these adversities are upon us because we are not sufficiently brutal in our approach to foreign affairs and that, to be taken seriously or to be effective, we must bomb, strafe, or use drones to assassinate those with whom we disagree and let the collateral damage fall where it may. But what we have actually proved is that, if you are sufficiently indifferent to the interests of others and throw your weight around enough, you can turn off practically everybody.

Outside our own country, American military prowess and willingness to administer shock and awe to foreign societies are nowhere in doubt. In Vietnam, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq, and many other places, Americans have provided ample evidence of our politico-military obduracy and willingness to inflict huge casualties on foreigners we judge oppose us. As a nation, we nonetheless seem to doubt our own prowess and to be obsessed with proving it to ourselves and others. But there is no credibility gap about American toughness to be remedied. That is not the issue. The issue is whether our policies are wise and whether military campaign plans dressed up in domestically appealing rhetoric equate to strategies that can yield a world more congruent with our interests and values.

In recent years, the United States has killed untold multitudes in wars and counterterrorist drone warfare in West Asia and North Africa. Our campaigns have spilled the blood, broken the bodies, and taken or blighted the lives of many in our armed forces, while weakening our economy by diverting necessary investment from it. These demonstrations of American power and determination have inflicted vast amounts of pain and suffering on foreign peoples. They have not bent our opponents to our will. Far from yielding greater security for us or our allies, our interventions – whether on the ground or from the air — have multiplied our enemies, intensified their hatred for us, and escalated the threat to both our homeland and our citizens and friends abroad.

It is a measure of the extent to which we now see the world through military eyes that the response of much of America’s political elite to the repeated failure of the use of force to yield desired results has been to assert that we would have succeeded if only we had been more gung ho and to argue for the use of even greater force. But what we have been doing with our armed forces has not halted dynamic change in the global and regional distribution of economic, military, and political power. There is no reason to believe that greater belligerence could yield a better result. Most Americans sense this and are skeptical both about the neoconservative agendas the military-industrial-congressional complex seeks to impose on our nation and the wisdom of staking our future on the preservation of a rapidly crumbling post-Cold War status quo.

Every nation’s political culture is a product of its historical experience. The American way in national security policy, like that of other countries, is steered by unexamined preconceptions drawn from the peculiarities of our history. In the aggregate, these convictions constitute a subliminal doctrine with the authority of dogma. Legions of academics now make a living by exploring applications of this dogma for the United States Department of Defense. They have produced an intellectual superstructure for the military-industrial complex in the form of an almost infinite variety of ruminations on coercion. (No one looks to the Department of State for support for research on less overbearing approaches to international relations. It has neither money nor a desire to vindicate its core functions by sponsoring the development of diplomatic doctrine.)

Americans are right to consider our nation exceptional. Among other things, our experience with armed conflict and our appreciation of the relationship between the use of force and diplomacy are unique – some might say “anomalous.” So, therefore, are our approaches to war, peace, and foreign relations.

War is the ultimate argument in relations between states and peoples. Its purpose is sometimes the conquest and subjugation of populations. More commonly, however, war is a means to remove perceived threats, repel aggression, restore a balance of power, compel acquiescence in a shift in borders, or alter the bad behavior of an adversary. Since war is not over until the defeated accept defeat and accommodate their new circumstances, other people’s wars usually end in negotiations directed at translating military outcomes into mutually agreed political arrangements that will establish a stable new order of affairs. Not so the wars of the United States.

In our civil war, World War I, World War II, and the Cold War, the U.S. objective was not adjustments in relations with the enemy but “unconditional surrender,” that is a peace imposed on the defeated nation without its assent and entailing its subsequent moral, political, and economic reconstruction. The smaller wars of the 20^th century did not replace this idiosyncratic American rejection of models of warfare linked to limited objectives. We fought to a draw in Korea, where to this day we have not translated the 1953 armistice into peace. We were bested in Vietnam. In Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989, and Iraq in 2003, we imposed regime change on the defeated, not terms for war termination and peace.

So Americans have no recent experience of ending wars through negotiation with those we have vanquished, as has been the norm throughout human history. Our national narrative inclines us to equate success in war with smashing up enemies enough to ensure that we can safely deny them the dignity of taking them seriously or enlisting them in building a peace. Our wars are typically planned as military campaigns with purely military objectives, with little, if any, thought to what adjustments in foreign relations the end of the fighting might facilitate or how to exploit the political opportunities our use of force can provide. As a rule, we do not specify war aims or plan for negotiations to obtain a defeated enemy’s acceptance of our terms for ending the fighting.

The absence of clearly stated war aims for U.S. combat operations makes it easy for our politicians to move the goal posts. Our wars therefore almost invariably entail mission creep. Our armed forces find themselves in pursuit of a fluid set of objectives that never solidifies. With victory undefined, our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines cannot say when they have accomplished their missions enough to stand down.

Our habit of failing to define specific political objectives for our military also means that, in our case, war is less “an extension of politics by other means” (as Clausewitz prescribed) than a brutally direct way of punishing our foes linked to no clear conception of how they might take aboard the lessons we imagine they should draw from the drubbing we give them. Our chronic inattention to the terms of war termination means that U.S. triumphs on the battlefield are seldom, if ever, translated into terms that reward military victory with a stable peace.

The U.S. armed forces are highly professional and admirably effective at demolishing our enemies’ power. But their expectation that civilian policymakers will then make something of the political vulnerabilities they create is almost always disappointed. The relevant civilian policymakers are almost all inexperienced amateurs placed in office by the spoils system. Their inexperience, the theories of coercive diplomacy they studied at university, the traditional disengagement of American diplomats from military operations, and our now heavily militarized political culture converge to assure that American diplomacy is missing in action when it is most needed – as the fighting ends.

Thus, our military triumph in the 1991 war to liberate Kuwait was never translated into terms to which Saddam Hussein or his regime were asked to pledge their honor. Instead, we looked to the United Nations one-sidedly to pass an omnibus resolution imposing onerous restrictions on Iraqi sovereignty, including inspections, reparations, and the demilitarization of portions of Iraq’s territory. Saddam assumed no explicit obligation to comply with these dictates. To the extent he could get away with ignoring them, he did. The war never really ended. In our 2003 re-invasion of Iraq, U.S. planners assumed apolitically that military victory would automatically bring peace. No competent Iraqi authority was left in place to accept terms and maintain stability. Subliminal doctrine instead prevailed. The U.S. government devised no mechanism to translate its success on the battlefield into a legitimate new order and peace in Iraq.

In Iraq, we were guided by the historically induced, peculiarly American presumption that war naturally culminates in the unconditional surrender and moral reconstruction of the enemy. The Department of State was excluded from all planning. The notion that a political process might be required for war termination on terms that could reconcile the enemy to its defeat never occurred to the White House or DOD. Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Libya offer different but analogous examples of Washington’s blindness or indifference to the utility of diplomacy in translating battlefield results into political results. As a result, our military interventions have nowhere produced a better peace. We Americans do not know how to conclude our wars.

American confusion about the relationship between the use of force and political order-setting extends to our approach to situations that have the potential to explode in war but have not yet done so. Our country learned how to behave as a world power during the four-decade-long bipolar stalemate of the Cold War. The Cold War’s strategy of containment made holding the line against our Soviet rivals the central task of U.S. diplomacy. Americans came to view negotiated adjustments in relations as part of a great zero-sum game and as therefore, for the most part, infeasible or undesirable, or both. After all, a misstep could trigger a nuclear war fatal to both sides.

The Cold War reduced diplomacy to the political equivalent of trench warfare, in which the absence of adjustments in position rather than advantageous maneuvering constituted success. It taught Americans to deter conflict by threatening escalation that might lead to a mutually fatal nuclear exchange. It conditioned us to believe that it is often wiser to stonewall – to freeze a situation so as to contain potential conflict – than to waste time and effort exploring ways of mitigating or eliminating it.

We Americans have yet to unlearn the now largely irrelevant lessons of the Cold War. We still respond to adverse developments with threats of escalating pressure calculated to immobilize the other side rather than with diplomatic efforts to resolve the issues that motivate it. We impose sanctions to symbolize our displeasure and to enable our politicians to appear to be doing something tough, even if it is inherently feckless. Sometimes we decline to speak with our adversary on the issue in question until it has agreed to end the behavior to which we object. But, almost invariably, the core of our response is the issuance of deterrent military threats.

The ostensible purpose of sanctions is to coerce the targeted country into submission. But, once imposed, sanctions invariably become ends in themselves. Their success is then measured not by how they modify or fail to modify the behavior of their targets but by the degree of pain and deprivation they are seen to inflict. There is no recorded instance in which the threat or actual imposition of sanctions not linked to negotiations about a “yes-able” proposition has induced cooperation. Sanctions do not build bridges or foster attitudes that facilitate concessions. They harden and entrench differences.

And, in many ways, sanctions backfire. They impose the equivalent of a protectionist wall against imports on the target nation. This often stimulates a drive for self-sufficiency and induces artificial prosperity in some sectors of its economy. Sanctions hurt some U.S. domestic interest groups and benefit others. Those who benefit develop a vested interest in perpetuating sanctions, making them hard to use as a bargaining chip.

Perversely, sanctions also tend to boost the political authority of the leaders of the countries they target. They place decisions about the distribution of rationed goods and services in these leaders’ hands. To the extent that sanctions immiserate populations, they unite nationalist opposition to the foreigners imposing them. As the examples of north Korea, Mao’s China, and Cuba attest, sanctions prolong the half-life of regimes that might otherwise fall from power as a result of patriotic resistance to their misrule. Eventually, as we now see with Cuba (and China before it), sanctions have the ironic effect of transforming the places we have walled off into exotic tourist destinations for Americans.

The pernicious effects of sanctions are magnified by the American habit of combining them with diplomatic ostracism. Refusal to talk is a tactic that can gain time for active improvement of one’s bargaining position. But meeting with another party is not a favor to it. Insisting on substantive concessions as the price for a meeting is self-defeating. Diplomatic contact is not a concession to an adversary but a means of gaining intelligence about its thinking and intentions, understanding and seeking to reshape how it sees its interests, looking for openings in its policy positions that can be exploited, conveying accurate messages and explanations of one’s own reasoning, manipulating its appreciation of its circumstances, and facilitating concessions by it.

Efforts at deterrence invite counterescalation by their target. Controlling this risk necessitates reassuring one’s adversary about the limits of one’s objectives. Reassurance requires accurate messaging. That cannot be assured without direct communication with the other side. This underscores the importance of the diplomatic relations and contacts we sometimes unwisely suspend. It is a sound rule that one should never lose contact with an enemy on either the battlefield or in the diplomatic arena.

Our frequent violation of this rule is a special problem for our practice of deterrence, now virtually the only technique of statecraft in our kit other than sanctions and military assault. To avert perceived challenges to our interests or those of the nations we have undertaken to protect, we declare that attempts by another country to seek unilateral advantage will invoke retaliation to impose unacceptable levels of loss. The penalties we promise can be political and economic. But, in the case of the contemporary United States, they are almost invariably military.

Deterrence substitutes military confrontation designed to freeze risk for diplomacy directed at eliminating its underlying causes. It sets off a test of will between the two sides’ armed forces as each considers how best to demonstrate its resolve while causing the other to back down. Deterrence can, of course, be the starting point for a diplomatic effort to resolve conflicts of interest. But, if deterrence is not paired with diplomacy, such conflicts are likely to fester or intensify. Then, too, with the end of the Cold War, the danger of escalation to the nuclear level has lessened. The threats of escalation inherent in deterrence are now less intimidating and more likely to face challenge.

In our attempts to limit uncertainty through deterrence alone, without diplomatic efforts to resolve the underlying crises that generate the uncertainty, Americans preserve the status quo, even when it is disadvantageous or evolving to our disadvantage. But by assuming that the immensity of our power makes deterrence in itself an adequate response to threats to our interests as we see them, we inadvertently perpetuate the danger of armed conflict, store up trouble for the future, and give potential adversaries time to increase their power relative to ours. This is the approach we are currently applying to China in the East and South China Seas and to Russia on its western borders. It is no more likely to succeed now than on the multiple occasions in the past in which it failed. The same is true of our latest attempt to apply military technical solutions to the political problems of a disintegrated Iraq.

This brings me to the question of whether and how we can learn from our mistakes. George Santayana famously warned that “those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” He was right.

But what if every four or so years, you administered a frontal lobotomy to yourself, excising your memories and making it impossible to learn from experience? What if most aspects of your job were always new to you? What if you didn’t know whether something you propose to do has been tried before and, if so, whether it succeeded or failed? To one degree or another, this is what is entailed in staffing the national security functions of our government (other than those assigned to our military) with short-term political appointees selected to reward not their knowledge, experience, or skill but campaign contributions, political sycophancy, affiliation with domestic interest groups, academic achievements, success in fields unrelated to diplomacy, or social prominence.

Alone among major powers, the United States has not professionalized its diplomacy. Professions are composed of individuals who profess a unique combination of specialized knowledge, experience, and technique. Their expertise reflects the distillation into doctrine – constantly refreshed – of what can be learned from experience. Their skills are inculcated through case studies, periodic training, and on-the-job mentoring. They are constantly improved by the critical introspection inherent in after-action reviews.

By contrast, Americans appear to believe that the formulation and conduct of foreign relations are best entrusted to self-promoting amateurs, ideologues, and dilettantes unburdened by apprenticeship, training, or prior experience. The lower ranks of our diplomatic service are highly regarded abroad for their intellectual competence and cross-cultural communication skills. With some notable exceptions, our ambassadors and the senior officials atop the Washington foreign affairs bureaucracies are not similarly admired. The contrast with the superbly professional leadership of the U.S. armed forces could not be greater. It should surprise no one that our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines often wait in vain for guidance and support from the civilian side of the U.S. government’s national security establishment. Current trends suggest they may have to wait a long time for their civilian counterparts to shape up.

The post-Cold War period has seen major expansion in the numbers of political appointees and their placement in ever lower foreign policy positions along with huge bloat in the National Security Council staff. This has progressively deprofessionalized U.S. diplomacy from the top down in both Washington and the field, while thinning out the American diplomatic bench. Increasingly, the U.S. military is being thrust into diplomatic roles it is not trained or equipped to handle, further militarizing U.S. foreign relations.

In the absence of major curtailment of the spoils system, the prospects for improved U.S. diplomatic performance are poor. Amateur ambassadors and senior officials cannot provide professional mentoring, yet the United States invests little in training its career personnel in either the lore or core skills of diplomacy. No case studies of diplomatic advocacy, negotiation, reporting and analysis, or protection of overseas Americans have been compiled. There is no professional framework for after-action reviews in American diplomacy and they seldom occur. (To the extent examining what went right or wrong and why might reflect adversely on ambitious political appointees or the administration itself, it is actually discouraged.) This ensures that nothing is learned from experience even if there were career diplomats in senior positions to learn it.

Diplomacy, as such, is not part of civic education in the United States. A large percentage of our political elite has no idea what diplomats do, can do, or ought to do. Not for nothing is it said that if you speak three or more languages, you are multilingual. If you speak two languages, you are bilingual. If you speak only one language, you are American. And if you speak only one language, have never studied geography, and do not have a passport, you are probably a member of Congress.

It is also said that, if we can’t get our act together at home, there is little reason to hope that we will get it together abroad. But we cannot afford not to. We are entering an era of strategic fluidity in which there are no fixed lines for Cold War-style diplomacy to defend, there is declining deference to our leadership, and there are ever more challenges that cannot be solved by military means. We need to raise the level of our international game.

It is time to rediscover the deep diplomacy that creates circumstances in which others become inclined out of self-interest to make choices and do things that serve our interests and that advance those interests without war. It is time to rediscover non-coercive instruments of statecraft that can persuade others that they can benefit by working with us rather than against us. It is time to exempt the foreign affairs elements of our national security policy apparatus from the venality and incompetence that the spoils system has come to exemplify. It is time to staff our diplomacy, as we have staffed our military, with well-trained professionals and to demand from them the best they can give to their country. Our country.

By video, 8 July 2026

Five hundred and thirty-four years ago, for the first time, the world became one. Christopher Columbus – an Italian adventurer – was looking for a faster way to Asia. Instead, he erased the Atlantic as a barrier between Europe and America. This transformed the globe. It fused ecosystems that had evolved separately for millions of years, triggering almost immediate demographic collapse in the Americas, fueling long-term population booms in Europe, Asia, and Africa, creating new global agricultural and industrial realities, and catalyzing new cuisines everywhere. For the first time in history, there were true “world powers” – countries whose interests and policies could not be ignored anywhere in the world – and they were all European.

Europe gained access to huge mineral resources: gold and silver in quantities previously unimaginable. Europe, Asia, and Africa also benefitted from the arrival of new foodstuffs developed over millennia by native Americans: cacao, cassava, chiles, maize, papayas, peanuts, potatoes, pumpkins, squashes, sweet potatoes, tapioca, tomatoes, turkeys, pineapples, and vanilla. Can anyone imagine today’s national cuisines without these ingredients?

The Americas gained bananas, citrus fruit, coffee, grapes and wine, rice, sugarcane, and wheat. Its peoples added donkeys, horses, mules, and oxen as beasts of burden and cattle, chickens, goats, hogs, and sheep as sources of protein. They also saw the introduction of many technologies they had lacked.

This so-called “Columbian Exchange” is the foundation of the modern world and its immense populations. But it came at a horrific initial cost.

Animal-vectored diseases like influenza, malaria, measles, mumps, smallpox, typhus, whooping cough, and yellow fever almost immediately killed well over 90 percent of the original inhabitants of North and South America – about ninety-five million people. Native Americans had no inherited immunity to these illnesses. Those who survived are the ancestors, with European, African, and Asian settlers, of the handsome mixed-race populations of the Americas today.

Our recent experiences with climate change and pandemics remind us that, however great the benefits, planetary integration can give rise to planetary problems that demand planetwide answers.

The five centuries that followed “the Columbian Exchange” have seen a succession of world orders. In the first three of these centuries, Europeans settled the Americas and Australia, forcibly transported Africans to the Americas, underwent scientific and industrial revolutions, conquered West Asia and North Africa as well as India and Southeast Asia, and extended their rivalries to the globe.

In the late 18^th century, they also attempted to establish relations with China in accordance with the principles of “state sovereignty” that they had worked out in the hard-won 1648 Peace of Westphalia. But China expressed disinterest in European science and technology and rejected the notion that other states could be equal to it. It sent the Europeans packing.

By the early 19^th century of the international calendar European settlers in the Americas had rebelled and established themselves as newly independent states. Their actions separated the Americas from the rest of the world, where imperialism reigned unopposed. European great powers, having refused to take no for an answer from China (then still the world’s largest economy) began to carve it up into “spheres of influence.” In 1884, at Berlin, they agreed to subdivide Africa among them. As the 19^th century came to an end, the United States crossed the Pacific to join the ranks of European imperialist powers, overthrowing the Hawaiian monarchy and conquering the Philippines. It then opposed the division of China in its “Open Door” policy.

The 20^th century began with an outbreak of war that challenged Europe’s imperial structures, then dissolved them, replacing them with new nations based on ethnolinguistic nationalism. The vindictive peace that followed the First World War excluded both Germany and the Soviet Union (as the successor to Czarist Russia) from roles in managing European security and established no alternative to European imperialism abroad. These failures laid the groundwork for the Second World War. Japan, left out of a world order still dominated by Europe, began a rampage through China that culminated in its erasure of Euro-American colonialism in Pacific Asia.

The war ended with the Soviet Union occupying and imposing its politico-economic model on the territories it had conquered from Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, the United States imposed its own system in the European and Asian countries it had liberated from German or Japanese militarism. China, like Russia before it, underwent a traumatic revolution. In the ensuing bipolar order of the “Cold War,” European colonialism evaporated amidst a proliferation of new states. India sought to remain aloof from post-colonial realignments. China emerged as a swing state. Beijing first allied itself with Moscow, then identified with the nonaligned movement and broke with the USSR, cooperating with Washington while avoiding an entangling alliance with America.

As the 20^th century ended, the Soviet system died of its own defects and, amidst much disorder and suffering, Moscow turned inward and abandoned its ambitions for global hegemony. The Cold War and the bipolar world order were over. There was no longer any apparent check on American power, which inherited a network of alliances it began to treat as an empire with behavior that validated Lord Acton’s aphorism that “power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

The United States replaced foreign policies based on comity and respect for the views of allies, partners, and friends with coercive unilateralism that increasingly ignored all but its own interests. Like the Soviet Union in its terminal phase, the United States boosted military spending to irrational and ultimately unsustainable levels. Islamist reprisal for American policies in Palestine and elsewhere in West Asia drew America into a series of wars with no clear objectives or termination strategies. By the third decade of the 21^st century, the United States, among other things:

· had ceased to keep international agreements or respect international law,

· was closing its market to foreign producers of goods and services with ill-considered, erratic protectionist policies,

· had sought to retard the development of China and other countries through tightening export controls,

· was engaged in low-intensity combat with non-state actors in at least eighty-two countries,

· had precipitated and lost a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine,

· was first distancing itself from its European allies, then bullying them,

· had joined Israel in genocide in occupied Palestine and in attacking Iran, while backing Israeli efforts to annex southern Lebanon,

· had turned its back on the rule of law at home and militarized its domestic law enforcement,

· had engaged in murder and other acts of piracy in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific,

· had reasserted political dominion over the Panama Canal,

· had decapitated the government of Venezuela and asserted mercantilist control over its energy resources and was attempting to do the same to Iran,

· had threatened to annex Canada and Greenland (the self-governing territory of Denmark, a NATO ally), and

· had joined Israel in an unprovoked war of aggression against Iran, which it lost.

The five hundred-year-long era of Euro-Atlantic dominance of world affairs is clearly at an end. So too are liberal internationalism and the so-called American “unipolar moment,” which fell victim to the equivalent of a nervous breakdown in the United States and Washington’s egomaniacal alienation of its allies, partners, and friends abroad. The American watchword became “I want it. No one can prevent me from taking it. I am prepared to kill people to get it.” This is banditry, not statecraft.

For decades, students of geopolitics had debated whether China would seek to revise or overthrow the American-sponsored post-World War II order as it rose. Ironically, it turned out to be the United States, not China, which repudiated and overthrew that order. Washington now rejects the rules on which the international system it originally espoused was based, while Beijing seeks to restore and enhance them.

The way in which a new international system and constellation of power is emerging echoes the turmoil that a rising Europe unleashed upon the world five centuries ago. This time it is the United States, not Europe, that bumptiously pursues territorial expansion, colonial control of natural resources, extortionate demands, and foreign capitulation to its power. But unlike Europe in the 16^th century, the United States is not winning but losing global primacy.

Is the new world disorder a momentary convulsion born of American distress at declining “greatness” or something likely to persist? The post-World War II order was far from perfect, but – overall – it was politically and financially stable, economically buoyant, technologically progressive, and optimistic. Its economies and sea lanes were open. Shipping was secure. Institutions were often actually able to perform the functions for which they had been established. What we are experiencing today is none of these things. But the current disorder will not last.

Some assert that we are entering an age in which spheres of influence – the primacy of great powers within their regions – will be the norm. This is the stated ambition of the Trump administration with respect to the Western Hemisphere. But the effort to impose unconstrained U.S. domination in the Americas – including Greenland, Canada and South America in addition to the Caribbean and Central America – is doomed to fail.

The Monroe Doctrine was conceived and proclaimed to ensure that European empires could not extinguish the hard-won self-determination of the nations of the Americas. The Trump administration has reinterpreted it as somehow establishing a right of the United States to impose its sovereignty on every other republic in the Western Hemisphere. But hegemony and colonialism have always generated their own antibodies. The Americas will prove no exception to this axiom. The countries of the Western Hemisphere will not yield their independence to anyone. They will instead strengthen and arm themselves in cooperation with each other and with extra-hemispheric partners.

That’s part of the reason that a system affirming the sovereignty of the world’s middle-ranking powers seems far more likely than one based on assertions of dominance by each region’s greatest power. Iran will not accept dictation from Israel or the United States. The Arab states in West Asia will not accept the hegemony of either Iran or Israel. Turkey is repositioning itself between Europe, Russia, Central Asia, and the Middle East, and now aspires to join the BRICS grouping. Canada feels compelled to balance the United States by reaching out to both China and Europe. The countries of South Asia all want cordial relations with India but will not accept subordination to it. ASEAN seeks to maintain a balance in its ties with China, Europe, the United States, India, Russia, and Japan. Japan is adopting a more self-reliant military posture and has ceased to be politico-economic wallflower in its region. If China asserts a right to control the decisions and alignments of its neighbors in Pacific Asia, Japan will catalyze the formation of intra- and extra-regional coalitions to oppose it.

Most pundits argue that we are witnessing the arrival of what they call a “multipolar system.” But the concept of a “multipolar order” is a caricature of the far more complex geopolitical geometry that is emerging. Confucius was right to insist on the “rectification of names” [正名]. He argued correctly that social and political disorder arise when language loses its connection to truth and words misdescribe reality. Unfortunately, the word “multipolar” does this.

A pole is one of two endpoints to a line. As such, it describes a two-dimensional relationship unconstrained by others. But statecraft today is no longer dominated or regulated by a contest between two quasi-feudal overlords. Nor do all roads lead to Washington, Moscow, New Delhi, Beijing, Tokyo, Berlin, Paris, Brasilia, Brussels, Jakarta, or any other great power capital. The emerging international system is multifaceted, has multiple actors, varies from region to region in geometry as well as in complexity, and functions in four – not two – dimensions.

Independent middle-ranking powers increasingly maneuver for national advantage in a world in which they have autonomy. They do not require the guidance of patrons to calibrate and balance their interests or the risks of pursuing them. They greatly prefer self-interested relations with multiple competing hegemons to any choice between them. They can determine what political, economic, cultural, and military relationships they desire with others. They can afford – indeed, it is in their interest – to be promiscuous. They seek to diversify their dependencies rather than clinging to a single patron. When they engage in demeaning acts to show their fealty to a great power, they are transparently insincere. They can practice political or economic polygamy and attach or distance themselves from patrons as they see fit.

Much the same is true for the world’s companies. They do not want to choose between the United States, China, or other patrons. They are tired of being battered by arbitrary and capricious decisions they cannot appeal. Businesses want predictability and reliable dispute resolution mechanisms. They seek security by diversifying markets, adding suppliers of critical industrial inputs and commodities, and developing additional, safer and more efficient trade routes. Innovative companies are not intimidated by export controls. They understand that technology has no assured nationality and that, in the end, nothing can stop its diffusion. As companies everywhere pursue expanded opportunities in new markets, they demand that governments simplify and speed financial transactions, the transit of goods, and customs clearances. That’s why many find cooperative programs like the “Belt and Road” so appealing.

A better word than “multipolar” for this complex and dynamic emerging order is “multi-nodal.” A node is a three-dimensional object at which many connections can converge. Its political, economic, or military ties to others can vary in width and intensity. Nodes can reposition themselves in both space and time. Countries, considered as nodes in the international system, can couple or decouple from other countries and both form and dissolve networks or coalitions. So can companies.

We are entering a multi-nodal system, and we are doing so in a world in which Asia has become the center of gravity in world affairs. Sixty percent of all humans alive today are Asian. Eighty-seven percent of global patents now originate in Asia. Asia’s contribution to global growth stands at 60 percent. Its exports amount to 55 percent of global trade. Asia accounts for half of global energy demand. Most economists predict that by the end of the century both China and India will have GDPs that are each about half again bigger than that of the United States and twice that of Europe. Of course, it is far from certain that China and India will not make mistakes or that the United States will cease doing so. Maybe Europe will get its groove back.

For now, however, as the United States does itself in by adopting counterproductive politico-economic theories and practices, Europe remains adrift. It is beginning to wobble in the direction of China and India or perhaps pick a fight with them. European societies no longer lead in most fields of science, technology, or industry. China and a few other Asian nations are the new leaders, with diminishing competition from the United States. Europeans are internally divided on where to go and what to do. They have no plan for peace on their subcontinent, no plan for their economic reinvigoration, and no concept of their place in a world no longer dominated by the United States or “the West.”

Europe is a delightful tourist destination. It retains many of the attributes of its past greatness. But the European Union seems structured to frustrate and punish efforts to take decisive action on the challenges confronting it. Its default position is wringing its hands while sitting on them. It’s hard to get anywhere if that’s your posture. It’s a pretty good definition of fecklessness.

As Europe and China decouple from the American market, each is beginning to flirt with the other as an alternative to the United States. Chinese investment and technology transfers to Europe can now balance past European investments and technology transfers to China. The basis for a newly cooperative relationship between China and Europe is willy-nilly being laid. 万事俱备只欠东风.^[i]

Sino-European industrial cooperation will not necessarily be limited to the non-defense sector. Here, the recent past is a possible guide to the future. In 2013, Türkiye sought to avoid dependence on either U.S. or Russian air defense systems by buying the export version of the Chinese HQ-9 [红旗-9]. American sanctions on Türkiye’s participation in the manufacture of the F-35 then blocked that sale. Ironically, this led to Türkiye’s purchase of the Russian S-400 system as well as a commitment to develop its own fifth-generation fighter jet, the “Kaan.”^[ii]

At least some other European states are likely to echo Türkiye’s decision to cooperate with China as they react to U.S. decoupling from them and seek to avoid overdependence on either American or Russian military systems. Meanwhile, Türkiye’s efforts to build a fighter jet to replace its aging F-16s may well lead it to seek Chinese rather than American technology transfers, given the poor state of US-Turkish relations. Türkiye’s aspiration to join the newly established Saudi Arabian defense arrangement with Pakistan, much of whose advanced military technology was codeveloped with China, underscores this emerging possibility.

We have exited the post-World War II order. Past power blocs and alignments have declining relevance. No great power now has an automatic followership. In the emerging international system, it’s every nation for itself. That is true in West Asia, where American dominance has been offset by regional powers (such as Egypt, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and the UAE) that now develop their own agendas and capabilities. It is true in East Asia, where Washington is militarily present but politically disengaged and absent from key institutions of regional economic governance like the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).

In Europe, there is rising apprehension that things may be falling apart. NATO and the EU’s effort to “weaken and isolate” Russia has backfired. NATO unity is crumbling, the EU is adrift, political establishments are discredited, and populist nationalism is redividing the subcontinent. 各人自扫门前雪.^[iii] This is in part a reaction to the sociopathic behavior of President Trump and his sidekicks, but it also reflects a vote of no confidence in European elites. The disintegration of NATO and the EU now seems more likely than the breakup of the Russian Federation that some in the West have openly wished for. Europe has long been less than the sum of its parts. Increasingly, China, Russia, and the United States once again find themselves dealing directly not with Europe as a whole, but with its self-interested parts.

Africa has become a central arena for geopolitical rivalry over natural resources, but this, the fragmentation of the world order, and U.S. retrenchment are enabling its many states to expand their global influence. Many see Africa as the continent of the future and are willing to put their money where their mouth is. Africans are casting off the last vestiges of European colonialism, diversifying alignments, strengthening their roles in global institutions like BRICS and the G20, and securing better terms in trade, finance, and diplomacy by negotiating more assertively with China, India, Russia, Gulf Arab states, Brazil, and other emerging partners.

The greatest challenge to the freedom of maneuver of middle-ranking and smaller states at present is in the Western Hemisphere, where the United States has professed a desire to exercise exclusive dominion. The jury is out on whether it can achieve this. Extra-hemispheric powers like China offer the states of the Americas government-financed investment in their infrastructure, a growing market for their goods, and diplomatic support for their independence. It is not clear what the United States now offers beyond military intimidation, subjugation, and sanctions, all of which discredit hegemony rather than make it acceptable.

Let me close by making some fearless predictions.

In a world that is indifferent to moral and legal principles and in which law no longer constrains power, states large and small are ineluctably driven to focus on national resilience and survival. This impels them to do what Canadian Prime Minister Carney urged at Davos in January – accept reality, band together for mutual protection, and seek logistical autonomy by diversifying their trade patterns and supply chains. 狡兔三窟^[iv] They have no choice but to build the strongest militaries they can.

In a dynamic multi-nodal order, states cannot afford eternal allies or perpetual enemies, so they will seek to avoid commitments to unconditional alliances in favor of impermanent ententes – limited partnerships for limited and contingent purposes. Flexibility, not constancy, will aid survival. The world is in the process of returning to something resembling the 19^th century European balance of power, in which states maneuver to preclude their domination by others in a system regulated by mutual fear, calibrated cooperation, and constant recalculation rather than by international law.

But the European balance of power of two centuries ago incorporated only five great powers – Britain, France, Austria, Prussia, and Russia. The 21^st century international system will be one of many regional as well as global balances. Networks and coalitions are bound to come and go, sometimes amidst violence.

The uncertainties inherent in such a system will gradually compel states to replace crumbling global rule-making and regulatory institutions with bilateral and regional or functional arrangements. This is already happening, as institutions like the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank (AAIB), Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SC), Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC), and BRICS attest. Over the past decade, the number of bilateral and regional trade agreements has risen from about 290 to 375.

The specialized agencies of the United Nations will survive to the extent that they serve the interests of their participants. But the Security Council and the UN itself have proven incapable of managing global peace and development or meeting the challenges of planetwide problems like climate change, pandemics, and migration. They have been unable to mount an effective response to genocide and other gross violations of universally recognized rights. They are fading into irrelevance and are in danger of going the way of the League of Nations. One way or another, they will either accept reform or find themselves replaced.

In the interim, where regional and functional groupings do not spring into existence to manage issues of multilateral interest, rulemaking may devolve to ad hoc gatherings. Universality is not essential to rule making. There is nothing to stop the participants in a gathering from agreeing rules to apply among themselves, leaving non-participants to their own devices. As the French saying goes, “the absent are always wrong.”^[v]

It is clear that we are entering a very different world from that of the Cold War or the American “unilateral moment.” It is a world that will avoid catastrophes only if it respects the principles established in the Peace of Westphalia. The Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, articulated in 1954, encapsulate this vision for international relations:

• mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty,

• mutual non-aggression,

• mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs,

• equality and co-operation for mutual benefit, and

• peaceful co-existence.

In many ways, these principles are the opposite of those now guiding the international behavior of the United States or US-China relations. But to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln in his inaugural address following the American civil war: “Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.” He predicted that relationships that have been lost can be recovered “when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Lincoln knew that strategy is a marathon, not a charge, and that peace must be shaped by steady hands. You are rising stars in great Chinese enterprises. Do you have such hands?

^[i] All set but for the final push.

^[ii] In Turkish, this means “king of kings.”

^[iii] Sauve qui peut. Every man for himself.

^[iv] A cunning rabbit has three tunnels to and from its burrow.

^[v] Les absents ont toujours tort.

By Video, 6 July 2026

Diplomacy gets a bad rap. Those who understand it least either fantasize about the impossible things it can supposedly accomplish or dismiss it as nothing more than saying ‘nice doggie’ until you can find a rock. This is not surprising. Diplomacy is a word that is simultaneously a synonym for statecraft, for the art and practice of conducting international negotiations, for skill in handling differences without arousing hostility, and for dealing tactfully with other people.

But, at its best, diplomacy is a mysterious science and the province of a learned profession, like the clergy, the law, medicine, or the professional military. This makes it inherently esoteric and incomprehensible to laymen. It also makes its practitioners an elite. As such, they are subject to vilification by everyone else as a group of intellectuals who mistake black passports for certificates of competence and misconstrue the peculiarities of foreigners as common sense.

We are, after all, a society that agrees with George Orwell that “some ideas [are] so stupid that only an intellectual could believe them.” Still, diplomacy is an essential profession, as illustrated by the observation that it is the second oldest.

Diplomats are the peaceable heralds of national power. They are the counselors of their nation’s leaders on foreign relations and the voice, hands, eyes, and ears of their country in foreign lands.

Statesmen use their armed forces to defend or advance national interests by intimidation or violence. They use spies to persuade foreigners to commit treason. They use diplomats to persuade foreigners to do what they want them to do without resorting to subversion or war. It takes skill to do that. Skill is not in-born. It is acquired through training, mentoring, experience, and passionate dedication to self-improvement.

For some time, the United States has experimented with diplomacy-free foreign policy. The results of the experiment are in. It doesn’t work.

Our experiment has included:

· A kneejerk preference for ostracism, punitive sanctions, or the use of force over dialogue, compromise, or measures short of war in response to disagreements with foreign countries. This approach reflects a disdain for the interests and perspectives of foreign counterparts and fecklessly panders to the hallucinations of the homeland instead of focusing on how to persuade the country it targets to accommodate our concerns. It impedes rather than facilitates mutually beneficial resolution of differences.

· The replacement of diplomatic engagement and dialogue with provocative posturing and diatribe. The theory behind this seems to be that giving the finger to other countries amidst colorful invective punctuated with erratic threats is more likely to cause them to repent and be saved than a respectful meeting with them would. That’s not how it works in ordinary society and it is not how it works in relations with foreign states and peoples.

· Substituting inexperienced cronies, in-laws, and political poodles for experienced envoys and giving them no mandate to seal an agreement with those with whom they are charged to negotiate. Ignorance of the negotiating record, culture, history, language, and decision-making processes of one’s opposite number makes success a shot in the dark. Positive results are even more elusive when the authority to whom the envoys report is prone to arbitrary and capricious second guessing and changes of mind or more focused on domestic politics than on the issues at stake with foreign interlocutors.

· The use of negotiations as a means of deception, including as cover for military surprise attacks. This discredits the United States as an interlocuteur valable [legitimate partner in discourse] or negotiating partner and thereby complicates, if it doesn’t outright preclude the peaceable resolution of disputes.

· Fake diplomacy to match fake news. Diplomacy is a political performing art. The use of it to manipulate domestic public opinion and stock markets rather than to resolve problems with foreign countries transforms it from an instrument of statecraft into a farcical political charade.

· Pursuing unwritten understandings or agreements in principle, heads of agreement, or so-called napkin agreements that defer all the difficult issues for later negotiation. This sort of performative diplomacy appeals to the gullible, but it is a failsafe recipe for further discord, escalated antagonism, and impasse.

· Substituting policies of deterrence based on purely military threats for an approach that balances the credible demonstration of military capabilities with diplomatic reassurances that these capabilities will not be used if the other side refrains from doing what you are trying to persuade it not to do. Without such reassurances, the military component of deterrence is more alarming and provocative than dissuasive. This is how arms races are born and sustained and the likelihood of eventual war is increased.

· Erratic movement of the goalposts in both negotiations and warfare as opposed to steadfast perseverance in the pursuit of well-defined and feasible objectives. This sets the stage for and perpetuates ‘forever wars.’ Such wars have no clear goals, no benchmarks against which to measure success or failure, no diplomatic engagement with a demonized enemy to persuade it to stop fighting, and no plan for negotiations to accomplish war termination or create a sustainable postwar order.

· Denigrating allies and dissing partners but fawning over the strongmen who lead adversaries. This is almost as counterproductive as lumping all your most disliked opponents together under a provocative but vapid rubric like “the Axis of Evil” or “powers that layer authoritarian governance with a revisionist foreign policy” – a Biden conception that counterfactually bracketed China and Russia. Pas sérieux, as the French might say. Such domestically appealing political sloganeering encourages camaraderie among U.S. adversaries while inviting the ridicule of analysts the world over.

· Aiming at the unilateral capitulation of foreign opponents in response to “maximum pressure” instead of negotiating with them to obtain their agreement to the adjustments in their policies, behavior, or relations with us or others we desire. The statement that the other side cannot be negotiated with because it is ‘irrational’ is no more than a declaration that you are not prepared to make the effort to understand why your opponent thinks the way he does or to work out how to persuade him to think differently.

· Misdescribing agreements on deescalation as ’peace agreements’ or ‘ceasefires’ when they do nothing to address the causes of armed conflict and provide no basis for ending it. Even worse: initiating ‘ceasefires with Israeli characteristics’ in which only one side is expected to actually cease fire.

The concrete results of implementing these hare-brained hypotheses include:

· The demise of international law and comity and their replacement with disorder verging on anarchy.

· attention deficit diplomacy that the world sees as fitful, oafish, and rude, as well as destabilizing and menacing.

· Failed forever wars in Indochina, Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine, Somalia, Ukraine, and Iran as well as in fruitless counterinsurgency operations in at least 82 countries at present.

· An entente between China and Russia aimed at countering U.S. global primacy.

· The creation of a previously unthinkable nuclear threat from north Korea to the continental United States.

· Irreparable forfeiture of trust on the part of foreign interlocutors to the point of gaining a reputation for being ‘agreement incapable.’

In the specific case of the United States at present, the results include:

· Tensions with U.S. allies that have cost us our assured followership, risk the dissolution of our alliances, and foreshadow the impairment of our capability to project power globally.

· A rising danger of war over Taiwan that risks an eventual nuclear exchange with the People’s Republic of China.

· The unraveling of dollar hegemony and a threat to the “exorbitant privileges” of prosperity and power that they have conferred on our country.

· And a lot more – that I do not want to mention because it would depress you or appear to imply that I think one of our two political parties is wiser than the other on foreign policy matters. I don’t.

Regardless of whether we favor Tweedle Dee or Tweedle Dum, we can safely conclude that the evidence shows that an all-military-all-the-time approach to international relations does not do the job. Disdain for analytical and diplomatic expertise is dangerous. It’s time to end the American experiment with diplomacy-free foreign policy and to return to proven means of conducting our foreign relations. This means setting aside the “Washington playbook” and its precepts.

When policies fail, doing more of the same or throwing more money at the problem is not an appropriate response. When force fails to produce the desired results, escalating it is unlikely to yield victory. When faced with unavoidable, impending defeat, one should face the truth and retreat, not hang around to reinforce failure as we did in Afghanistan. Claiming victory is dunderheaded when the other side has not accepted defeat.

So, what do diplomats do other than push cookies at each other or hand them out to mobs in public squares abroad? Well, they are at work 24/7 interacting with foreigners, protecting and seeking to advance national interests, and rescuing citizens from the ingenious difficulties they create for themselves. Diplomats help prepare for war. Sometimes they start wars even when they don’t mean to do so. In a backhanded recognition of all this, the Cherokee pundit, Will Rogers once quipped, “take the diplomacy out of war and the thing would fall flat in a week.”

American diplomats’ recruitment of allies aggregates other nations’ power to our own. Agreements on basing and transit assure logistical support for ourr country’s armed forces. Diplomacy establishes the privileges and immunities members of those forces enjoy when deployed to other countries. Most important, it provides the means by which a better peace can replace the one a war has shattered.

Diplomacy is a lot cheaper and less risky than war, but it and armed combat are both means to the same ends – maximizing national advantage. As Clausewitz said, “war is the continuation of policy by other means.” The success or failure of wars is not measured in battle damage but in political results. Wars do not end until the defeated admit defeat. Peace does not last if the defeated are not reconciled to the political changes that their defeat has entailed. The consolidation of victory or the mitigation of defeat in a peace between the combatants is a classic task of diplomacy. We Americans seem to have lost our ability to accomplish this.

Contrary to popular opinion, wars do not suspend diplomacy. Holding alliances and coalitions together in support of a war effort is a diplomatic responsibility. It is as dangerous to lose contact with the enemy in the diplomatic arena as it is to do so on the battlefield. In either case, loss of contact exacts opportunity costs and risks strategic or tactical surprise. Diplomacy sustains the hope that a war can end on advantageous terms.

The recent history of the United States amply illustrates the limitations of the use of force – even overwhelming force. As Talleyrand is said to have remarked, you can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it. As a country, we haven’t seemed to understand that sitting on bayonets is not a good idea. Time for a moment of national satori.

Our experiment with diplomacy-free foreign policy cannot last. The lesson of the diplomatic and military disasters that have recently befallen us is not that diplomacy is “woke” and worthless but that resort to it is inevitable. That is because without it we are often impotent. Forty-one years ago, Herb Stein quoted his wise mother to point out that “if something can’t go on forever, sooner or later it will stop.” We are destined to rediscover diplomacy and how to practice it, whether our politicians understand or like it or not.

So, those of you in this group who have not been deterred by the failure of the last gasp of the Boomers and Gen X’s replacement of them as managers of our national destiny should not despair. You can still find fulfillment in a career in diplomacy. You are, after all, blessed by an opportunity to start pretty much from scratch. If you choose to serve our country, you will be present at the recreation of the arts of power. As a pre-boomer, I envy you that opportunity, if not the circumstances that are creating it.

Diplomacy is not just an activity abroad. It is, as I mentioned, a role in the formulation of national policy. Among other things, the United States needs to reinstitute a policy process that pursues national interests rather than personal prejudices or vendettas. Even if most of their careers are spent abroad, diplomats are essential contributors to any effective foreign policy process.

I want to counsel you, however, that diplomatic service contains hardships. My thirty years as a diplomat spanned the apex of American power and concluded at the dawn of the so-called ‘unipolar moment.” That was the beginning of the end of American strategic coherence and humility. I had a spectacular career, including a role in every phase of the geopolitical and politico-economic transformation of China, the end of colonialism and apartheid in Africa, the end of the Cold War, the effort to ensure that the Cold War was followed by collective enforcement of the U.N. Charter and international law through the creation of a posse to liberate Kuwait, and a failed effort to enable a cooperative rather than confrontational order in Europe. But in the course of my modest contributions to history, I lost a child to inadequate medical care, was shot at several times (they missed), saw a marriage destroyed in part by the demands of my profession, and was mugged by the Israel Lobby for warning against the unsustainable horror that Israel has become.

A diplomatic career is an opportunity to be at least a spear carrier in the operatic spectacle of history but is not without sacrifices. It doesn’t pay much. I resigned over three decades ago, poor as a church mouse, to pursue a second, more lucrative career. I have followed that with an unanticipated third career as a talking head on alternative media.

As the great quantum physicist, Niels Bohr said, in a wise remark that is often misattributed to Yogi Berra, “prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” I urge you to seize the uncertainty! There is great satisfaction to be gained from helping to dispel it to the advantage of our country, the United States of America. We need to reaffirm the better angels of the American nature and to resume our country’s contributions to a more prosperous and democratic future, not just for ourselves, but for the world of which we are an inseparable part.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Senior Fellow, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University
Washington, DC, 29 July 2022

In June 1974, cornered by Watergate, Richard Nixon set off on a quick tour of the Middle East. This is something presidents seem to do when they’re in trouble back home. In no foreign region is U.S. statecraft so inseparable from domestic politics. But the unpalatable realities of the Middle East have made it the unchallenged center of diplomatic hypocrisy and double standards. It is where the values-based foreign policies that our domestic politics demands go to die.

Pledging allegiance to Israel – regardless of its gross violations of Palestinian rights and neighboring states’ sovereignty — pries manna from heaven in the form of campaign donations from American Zionists and their fellow travelers. Similarly, given the American addiction to cheap energy, a quixotic desire for Saudi intervention to lower the price of gas at the pump springs eternal.

Domestic political calculations, not the strategic pursuit of national interests, have just led President Biden to affirm his fidelity to Zionism with a trip to Israel, the only country in the world where Donald Trump is more popular than he is. From Israel, the president traveled to Saudi Arabia, hat and emergency gas can in hand, to dine on symbolic crow as a guest of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom – to much domestic American applause – he had loudly denounced and pledged to make a “pariah.”

But no one should be surprised that he didn’t condemn the Saudi government for the murder of my friend, Jamal Khashoggi. Neither he nor any other president has ever held the Israeli government accountable for murdering Americans like Shireen Abu Akleh, Rachel Corrie, or the crew of the U.S.S. Liberty. Get real! Why should President Biden be more concerned about a dead citizen of Saudi Arabia than about dead Americans?

In Jeddah, the president bumped fists with MbS and made Israel’s case for a normalized relationship with its Arab neighbors despite its continuing cruelty to the Palestinian Arabs it oppresses. It doesn’t get more demeaning than this. When interests and pretenses collide, interests prevail. When foreign and domestic interests are in conflict, domestic interests come first. Nothing unusual about that. Let’s hear it for AIPAC and cheap gas!

If it’s obvious why President Biden needed Israel and Saudi Arabia at this moment, it’s less clear why they needed him. America has lost its grip on West Asia, which is now not its or any other great power’s fiefdom. Diminished leverage in the region makes Washington a less compelling partner than it once was. The United States no longer attempts to achieve peace for the Palestinians. Is cozying up to Iran’s enemies, refusing to deal with Iran itself, and continuing to trash the JCPOA a strategy, or just a posture dictated by domestic politics? It’s far from clear that shared fear of Iranian power and weaponry can sustain American influence in the region, as the so-called “peace process” and shared dread of godless Soviet communism once did.

Regardless of doubts about Washington’s reliability as a protector, Israel, the Arab participants in the eruption of Realpolitik known as the “Abraham Accords,” and Saudi Arabia all recognize that they have no real alternative to a U.S. security umbrella. No other great power is able to assume or, indeed, has any desire to take up American defense burdens in the region. But what’s in it for Americans to soldier on?

There are, in fact, serious matters at stake for the United States in West Asia beyond the sole reason the president gave – to exclude Chinese and Russian influence there. Many factors dictate a sound American relationship with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab countries. Among these:

• The United States itself may no longer need Saudi oil, but everyone else does. Saudi Arabia supplies one-sixth of the world’s exported oil. Other Gulf Arab states close to Riyadh supply another eighth. The Kingdom leads OPEC, which exports almost fifty percent of world petroleum. OPEC plus Russia supplies just a bit under three-fifths. It’s the balance of supply and demand in the global market, not political pandering to angry American consumers, that determines energy prices, supports or undermines global prosperity, and helps determine rates of inflation. If you’re concerned about energy prices, you better be on speaking terms with Riyadh. Moscow too.

• Washington has set aside reliance on diplomatic persuasion in favor of coercive policies based on dollar sovereignty. The United States now imposes sanctions on any and all countries that defy its policies. This practice and the lawless confiscation of a growing number of countries’ dollar reserves have put America at odds with much of the world. The dollar ceased to be convertible to gold in 1971. Since then, its centrality to global trade settlement and finance has been sustained by a Saudi commitment (which OPEC grudgingly follows) to price energy in dollars. Should the Saudis decide to accept other currencies for their oil, markets for other commodities would do the same. This would collapse the dollar, end the “exorbitant privilege” it affords the United States, and terminate U.S. global primacy. This is not a small matter.

• To get from Asia to Europe or vice versa, you need permission to transit Saudi airspace. So, U.S. global strategic mobility is hostage to the Kingdom’s goodwill. The geopolitical cost of an unfriendly and uncooperative relationship with Riyadh would be immense.

• The most extreme Islamist movements bracket the United States and Saudi Arabia as enemies. Intelligence from the Kingdom remains essential to effective U.S. defense against terrorist attack.

• Saudi custody of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina gives it worldwide soft power. Saudi Islam has shown that it has the potential to be either a font of Muslim extremism and anti-Americanism or its most effective antidote. After supporting religious intolerance for decades, Saudi Arabia now actively combats Islamist causes. This cannot be taken for granted.

• Saudi Arabia is the largest single foreign purchaser of both American and British defense equipment and services. Many production lines in the U.S. and U.K. would shut down if the Kingdom bought elsewhere. Lots of jobs would be lost.

The U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia is, of course, not the only challenge to U.S. strategic interests in the region. Consider these other issues:

• Current U.S. policies toward Iran invite it to emulate North Korea, which responded to “maximum pressure” by developing a nuclear deterrent to attack by the United States, thus creating a previously nonexistent threat to the American homeland.

• The forty-year-old Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), in which Saudi Arabia is primus inter pares, is on the mend, but just as feckless as ever.

• U.S. forces have illegally invaded Syria and are engaged there in dangerous maneuvers against Russian, Turkish, Iranian, and Lebanese as well as Syrian forces. These confrontations risk wider wars – and not just in the region.

• The post-Saddam order the assembled battalions of the Blob unilaterally imposed on Iraq earlier this century is unstable and crumbling. Iraq’s future alignments are in doubt. The Biden administration does not appear to have an answer to this.

• Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the UAE, among others, are attempting to dilute their strategic overdependence on the United States. They do not share Washington’s global obsessions, are alarmed by its erratic politics, resent its efforts to coerce them into placing dubious U.S. interests above their own, and will not downgrade relations with China and Russia to please America.

• Israel continues to terrorize and dispossess its captive Arab populations and to violate the sovereignty of neighboring states. The Zionist state is increasingly dismissive of U.S. advice to restrain its violent behavior. It appears to believe that it has a blank check from America. Maybe it does. Others in the region want the U.S. to make them safe from Israel, not Israel safe from them.

It’s a truism that failure provides more lessons than success. West Asia is a region in which abundant policy failures offer a cornucopia of insights into warfare and diplomacy. Few of these would come as a surprise to classical Arab, British, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Indian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mongol, Persian, Portuguese, Roman, Russian, Spanish, or Turkish students of statecraft. But the United States no longer teaches geography or foreign history in its schools, has ever fewer foreign correspondents, glorifies war, and seems to view diplomacy as nothing more than foreplay before a military assault. Our habit of plotting foreign policies as vectors of ill-informed popular perceptions and passions belies reality. By reality I mean what is out there whether Americans perceive it and believe in it or not. Not bothering to figure out how foreigners see things enables Washington to avoid having to ponder how they might react to its decisions. Americans now feel free to indulge solipsistic fantasies that justify foreign policies so out of line with trends and events abroad that they gain more blowback than traction.

We are now in the post-post-World War II, post-post Bretton Woods, and post-post-Cold War periods. Let’s call this ‘the new world disorder.’ Neither the world nor the United States is what it was in the formative years of our leaders’ and their key subordinates’ experience. They and we need to come to grips with radically altered realities. Acting as if nothing much has changed is the equivalent of playing chess blindfolded with your ears blocked. It’s a sure path to geopolitical checkmate or worse.

The Biden trip to Israel and Saudi Arabia is proof that passionate attachments and moral outrage directed at foreigners may be freebies on the campaign trail but can be a serious challenge and embarrassment to anyone who actually gets elected, takes office, and has to govern. Venomous denunciations of foreign leaders now have consequences. A bit of rhetorical restraint is in order.

About twenty years ago, I was present when a well-meaning visitor asked then Crown Prince `Abdullah bin `Abdulaziz Al-Sa`ud to provide Israelis with useful private advice on how to make peace with others in the region. `Abdullah replied, “tell them, if they want to be loved, they should do something lovable.” That was good advice for Israel then. And it’s good advice for the United States and others now.

March 28, 2008, New Orleans, Louisiana
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)

I want to speak to you this afternoon about diplomacy as an element of statecraft. By now most Americans recognize that we are in a bit of trouble both at home and abroad. What is to be done? Is diplomacy a better answer than the use of force?

The late Arthur Goldberg, who was both a Justice of our Supreme Court and Ambassador to the United Nations, observed that “diplomats approach every issue with an open … mouth.” A colleague and friend of mine, who served as Ambassador to China, once told me that “a diplomat is someone who thinks twice – before saying nothing.” They set a high bar for a public speaker on diplomacy as an alternative to militarism, but I am willing to attempt it.

Americans believe in military power, and the United States has never spent so much on it. Internationally, given our diminished political standing and the collapse of the dollar, military prowess may be our only remaining comparative advantage. We certainly behave as though we think it is.

In current dollars, we are spending about 28 percent more on our military each year than we did during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and over one-third more than at the height of the Reagan defense build-up against the late, unlamented Soviet Union. We are spending considerably more on military power than the rest of the world put together – three and a half times as much as the highest estimate for China, Russia, Cuba, Iran, and North Korea combined; and at least 12,000 times as much as Al Qaeda and all other terrorist groups with global reach. It is not clear what enemies justify all this money. Whoever they are, if military expenditures are the key to national security, we’ve got them where we want them.

In the first ten years of this century, US defense outlays will total about five and one-quarter trillion dollars. Military-related outlays in other parts of the federal budget – like homeland security, veterans affairs, and interest payments on war debt – will add another $2 trillion or so to this, for a cumulative total of something well over $7 trillion in military and military-related spending. Our defense budget, including supplementals to pay for offensive operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, is now about 5 percent of our gross domestic product (GDP). Counting military-related outlays in other budgets, the percentage of our economy devoted to defense is around 7 percent. We have a huge economy and, in absolute terms, that is a lot of military spending.

We need a strong military even though we’re not really worried about an invasion from Jamaica or Canada or Mexico or even Cuba or Iran. Unlike other nations’ armed forces, what ours do is mostly not defense against foreign invasion or attacks on the homeland. Our military is configured for offensive deployment in support of foreign policy. It does deterrence, punishment, and conquest of real and potential foreign enemies. That is why our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines are in Korea, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as in Bosnia and dozens of other places around the world that have neither the intent nor the capability to attack us. It took 9/11 and its demonstration that we had no military means of preventing foreign attack on US civilians to get us to worry about the possibility that such attacks might occur. We now have a separate department of government focused on that.

Somehow, however, despite all the money we’ve spent, the debt we’ve accumulated, and the sacrifices patriotic Americans have made in distant foreign lands, our leaders tell us that we have never been so threatened. Given all the enemies we have been making recently, they may be right. There is, of course, a time-tested political axiom in Washington that if something isn’t working the answer is to add money and do more of it. So our president and the three major candidates vying to succeed him join in promising further increases in defense spending – without providing any indication of how these increases would buy us greater security. It’s enough to make one wonder whether President Eisenhower wasn’t onto something when he warned Americans against the danger of nurturing a “military-industrial complex” that would give us a vested interest in military spending, regardless of the nature and level of the threat to our nation.

Massive military spending has, in fact, become an indispensable part of our political-economy. In addition to buying remarkably capable and costly weapons systems, it feeds hordes of consultants and contractors and houses legions of academic specialists. These are very bright people who labor to develop theories of how military coercion might control foreign behavior. They produce threat analyses to justify continuing US military build-up. They consider how best to apply our military might abroad, and they work out the force packages and weapons system specifications to do it. The intellectual energy that massive spending has focused on these topics – as opposed to means of influence that do not rely on the threat or use of force – has revolutionized the American approach to foreign policy. One should never underestimate the impact of either federal spending or the resulting focus of the academy!

And one should never underestimate the ability of politicians to ignore millennia of human experience and to aspire to expediency if the academy gives them an opening to do so. Most of our leaders, in both major political parties, now espouse a reversal of the longstanding American view that coercion, especially through military means, is a last resort to be brought into play only when diplomacy – in the form of persuasion, diplomatic bargaining, alliance-building, and other measures short of war – has failed. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, the sequence approved on both sides of the aisle was to shoot first, then send in the diplomats to mop up. Since this hasn’t worked out too well, there is now a lot of talk about how to recruit more diplomats and buy more mops. That’s probably a good idea, but it might be more effective and cheaper to involve the diplomats at the outset and avoid creating such a mess in the first place.

It used to be thought that the purpose of war is to secure a more perfect peace. That is an objective that invokes diplomacy to translate military triumph into new arrangements acceptable to both victor and vanquished. It implies war planning focused on the question: “and then what?” and the conduct of war in accordance with a strategy that unites political, economic, informational, and intelligence measures with military actions and a well-crafted plan for war termination. In Iraq, a brilliant general has belatedly come up with a credible campaign plan but his plan is still unconnected to a strategy. Our plan to end the fighting is apparently to hang around until the Iraqis decide to make peace with each other. That might take a while. In the strategy-free zone that is contemporary Washington, no one wants to second-guess a celebrity general, but any reading of David Petraeus’ manual on counter-insurgency must lead to the conclusion that, in Iraq, “victory” remains undefined and missing in action.

Sadly, theories of coercion and plans to use military means to impose our will on other nations have for some time squeezed out serious consideration of diplomacy as an alternative to the use of force. Diplomacy is more than saying “nice doggie,” till you can find a rock. Weapons are tools to change men’s minds but they are far from the only means of doing so. As we are learning from our misadventures in the Middle East, they are also seldom the most reliable or least expensive. The weapons of diplomats are words and their power is their persuasiveness. Talk is cheaper than firepower and does less collateral damage, so it makes sense to try it before blazing away at the adversary.

There is another reason to regard force as a last resort. It creates ruins that cannot easily be rebuilt and resentments that cannot be easily be overcome. War is a form of demolition; its results are messy and its effects on those it touches are uncertain. In the age of globalization, moreover, military invasion is as likely to incubate terrorists with global reach as it is to overthrow governments and seize terrain. It makes sense to exhaust diplomatic remedies first, not to follow a script of “Ready! Fire! Diplomacy!”

Diplomacy is the art of pursuing the internationally possible. Its main drawback is that it involves the unpleasant task of interacting persuasively with usually disagreeable adversaries and sometimes tedious friends. Despite the example of useful, wide-ranging dialog with our Soviet enemies (conducted on the sound theory that one should never lose contact with the enemy diplomatically or militarily), a generation of American leaders seems to have concluded that we shouldn’t talk to people who disagree with us till they come out with their hands up. But not talking to those with whom one disagrees is the diplomatic equivalent of unilateral disarmament.

Figuring out why others are doing things and explaining to them why Americans disagree with this and why they should, in their own interest, do things our way is the opposite of appeasement. And it is more likely to achieve results than ducking such encounters while loudly proclaiming that those we disdain to speak with already know what they need to do to appease us, so we don’t need to reason with them. Substituting reliance on the intuition of our adversaries for diplomatic communication with them leaves few options. We can live with a surging mess or we can slap on some sanctions. When these fail, as they inevitably do, we can send in the B-2s and Abrams tanks. These are not good choices. The approach they impose creates more problems than it solves.

Our next president will inherit a daunting list of challenges: apparently interminable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; withering alliances; diminished international prestige and deference to our leadership; deepening estrangement between the United States and the Islamic world, a mounting threat to our homeland from the growing ranks of anti-American jihadis; a war-fatigued, equipment-depleted, disenchanted, and still untransformed US military; an increasingly lawless world order; and the emergence of a widening range of regional challenges to US influence and interests from the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chávez Frías, and Vladimir Putin..

He or she will have to deal with all these issues while wrestling with a budget and economy in chronic deficit; mounting national debt amidst a credit crisis; recession; inflation; insolvent pension systems; decaying infrastructure – complete with collapsing bridges, pot-holes, and gridlock; a medical system that extracts rapidly inflating payments from middle class Americans without caring for the poor, sick, and destitute among us; and other developments that, collectively, undermine America as a model that other nations wish to emulate. It is tempting to conclude that anyone who wants to be president under these circumstances is prima facie mentally defective and unfit for the office. Still, some poor soul will be inaugurated next January 20 and will have to deal with all these issues and then some.

The new president might start by shaking off the constipated notion that diplomacy is, like military posturing, just a way of conveying menace or containing or deterring threats. These things are, of course, part of diplomacy. And it’s true, as Al Capone once sagely remarked, that “you will get farther with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone.” Diplomacy is largely about adding the strength of others to one’s own, but its greater mission is to take the political offensive by transcending the conventional wisdom and identifying or creating opportunities, and seizing them to the national advantage. That is what Truman did with the Marshall Plan and the formation of NATO. It is what Nixon did with his opening to China. It is what Carter did at Camp David. It is what Reagan did with Gorbachev at Reykjavik. The next president should look into how to restore our atrophied diplomatic capabilities so as to lift us from the mire into which we have sunk.

Resorting to diplomacy will not be as easy as it may sound. Secretary of Defense Gates has recently begun to speak to the lopsided priorities apparent in our budget, which underfunds diplomacy and forces the US military to do all sorts of things that would be more appropriately and better done by civilian foreign affairs personnel. Gates points out that there are fewer professional diplomats in our Foreign Service than there are personnel in military bands or a single carrier battle group. What our country spends on a year’s diplomatic and consular operations worldwide is less than what we spend in six days of military operations in Iraq.

You get what you pay for. In this case, that’s a superbly professional and supremely lethal military and an anemically staffed and undertrained diplomatic service led by inexperienced political appointees on sabbatical from high incomes. As one of the last century’s greatest diplomats, Israel’s Abba Eban, said of this peculiarly American practice,

“The bizarre notion that any citizen, especially if he is rich, is fit for the representation of his country abroad has taken some hard blows through empirical evidence. But it has not been discarded.”

It has been 196 years since an amateur general – Andrew Jackson – last commanded US troops in battle not far from here. But to lead our diplomatic work abroad, especially in countries where the standard of living is high and the danger of anti-American violence is low, we still depend on amateurs who must learn on the job, hoping that their experienced subordinates will help them overcome their ignorance of the local language, paper over embarrassing gaffes, and avoid catastrophic mistakes. And in Washington, where Iraq has just reminded us how dangerous it can be to allow civilian armchair generals to substitute their military judgments for those of military professionals, we now staff our foreign policy apparatus almost entirely with people with no diplomatic experience. No other country in the world so values ideological reliability and party loyalty over professional knowledge and expertise. Only in America….

I am reminded of the story of a former US ambassador to the Soviet Union, Mac Toon, a crusty career diplomat who went aboard an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean for a meeting with the admiral who commanded its battle group. At the end of their discussion, the admiral leaned over to ask, “what’s it like being an ambassador? I’ve always thought that after I retire I might want to try it.” Ambassador Toon replied, “that’s funny. I’ve always thought that, when I retire, I might try my hand at running a carrier battle group.” The admiral said, “That’s ridiculous. A naval command requires years of training and experience.” But so do the management of foreign policy and diplomacy, if the ship of state is not to be sailed onto the rocks or beached in the desert.

It is a truism that skilled work requires skilled workmen. Americans are now without peer in the military arts. To prevail against our current enemies, we must attain equal excellence in diplomacy. We do not have the margin for error we once did. But even if we devote the equivalent of a whole week’s worth of the Pentagon budget to the arts of peace – rather than the three days or so we now do – fixing our Foreign Service will take time. As our military know better than anyone, it takes decades to train, exercise, and professionalize personnel. After years of overemphasis on military means of conducting our foreign relations, getting up to diplomatic snuff will also require a serious investment in intellectual infrastructure comparable to that we have devoted to the military arts.

If we build a diplomatic capability to match our military prowess, we will gain a key building block of national strategy. But a bigger, better Foreign Service will not in itself create such a strategy. Nor will it solve the underlying problem of national strategic illiteracy. We suffer from what one of our most sophisticated foreign policy practitioners, Chester Crocker, has called a “statecraft deficit.” It is inspiring to observe the professionalism of our military, which is the most competent in history. It is painful to observe the extent to which military requests for direction from the civilians whose control they are taught to revere go unanswered. The fact is that we – and those we elect and appoint to lead us – are remarkably poorly prepared for the preeminent role in world affairs we now play.

Our educational system bears major responsibility for this. Most Americans can’t find Louisiana, let alone Iraq or Afghanistan, on the map. Many are unversed in history, still less diplomatic history. Few have been exposed to any instruction in how to reason about foreign affairs or statecraft and its diplomatic, intelligence, and military tools. Almost none have been tutored in strategy. This is understandable. It is largely a reflection of two factors, both of which have changed.

First, until recently, the American homeland was apparently invulnerable, and the United States was the leader in most fields of human endeavor. Foreign policy was therefore something we inflicted on others without fear of reprisal, not something they did unto us. And we didn’t think we had much to learn from foreigners. Foreign affairs and national security didn’t seem like anything the average American citizen had to worry about. But 9/11 changed that forever.

And, second, the formative influences of the Cold War, during which the United States led half the world against Soviet communism, are still with us. Then, the capacity of the Soviet Union to annihilate us imperiled our very existence. Its predatory ideology menaced our values; its imperial ambitions threatened our interests and those of many other nations.. The threats to both values and interests became so thoroughly merged that we forgot how to distinguish the two, though they are very different in their functions and import.

Attempts at historical revisionism by the proponents of militarism notwithstanding, the fact is that we won the Cold War by patient adherence to a strategy of containment, not by butting heads on a battlefield. Containment relied on diplomacy – on measures short of war – to build and sustain alliances backed by the deterrent power of great military strength. Some may profess to regret that we did not join in battle with the Soviet Union to roll back its empire. I am glad we substituted patience for belligerence. Our strategy did not vary over forty years. It formed the foreign policy outlook of three generations We did not have to think about strategy. In many ways, we appear to have forgotten how to do so.

We now face a world in which our personal security and that of our communities is threatened, but our national existence is not. As a people and as a nation, we are challenged from many directions and in many ways, not by a single “evil empire” that we can count upon to rot away from within. To secure our domestic tranquility against foreign assault and to lead the 21^st Century as we did the last one will demand of us a higher level of strategic conceptual ability and civic literacy than we have had to demonstrate for decades. And it will require instruments of statecraft adequate to the task – diplomatic, informational, and intelligence capabilities of the first order, backed by military power without peer and a prosperous, attractive, and open society.

Two millennia ago, the Roman philosopher Seneca advised the Emperor Nero of the vital importance of setting objectives. “If a man does not know to what port he steers, no wind is favorable,” he pointed out. It was good advice, even if Nero didn’t take it. It is worth pondering in our current circumstances. Our debate about the challenges before us is almost entirely tactical not strategic; cast in terms of our politics rather than external realities; and focused on preventing change rather than turning it to our advantage.

Yet, for example, we risk reaping the whirlwind if we simply leave Iraq. We cannot do so safely and responsibly without defining realistic objectives and using our withdrawal to advance toward them. If we continue to aid and abet counterproductive behavior by all sides in the Middle East, we should not be surprised when they turn on us. If we do not define a feasible end-game in Afghanistan, we will just incubate more anti-American terrorists while expanding the world’s heroin supply.

If we cannot decide what sort of international monetary reserve system should replace the currently collapsing one and persuade other stakeholders to act with us to fix it, we will drift into increasing economic misery. We must develop a plan to reunite the Atlantic region behind the rule of law and other Western values or see these eclipsed by ideas from other regions of the world that are rising to new prominence. Without a vision of mutually beneficial coexistence in our hemisphere, events and the anti-American dreams of others will bring needless trouble right up to our borders. If we are not positioned to help as Cuba, North Korea, Burma, and other troubled nations enter periods of transition, we must expect that they will change in ways that create new problems for us and their neighbors. If we have no positive agenda for enlisting Chinese and Indian power in common causes, they may well apply their power in ways that undercut ours, annoy us, or even injure us.

It has been a long time since Americans had a positive vision or clear objectives for these and many other pressing issues. I could go on, but the afternoon advances, and New Orleans beckons. Let me close with the obvious point that we cannot hope to appeal to the conscience of humankind if we do not continue to embody its aspirations. If we do not restore our country’s good name, others will not follow when we lead or share the burdens we take up. To regain the cooperation of allies and friends, we must rediscover how to listen, how to persuade, how to be a team player, and how to follow the rules we demand others follow.

We must do this because we Americans cannot successfully address the problems we confront on our own. Our need for foreign partners has never been greater. Fortunately, the world’s desire for partnership with America has not really gone away. Beneath the layers of resentment and animosity laid down by our recent behavior, there is still much goodwill toward the United States. This “fossil friendship” will not last forever. For now, however, it is a resource that American diplomacy can mine to rebuild the respect of allies and friends for our leadership and to unite them behind an American vision of a better world. A return to diplomacy, not threats and the use of force, is the surest path to the reassertion of American leadership. It is time to rediscover and explore that path.

By Video, June 26, 2026

Peace is more than the absence of combat between warring parties. Cicero defined it as “liberty in tranquility,” a condition in which states and peoples do not use violence against each other in pursuit of their inherently incompatible goals. There has been no such peace in West Asia since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in World War I.

The Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 divided that Empire’s Arab provinces into British and French spheres of influence. In 1917 Britain – a colonial power – declared its support for the establishment of “a national home for the [European] Jewish people” in Palestine, while fatuously denying that this would affect the civil and religious rights of Palestine’s existing Muslim and Christian communities. In 1919, denied the self-determination promised to other peoples in President Wilson’s “Fourteen Points,” the Kurds revolted against British rule in Mesopotamia. They continue to rebel against the Arabs. Persians, and Turks who dominate the states they inhabit.

The unintended consequence of these actions has been more than a century of low intensity conflict in West Asia, punctuated by bloody wars, genocidal massacres, and terrorist incidents. The Israeli-American war with Iran is the latest expression of this endemic violence. The latest ‘ceasefire with Israeli characteristics’ does not promise an end to it.

Israel’s insistence on absolute security for itself has meant absolute insecurity for everyone else in West Asia. With U.S. backing, it has felt free to bomb, strafe, and murder its potential adversaries throughout West Asia. Israeli and American attacks on Iran have, however, now evoked effective counterattacks. Israel retains its “qualitative edge” over its neighbors, but it has lost its immunity from devastating reprisal.

Almost all wars conclude through negotiations. To succeed, these must recognize what interactions on the battlefield have produced. Otherwise, the negotiations fail. The chances of success are improved if the negotiators representing the parties are experienced professionals with no conflicts of interest and who have built mutual trust with their opposing counterparts. That has not been the case in U.S. negotiations with Iran, which have been and will remain complicated by Israel’s determination to ensure that they fail.

The Iran War will not be followed by peace in West Asia, but it may mark the end of direct great-power involvement in armed conflict between its warring parties. Memoranda of understanding may be “deals” in the sense of a coordinated statement of intent, but they are the equivalent of a handshake before the parties sit down at the negotiating table. They are neither peace nor a peace agreement.

The immediate results of the Iran War are clear. The war after the war has begun. Its longer-term consequences are only now coming into view. Some of them are strategically systemic.

This war has resulted in:

· Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz,

· Iran’s adoption of an Israeli-style standard of disproportionate retaliation for attacks on it or Israel’s neighbors or Arab movements resisting Israeli expansionism,

· a US-Iranian de-escalation agreement misdescribed as a “ceasefire’ and, so far, not accepted by Israel, which continues to seek to annihilate Iran and dominate West Asia through the use of force,

· a growing U.S. rupture with Israel,

· escalating energy prices and inflation,

· the probable tipping of the global economy into recession or worse,

· impending food and other supply shortages,

· the creation of a greatly expanded market for Chinese renewable energy technology and products,

· the erosion of the dollar’s global monopoly on trade settlement through the slow birth of a Chinese “petroyuan,”

· a convincing demonstration of the limits of U.S. military power,

· the depletion of the U.S. weapons and defense systems needed for other contingencies or contracted for delivery by allies and partners,

· the flaking apart of NATO and the basing and overflight rights its members have granted to the U.S.,

· the probable eviction of the U.S. armed forces from the bases the Gulf Arabs have heretofore loaned them,

· the murder of the Iranian leadership echelon most opposed to building a nuclear weapon with the consequence that Iran will do so after the sixty day ‘truce’ in the absence of the return of its frozen assets, the removal of sanctions, and credible security guarantees,

· the severe devaluation of the U.S. word by performative rather than substantive diplomacy and erratic oscillation in negotiating positions, as well as

· definitive proof that selecting personnel for their political subservience and sycophancy rather than their experience, expertise, and willingness to speak truth to power can render a government incompetent and ‘agreement incapable.’

Meanwhile, gross violations of international law and human decency by Israel continue to escalate antipathy to it in ever younger echelons of the U.S. population, including American Jews. Israel’s charges that criticism of its polices amount to antisemitism have largely lost their sting. Israel is now an international pariah. It is becoming the skunk at the garden party in American politics. A similar evolution is underway in Europe.

The influence in American politics that the so-called “Abraham Accords” gained for the UAE and Bahrain through the U.S. Zionist Lobby is therefore a wasting asset. The accords themselves are on life support. They are unlikely to survive the logic of Gulf Arab national interests. Israeli genocide, ethnic cleansing, and expansionism plus the need to make peace with an Iran determined to counter Israel have combined to make overt cooperation with Israel a domestic threat to Arab governments. The Israeli police-state and defense technology the Gulf Arab rulers have acquired from Israel is formidable but not irreplaceable.

Yemen and Iran have now both successfully conducted land-based blockades of their adjacent seas. This calls into question the traditional Anglo-American view of the sea as a strategic domain from which to dominate the land.[1] The three-mile range of canon in the 18^th century established a three-mile limit for territorial seas. Now drones and terminally-guided missiles can strike ships up to 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles) or more away from coastal batteries. Sea control is no longer the uncontested province of navies.

Meanwhile, international law no longer inhibits acts of piracy – seaborne murder and robbery. Ships are now subject to unprovoked attacks or outright seizure by the former champions of freedom of navigation. Insurance rates are rising. The seas are no longer open to all nations for secure navigation and trade.

War always creates new realities and adjusts relations between states and peoples. That is its purpose. But armed conflicts seldom work out the way those who start them imagine they will. And they are not always succeeded by peace. The prospect that a peace will emerge from whatever negotiating process follows the US-Iran memorandum of understanding announced on June 15, 2026, is poor. In West Asia, warfare is far more likely to persist at varying levels of intensity.

The Iran War has just reminded the world that wars test endurance and resolve more than weapon systems, and that they do not end until the loser accepts defeat—something the United States apparently finds it impossible to do. Wars do not end because one side blows up more buildings or kills more civilians than the other. (Ask the Vietnamese, Afghans, Ukrainians, Palestinians, or Lebanese about this.) Military prowess can impose outcomes, but it does not always prevail. The balance of fervor—the degree to which each side sees the conflict as vital to its national identity and interests, dignity, and survival—can enable a militarily weaker side to carry the day. When the fundamental causes of war do not disappear, the parties will remain determined to keep fighting as best they can. Iran and Israel have made no effort to set aside their differences. The June 15 “ceasefire” between Iran and the United States does not oblige them to bury the hatchet or offer a process to facilitate them doing so.

The prospects for peace are also ill-served by the changes in the information environment that recent wars have catalyzed. The new transparency of battlefields to observation by satellites and drones has made deception difficult, if not impossible, so states now rely on information warfare to accomplish it. Censorship, lying narratives, fake news, and false flag operations are central to the strategies of contemporary combatants. The press is no longer an effective check on Orwellian storylines. This leaves governments free to consume their own propaganda and to formulate policies based on it rather than on unpalatable underlying realities. This feeds hallucinations that suffocate diplomacy and help prolong ‘forever wars.’

The Gulf Arabs have just learned the hard way that the United States prioritizes Israel’s defense over theirs and that Iran can and will punish them for any alignment with Israel or the United States. Cooperation by them with either Israel or the United States will continue to invite Iranian attack. So, Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members now face a choice between wary cooperation with Iran or continuing threats to their oil and gas facilities or, even worse, their desalination plants – without which they cannot exist as modern societies. This is no choice at all. The Gulf Arabs have a powerful incentive to accommodate Iran’s demand that they remove American bases from their territory.

The states of the region do not want to replace the United States with another external actor like China or Russia. A new four-party coalition of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Türkiye, and Egypt has formed to create a revised West Asian security architecture that can provide deterrent weight against either Israeli or Iranian regional hegemony, while reducing reliance on external great powers and building strategic autonomy. The members of this coalition, which is likely to expand, hope to build an indigenous military industrial base that will reduce their overall dependence on both foreign protection and arms imports. They will seek assurances of respect for their strategic autonomy from external great powers.

Iran now controls and will continue to regulate passage through the Strait of Hormuz in partnership with Oman and (possibly) other littoral states but not with any external great naval power. This sets a precedent that overturns centuries of international law and risks being applied to other straits. The list of waterways that might be reduced to a nationally regulated transit status like the manmade canals of Panama and Suez is long. It includes Malacca, Sunda, Lombok, the Bab-al-Mandeb, Taiwan, Gibraltar, and the Bosphorus. The international community – including countries dependent on maritime trade like China, Japan, and India – should share an interest with the West in ensuring that whatever management system is put in place in the Strait of Hormuz does not inspire comparable limits to freedom navigation elsewhere.

The economic stress and the uncertainties that the Iran War has introduced are a great stimulus to national efforts to consolidate supply chains, lessen reliance on maritime transport of fossil fuels, invest in renewable energy technology and products, and otherwise pursue self-sufficiency. The result will be slower economic growth pretty much everywhere as self-reliance replaces ‘comparative advantage.’ But the transition to renewable energy and electrification of the world’s economies will accelerate.

So, in sum, we are likely entering an era in which:

· shipping is more expensive and less secure,

· economies worldwide strive to lessen their dependence on hydrocarbons as their primary sources of energy,

· the need to restore lost hydrocarbon production burdens Persian Gulf economies in ways that demand reformulation of their policies and development plans,

· the pressure on Gulf economies to wean themselves from their economic dependence on hydrocarbon exports increases even as revenues from such exports decline and development projects are trimmed back,

· Iran answers intermittent acts of aggression by Israel against it and Israels’ Arab neighbors with retaliatory strikes on Israel,

· the resistance movements Israel has battered are tempted to revive 1960s-style attacks on Israelis and their foreign supporters,

· foreign investment and economic activity in the UAE and other GCC members are hampered by a perceived rise in political risk,

· geopolitics in West Asia are dominated by détente between the Gulf Arabs and Iran and a search for regional strategic autonomy by a coalition whose core is a partnership between Ankara, Cairo, Islamabad, and Riyadh,

· Iran, Lebanon, and Syria are obsessed with repairing war damage and reconstructing their economies, providing opportunities for foreign construction companies (e.g., from China and Turkey),

· Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, Russian, and Turkish influence in West Asia grows, while U.S. influence diminishes, and

· Iran joins Israel as a de facto nuclear power, sparking the development of nuclear weapons by Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and others.

These unfortunate potential results of the American debacle in the Persian Gulf cannot be separated from broader geopolitical and geoeconomic trends.

The five-century-long era of Western dominance of global affairs is over. A disunited Europe is no longer an effective participant in global geopolitics or economics, despite its obvious potential to be both. China has no interest in assuming the decaying role of the United States as the global hegemon. India is far from ready to do so. Africa and Latin America remain self-absorbed. International institutions are increasingly ineffective. The world order is no longer regulated by international law. Disorder, for now, prevails. We are all less secure than we were.

We are again at a moment like the one Gramsci described at the outset of the 1930s: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of morbid symptoms.” He did not, as supposed, refer to the advent of “monsters” but that is no consolation. The monsters are already here and show no signs of going away.

توكلنا على الله

[1] Viz: Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (1890)

Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Visiting Scholar, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University
By video from Washington, DC 21 September 2022

The world is now in a confusing transition to a new order for both its constituent regions and its functional divisions. This is not unusual. In the five centuries since all parts of the globe were brought into mutual communication, there have been many such evolutions.

The first global, as opposed to regional order emerged only in the final years of the 15^th century. In 1492, Columbus crossed the Atlantic. This connected the Americas to Europe. Soon after, in 1498, Vasco da Gama circumnavigated Africa and reached India. These two events for the first time made all the world’s continents and oceans a single geopolitical and geoeconomic playing field. They also inaugurated a four-century-long period in which rapidly advancing European technology, industry, and military capabilities bested all competitors, and Western imperialism, colonialism, and ideas conquered the globe.

In the 16^th and 17^th centuries, Europeans exterminated most of the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas, became the predominant populations there, and began the transport of millions of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. In the late 18^th and the 19^th centuries Europeans and their North American descendants overthrew the indigenous civilizations of Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific and began the replacement of their political cultures. A new, Atlantic-centered world order had come into being.

Here is a map showing in white the twenty-two countries that the most successfully predatory European imperialist power, Britain did not invade.

European states sought security and prosperity through competition in their own region. But to strengthen themselves in that competition, they pursued control of overseas resources and markets, established military bases abroad, and settled their citizens in lands with sparse indigenous populations but congenial climates. The result was the political, technological, and military domination of the globe by Europe’s great powers, and mass migration by Europeans to the temperate zones of the Americas and Antipodes.

The first worldwide war (1756 – 1815)

In the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, the British and French fought the first truly global war.

Their battle for global hegemony flared on and off from 1756 to 1815. with decisive effects on the countries and regions within the world order it defined. France was an absolute monarchy but its worldwide contest with Britain gave it a compelling interest in supporting Britain’s radically democratic American colonists against their king despite their crime of lèse majesté. Absent French intervention, the decisive battle for American independence at Yorktown would not have occurred and the colonists’ rebellion might not have succeeded.

Global Europe (1815 – 1914)

After the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the Congress of Vienna reconstituted order in Europe by reintegrating France into its councils of governance. The so-called Concert of Europe established a balance of power system that prevented any single power from dominating the European subcontinent. But as the 19^th century proceeded, outside Europe Britain emerged as the undisputed global hegemon.

A British viceroy ruled India. Europeans divided the rest of the world between them. Britain, France, Germany, and Russia sliced China into spheres of influence.

Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Spain apportioned Africa between them, leaving only Ethiopia and Liberia independent.

In West Asia, only Saudi Arabia, and in East Asia, only Japan remained completely independent. Japan soon emulated Europe’s imperialist powers by building its own overseas empire, seizing the Chinese province of Taiwan in 1895, subjugating the Empire of Korea in 1905, and annexing it in 1910.

A hemisphere apart (1815 -?)

After its 1815 victory over its French adversary, Britain made a century-long effort to deny the resources of the Americas to its European rivals. The newborn United States shared this British interest, even if it found it impolitic to acknowledge this. U.S. independence, followed by the French revolution of 1789 – 1799, had inspired Haiti and the Spanish fiefdoms in the Americas to throw off colonial rule and declare their own independence. By 1821, Spain was in firm control only of the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico.

In its 1823 “Monroe Doctrine,” the United States declared its opposition to any new European great power presence in Latin America and the Caribbean. In practice, given its weakness and concentration on territorial expansion under the doctrine of “Manifest Destiny,” Washington relied on London to enforce its declared policy of hemispheric strategic denial. In this way, with tacit British backing, the United States managed to subtract the Americas from the global order, exempting them from the European imperialism, colonialism, and cultural supremacy that were everywhere else triumphant. The Americas became a U.S. sphere of influence.

America joins the club (1898 – 1934)

As the 19^th century ended, the United States itself joined the imperialist club, engineering regime change in Hawaii and annexing it, then seizing Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico from Spain. Britain recognized that, in the Americas, U.S. power had eclipsed its own. Rather than allow Anglo-American conflicts of interest and confrontations to spark a war that might cost Britain its Canadian dominion, London decided to appease and court Washington. So, it recognized U.S. rather than Canadian sovereignty in the Alaska Panhandle and withdrew its objections to the U.S. construction and management of a trans-Isthmian canal in Panama.

In 1900, in a culmination of the age of imperialism that included Japan and the United States as its first non-European practitioners, eight colonial powers (Austria-Hungary, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, and the United States) combined forces to suppress the “Boxer” rebellion against foreign control in China and to pillage Beijing.

In 1903, the United States detached Panama from Colombia and began a century of violent interventions and imposed regime changes in Latin America and the Caribbean. Under American hegemony, the Western Hemisphere remained a region distinct from the world order at large.

America as transatlantic balancer, rule giver, and cop-out (1919 – 1929)

By 1917, Britain had improved its relations with the United States to the point that it was able to draw Americans into support of efforts to redress the breakdown of the balance of power in Europe brought about by the unification and rise of Germany. Given Europe’s dominance of global affairs, the U.S. entry into World War I had worldwide effects. The unprecedented involvement of the United States in European affairs and America’s status as the world’s largest economy and creditor nation marked yet another transformation of the global order. But it took time for this to become apparent.

The 1919 peace conference that followed victory over Germany in the First World War marked international recognition of the United States as a leading Atlantic and global power. At the conference, President Woodrow Wilson advocated a distinctly American vision of world order based on self-determination – if only for the white nations of Europe – and the replacement of international power politics with a version of the rule of law under a new “League of Nations.” His support for self-determination reflected both popular American reverence for the U.S. declaration of independence and his own sympathy for the right of secession espoused by his native Virginia and childhood residence in Georgia, both unreconciled members of the ill-fated Confederate States of America. Wilson’s idealistic vision of a new world order based on agreed norms and regulatory institutions gained lip service at the conference, but little else. Translated into ethno-linguistic terms relevant to Europe and West Asia, “self-determination” furnished the justification for the dismantling and partition of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires.

America’s core ideology had long been the rule of law. The proposal for a “League of Nations” represented a projection of this ideology into international affairs. The subsequent refusal of the United States to join the League incapacitated it, but the idea of a rule-bound order continued to find expression in idealistic projects like the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, whose signatories sanctimoniously renounced the use of war to settle international disputes.

The First World War had crippled Germany, gutted and impoverished Britain and France, and catalyzed the dissolution and rebirth of the Russian Empire as the Soviet Union. The victors, including the United States, excluded both Germany and the Soviet Union from any role in a renewed European system of governance or balance of power. This miscarriage of statecraft ensured instability and laid the basis for a renewed violent struggle for hegemony in Europe two decades later.

Meanwhile, the world war of 1914 – 1918 had propelled the United States to global economic, financial, and cultural preeminence. The dollar became a major international medium of exchange, and American music, literature, and consumer products achieved worldwide acclaim. But with the United States self-isolated, the great powers of Europe weakened, and agitation for independence in their overseas empires mounting, the world was in a state of increasing disorder – in transition to something yet unknown.

The great depression and the rise of fascism (1929 – 1939)

In 1929, the American economy succumbed to mass speculation in its unregulated capital markets, blunders by the “Fed,” and protectionist measures that kicked off a series of trade wars The global misery generated by the knock-on effects of these developments precipitated the replacement of democracy with militarism in Germany and Japan, which joined Italy in developing forms of “fascism” – dictatorial regimes driven by social Darwinist theories of racial supremacy, obsessions with territorial expansion, and government-guided corporatist economies.

In 1931, Japan invaded China and annexed its northeastern provinces. Four years later, Italy invaded Ethiopia. In 1938, Germany took part of Czechoslovakia. In 1939, Italy annexed Albania and Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned Poland. In 1940, Germany conquered France. In 1941, it invaded the Soviet Union.

World War II and the world it created (1939 – 1945)

Despite desperate pleas from a battered and beleaguered Britain and a decimated China, the United States stood aside from the wars in Europe and Asia for two years. But in December 1941, U.S. sanctions regarded by Japan as an existential threat provoked it into a desperate attack on Pearl Harbor as well as the Philippines, Indochina, Malaya, Singapore, Indonesia, and Hong Kong. With help from its Thai allies, Japan invaded Burma. Four days later, German, Italy, and their satrapies declared war on the United States, which reciprocated. The contest was now global. A second world war had begun.

By the time it ended in 1945, World War II had smashed the previous world order and taken the lives of an estimated 70 – 85 million people or about 3 percent of the world’s then population. About one-third of the deaths were Soviet, another third Chinese. American deaths came to almost 420,00, British to 450,000, and French to about 600.000. Germany lost over seven million citizens and Japan almost three million. At the war’s end, only the United States, whose wartime economy had grown to about 60 percent of global GDP, was better off than it had been.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the U.S. wartime president, understood the need for a new world order and imagined one built on spheres of influence. In his concept, which Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill found congenial if charmingly naïve, Britain would manage its global empire, China would manage East Asia, the Soviet Union would manage eastern Europe and inner Asia, and the United States would manage the Western Hemisphere. While this proposal died with Roosevelt in 1945, the concept lived on – with the addition of France – in the composition of the United Nations Security Council’s veto-wielding permanent members.

A plan for world order (1944 – 1945)

During World War II, for the first time in history, multinational negotiations took place on a global basis explicitly to craft a new world order. In 1944, the representatives of forty-four independent nations gathered at the Bretton Woods resort in northern New Hampshire to agree on a gold and dollar-based system for the postwar world’s commercial and financial relations. The following year, as the war neared its end, the representatives of fifty nations convened in San Francisco to draft the Charter of the United Nations. This set out the fundamentals of international law and provided the basis for the formal establishment of the UN in October 1945, two months after the Japanese surrender. Reflecting the post-war ascendancy of the United States and concerns about a possible renewal of American isolationism, the headquarters of this improved version of the League of Nations was in New York.

The UN vision of a cooperative system of rule-guided global governance almost immediately fell victim to great power antagonism, but US-sponsored rule-building proceeded apace. The International Convention on Human Rights and the Genocide Convention date to 1948. In 1949, the two Geneva Conventions regulating the conduct of war received an update and gained two new conventions. A wide range of international treaties prohibiting various cruelties followed, including bans on racism, discrimination against women, and torture. But by the 1980s, the momentum slackened, in large measure due to flagging U.S. deference to the UN and international law. The United States worked hard to conclude the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea but then declined to ratify it. The same fate befell some twenty other multilateral treaties adopted by the international community since 1981. For the past four decades, the U.S. has participated only erratically in the law-based world order it had worked so hard to establish in the post-World War I and World War II periods.

The Cold War order (1947 – 1989)

By 1947, rival blocs led by Soviet and American overlords had begun to confront each other over both geopolitical and ideological issues. Both sources of contention were evident in the 1947 Truman Doctrine’s support for Greece and Turkey against Soviet pressure, the 1948 -1949 Berlin crisis, and the appallingly bloody Korean War of 1950 – 1953. These events put in place a quasi-feudal bipolar world order that lasted until 1989, when the Soviet Union’s eastern European empire disintegrated, and it ceased to contend for Eurasian or global hegemony.

During the four decades of the Cold War, the relationship – or lack of relationship – of nation states with one or the other superpower determined their geopolitical positions, freedom of maneuver, level of access to public goods, and degree of immunity from foreign-instigated regime change operations. Meanwhile, the contending superpowers came to expect automatic followership from those aligned with them for their positions on each and every aspect of world affairs.

The U.S. and the Soviet Union took care to prevent states in their respective spheres of influence from slipping away or defecting to the other, but both were conscious of the danger of mutual annihilation in a nuclear exchange, and neither was prepared to risk this by engaging in direct combat with the other. Both saw newly independent states that attempted to remain nonaligned – separate from either bloc – as weak-minded and up for grabs, and each sought to sustain or expand its sphere of influence through proxy wars, regime change operations, the manipulation of elections, and economic blandishments and deprivations.

Ideology was a much more prominent feature of the Cold War than it had been in previous world orders. The US-led bloc – the so-called “free world” – was politically heterogeneous. It was composed of a mixture of democracies, dictatorships, monarchies, and imperial outposts with little in common other than a desire to remain unsubjugated by godless communism and to derive material benefits through alignment with the United States. Its member states practiced multiple versions of capitalism, social democracy, and religious faith.

The members of the Soviet bloc, by contrast, were relatively homogeneous. They modeled their politics on Marxism-Leninism, the ruthless elitist dictatorship, atheist ideology, and statist political economic system championed by Moscow.

Diplomacy in the Cold War resembled nothing so much as trench warfare. Its object was less to roll back the spheres of influence of the other side than to avoid giving the other a reason to attack it. Despite the efforts of each side to subvert the other, the two blocs remained remarkably stable over the course of their four-decade-long confrontation. Both superpowers kept garrisons on the territories of those members of their blocs they termed “allies,” by which each meant subordinate states they had committed to secure against attack or ideological conversion by the other. Each restrained such “allies” from actions against the other that might escalate into bilateral warfare between them. The end of the Cold War order removed Soviet constraints on countries like Iraq, which then felt free to launch a war of expansion in Arabia it would never have dared to risk when subject to Soviet supervision.

The greatest shock to the boring stability of the Cold War order was the 1971 – 1979 U.S. enlistment of China in the containment of the Soviet Union. China’s shift to the so-called “free world” rebalanced but did not alter the fundamental nature of the world order of the time. This remained defined by adversarial interactions of the United States and its bloc and the Soviet Union and its satrapies. Aside from the U.S. entente with China and an earlier shift to neutrality by Yugoslavia, there were few defections from either bloc. Only one — Cuba’s turn to Soviet protection – catalyzed the near-death experience of a nuclear standoff between the two superpowers. Deft diplomacy kept disaster at bay.

The end of colonialism (1947 – 1997)

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, Europe’s empires had tried and failed to recover the overseas dominions they had lost during World War II. Centuries of European global dominance had imposed elements of the Christian West’s culture on its overseas possessions, including the Atlantic region’s major languages and professed values. These included norms of representative government rooted in popular elections, with which the tyranny inherent in imperial rule was in obvious conflict. Ironically, the ideologies and political cultures of the Euro-American colonial powers ended up inspiring the global South’s struggles for independence from them.

The exported Western ideologies included Marxism, which had begun as a philosophical and social science-based critique of Western civilization’s failure to foster the individual and collective self-fulfillment, egalitarianism, and fraternity that its religious faith and ideals required. In China and elsewhere, Marxism served as a welcome means by which to westernize while simultaneously disparaging the West. Allied with Leninism – a set of political principles for organizing an elite one-party dictatorship to reengineer socioeconomic systems and direct their development – it proved a potent tool of revolution and politico-economic transformation.

The retreat of European imperialism created new arenas for the struggle between the two “superpowers,” both of which were avowedly anti-colonialist. From 1941 to 1945 Japan had forcibly replaced European rule in East and Southeast Asia with its own. Its defeat left a power vacuum that was occupied by the victorious United States. In Burma and India, Japan’s advocacy of Asia for the Asians had resonated with Burmese and Indian nationalists, who wrested their independence from Britain in 1947. Between 1945 and 1949, the US-held Philippines, Dutch Indonesia, and British India, Pakistan, Burma, and Ceylon all achieved independence over often violent opposition by their colonial masters. The casualties involved in the struggles of these countries for self-determination numbered in the millions.

In 1949, as a condition for joining NATO, the French demanded the return of their colonies in Indochina. But, by 1954, Vietnamese communist forces had forced them to accept the independence of northern Vietnam as well as Cambodia and Laos. Thereafter, in the “Second Indochina War” of 1954 – 1975, north Vietnam defeated both south Vietnam and its American sponsor. In the Vietnamese struggle for national self-determination, three million or more Vietnamese civilians and combatants died. After the north’s victory over the south, as two million Vietnamese sought asylum abroad, another million perished at sea. France gave political independence to its African colonies in the early 1960s but locked them into continued economic fealty.

In 1957, by contrast, Britain followed the precedent it had set in India and Burma and began the process of conferring full independence on its most insistent colonies, beginning with Malaya and Ghana. British settler colonialism suffered a mortal blow in Kenya in the Mau Mau uprising of 1952 – 1963. In 1980, after a bloody ten-year-long war, Zimbabwe emerged from white rule in Southern Rhodesia. By 1990, the last African colonial territory – Namibia – had achieved independence. In 1997, the last non-self-governing British colony, Hong Kong, reverted to China. The five-century-long age of imperialism had ended. The sole remaining practitioner of aggressive settler colonialism is now Israel, which only the U.S. veto in the UN Security Council has shielded from international censure and sanctions.

The aftermath of the Cold War (1989 – 2007)

The American diplomat George Kennan based his 1946 proposal for a grand strategy of “containment” of the Soviet Union on his judgment that, if isolated, it would eventually collapse of its own defects. It took more than four decades to prove him right. For a few delirious years immediately after the 1991 implosion of the USSR and the independence of its constituent Baltic, eastern European, and central Asian republics, it seemed that, as Francis Fukuyama declared, history had ended in the triumph of liberal democracy. But this was not to be. Western carpetbaggers administered a drastic restructuring of the Soviet economy that immiserated the population but enriched a new class of plutocrats and oligarchs. Russia’s efforts to integrate itself with the West met with an ambivalent, unwelcoming, and off-putting response.

In the immediate post-Cold War period, no one contested the global supremacy of the United States. In effect, Washington presided over a global sphere of influence that excluded only China, Iran, north Korea, and Russia in which it was able to act as it wished without regard for the UN Charter, international law, or other norms of international interaction it had earlier helped prescribe. Meanwhile, the liberalization and globalization of trade and investment brought new wealth to the world economy, including China and the global South.

But a combination of triumphalism and attention deficit diplomacy derived from resource-intensive “forever wars” and counterterrorism campaigns deprived the United States of any strategy for crafting a cooperative relationship with the newly reemerged Russian Federation. Instead, the traditional Western view of Russia as a latent enemy prevailed. Under pressure from Moscow’s Russophobic neighbors and their American diasporas, a military-industrial-congressional complex disoriented by enemy deprivation syndrome, diehard veterans of the Cold War, and force of habit, fear of Russia remained the guiding spirit of NATO.

Russian reactions (1994 – 2008)

As early as 1994, Russia began warning the United States that, if NATO enlargement extended to the Russian borders, Moscow would view this as evidence of hostility and mount a military response. But by 2004, every member state of the former Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact had been inducted into NATO. In the Cold War, NATO had been a purely defensive alliance designed to counter Moscow in Europe. But in 1995, NATO began to take the offensive. It intervened in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1999, it launched a 78-day bombing campaign that wrested Kosovo from Serbia, a state traditionally associated with Russia. In 2001, NATO joined the United States in its twenty-year war to pacify faraway Afghanistan. And in 2011, it supported a regime change operation that threw Libya into anarchy. As NATO expanded toward Russia, Moscow came to see it as an increasingly active military threat.

In 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a strong warning against further NATO enlargement. But in 2008, under U.S. pressure, NATO offered membership to Georgia and Ukraine, both former constituent states of the Soviet Union bordering the Russian Federation. An emboldened Georgia then challenged Russian influence in minority regions on its Russian border. The result was the first European war of the 21^st century, which ended in the Russian-aided secession of both South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia and Russian establishment of suzerainty there.

Proxy war in the Donbas (2014 -?)

In 2014 a US-supported coup overthrew the elected but corrupt pro-Russian government of Ukraine. After the coup, the U.S. again pressed NATO to induct Ukraine. Ukrainian membership in NATO threatened, among other consequences, to deprive Russia of its centuries-old Black Sea naval base in Crimea. In a bloodless use of military measures short of war, Russia then took back Crimea, administrative control of which the Soviet Union had transferred from Russia to Ukraine in 1954.

Meanwhile, the new ultranationalist regime in Kyiv sought to make Ukrainian the sole language of official and interpersonal communication in public institutions throughout the country, ending the official use of Russian and other minority languages at both the national and regional levels. Soon thereafter, Russia conducted a referendum in Crimea, most of whose inhabitants — more than three-fourths of whom are native speakers of Russian – welcomed reincorporation into the Russian Federation. The Donbas oblasts of Donetsk and Lugansk, where Russian speakers are seventy percent or more of the population, then declared their autonomy from Ukraine, a decision that Russia endorsed.

Ukraine launched an offensive that recovered parts of the Donbas. Russia countered with military aid to the secessionists. Diplomatic efforts to restore linguistic and other elements of autonomy within a federalized Ukraine produced two never-implemented agreements (at Minsk). As the Donbas war proceeded amidst occasional ceasefires, Ukraine built a line of fortifications in the Donbas from which it daily bombarded the secessionists, whom Russia helped build formidable armies. The United States, Britain, and other NATO members made a major effort to retrain, reorganize, and re-equip the Ukrainian army. Russia simultaneously escalated its military support for the Donbas separatists.

War over NATO enlargement, Sino-American estrangement, and Sino-Russian entente

In late 2021, Russia demanded negotiations to rule out Ukrainian membership in NATO. The U.S. and NATO refused to discuss this. Russia massed troops on its border with Ukraine. The U.S. and NATO again rebuffed Moscow’s demand for talks about NATO enlargement. In early 2022, Russia recognized the independence of Donetsk and Lugansk, garrisoned them, and invaded Ukraine.

In response, the United States, joined by the EU, Britain, Australia, and a few other security partners, declared all-out economic war on Russia, cutting it off from the global dollar-based trading system, attempting to ban its energy exports, and seizing its dollar reserves, while initiating massive arms transfers and tactical intelligence support to Ukraine, which is now mired in a thousand-kilometer-wide war of attrition with Russia. The information war that accompanied the Western response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the fiercest and most comprehensive in world history. With all sources of information other than those favoring Ukraine cut off, it is impossible to understand what is actually happening there. Whether a Western policy of support for proxy war in Ukraine can save it and restore peace in Europe is at best doubtful, but the economic war on Russia, its knock-on effects, the concomitant paroxysm in US-China relations, and the worldwide turn to protectionism driven by national security rather than economic concerns are together catalyzing the emergence of a very new pattern of international interactions.

The disorderly birth of another, yet unnamed world order (2022 -?)

The immediate U.S. war aims in Ukraine are to preserve Kyiv’s freedom to remain aligned with the U.S. and EU, if not now to join NATO. The longer-term U.S. strategic objective is avowedly “to isolate and weaken Russia.”

U.S. policies toward China parallel these objectives. Washington seeks to keep Taiwan in its sphere of influence and to isolate and weaken China in order to retain its regional and global economic and technological as well as politico-military supremacy. It should surprise no one that Beijing and Moscow have come to perceive a common interest in thwarting and countering U.S. policies aimed at subordinating them and retarding their growth in wealth and power.

U.S. policies of confrontation with Russia and China have unenthusiastic support from most NATO countries and Japan. But rising and resurgent powers, like Brazil, India, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Turkey, oppose the effort to perpetuate the U.S. “unilateral moment” that they represent. With the notable exceptions of Australia, Britain, Japan, and south Korea, other major countries clearly prefer a multipolar, polycentric world order to one dominated by the United States or any other single power.

So far, the protectionist trade and technology policies the Trump administration launched against China in 2018 and the current economic and financial war on Russia are having pernicious results. China has accelerated its scientific, technological, and military advance. Far from collapsing, the Russian economy now has the second largest balance of payments surplus after China’s. Meanwhile, Europeans face recession, energy shortages, and other hardships. Both China and Russia are finding new markets for their goods and services. The war in Ukraine shows no sign of ending, and the probability of war in the Taiwan Strait is rising dramatically.

The shape of things to come

The world order that appears to be emerging is one in which:

• Sanctions-induced commodity and food shortages, breaking supply chains, and rearmament fuel persistent inflation.

• The fiscal burden of rising interest payments forces a turn to domestic pay-as-you-go policies and a choice between “guns and butter” that the U.S. has long evaded.

• The bloc formed by the United States, EU, Australia, Britain, and Japan to ostracize Russia and China is itself marginalized by the rest of the world, including its fastest growing economies and markets. Countries outside the US-led bloc refuse to choose between it and its designated adversaries, remain open for business with both, and reject the West’s imposition of end-use and retransfer restrictions on its exported products.

• The ability to mount planetwide responses to issues like climate change and pandemics is impaired. Every region is on its own and, in terms of its impact, the sum of the parts is less than the whole.

• The principal strength of the United States – its military prowess – proves irrelevant to most of the challenges in the emerging world order, which require economic responses that Washington cannot muster.

• Russia permanently abandons its three-century-long effort to integrate with Europe to seek an Asian identity through intensified relations with China and India.

• Turkey does the same, redefining itself as a West Asian and Islamic country rather than a European one and further attenuating its commitments to other members of NATO.

• Smaller countries resist affiliation with either the West or its designated adversaries.

• China’s “Belt and Road” initiative gradually extends Chinese economic influence throughout the Eurasian landmass and beyond in Southeast Asia and East Africa. Chinese political influence in the areas covered by the BRI gradually displaces that of the United States.

• NATO and other multinational alliances become less cohesive, with members gradually reducing or withdrawing their commitments to them.

• Germany, Japan, and other post-World War II dependencies of the United States rearm and develop more independent foreign policies.

• Latin America develops relations with China, India, Iran, Russia, Turkey, and other countries that increasingly undercut American hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.

• Africa is where most of the world’s industrial labor force comes to reside, and its economies become more connected to Brazil, China, India, Russia, and Turkey than to the EU or United States.

• Technology standards differ from region to region, and new technologies are often unavailable in regions beyond those that originated them.

• The internet evolves into regional and national zones, separated from each other by firewalls.

• Inexpensive Russian energy, metals, minerals, and other natural resources nourish economies in the so-called “global South” but are no longer reliably available at favorable prices to the U.S. and members of its anti-Russian coalition.

• U.S. sanctions give China and Russia a compelling incentive to form consortia with Iran and others to eliminate dependence on the United States for civilian, military, and dual-use products like passenger aircraft.

• The ability of the United States to finance its government and global power projection by issuing Treasury bonds is in increasing doubt, given the reputational damage of its confiscation of Iran’s, Venezuela’s, Russia’s, and Afghanistan’s dollar reserves.

• The rising risk from U.S. unilateral dollar-based sanctions causes ever more countries to price exports and imports in their own currencies, use swaps to pair their currency with those of their main trading partners, switch to hard currencies other than the dollar, institute point-of-sale digital cross-border currency exchanges, and create new units of account for transnational trade settlement. The “exorbitant privilege” that has underwritten U.S. global primacy unwinds.

• China, India, Russia, Arab oil producers, and other rising economic and financial powers respond to the incentives to build a separate financial world order that provides alternatives to the dollar-based SWIFT system and can destroy the effectiveness of U.S. sanctions as an instrument of foreign policy. They do so.

• Deglobalization generates multiple regional trade and investment regimes and divides global markets, from some of which specific great powers, like China, the EU, India, Russia, or the United States are excluded.

• Disputes over international transactions are handled bilaterally or by region-specific processes rather than by global dispute resolution mechanisms like those of the WTO.

• The world continues to rely on UN specialized agencies to address technical problems, but the UN Security Council and other international policy organizations, paralyzed by great power rivalries and disagreements, have diminished diplomatic utility.

• There are few, if any, new global – as opposed to regional — rule-setting treaties and arrangements. The worldwide regulatory regimes of the post-Cold War era atrophy.

• U.S. military supremacy erodes as regional forces strengthen themselves and new weapons systems and capabilities emerge in China, India, Japan, Korea, and Russia.

• Given the escalation risks of the US-NATO-Russia proxy war in Ukraine, the increasing likelihood of a Sino-American war over Taiwan, north Korea’s reliance on a nuclear deterrent for regime survival, the India-Pakistan nuclear standoff, and the incentive to acquire nuclear weapons that Israel’s nuclear arsenal provides to other countries in its region, the danger of nuclear war is now significantly greater than at any moment of the Cold War.

Conclusion

There is great dissatisfaction internationally with the now decaying “Pax Americana” of the late 20^th century and a desire to see it replaced by a multipolar world order or orders in which different countries play leading roles in different sectors of world affairs. Current trends suggest that the kaleidoscope is once again rearranging international actors and their relationships in new patterns in which economic, financial, political, cultural, and military prowess is distributed regionally and functionally rather than centralized. But there has been little consideration so far of the likely consequences of an international system that entails much more complex interactions among states and peoples than before. If nothing else, this is a timely reminder of the old saying: ‘be careful what you wish for. You may just get it.’

To cope successfully with the challenges of a world with many competing centers, statecraft must take the long view, focusing on abiding interests rather than the passions of the moment. To manage a world in which rapid, unexpected change is the norm, diplomacy must be nimble rather than steadfast. And to be able to compete, countries must not only get their act together at home but employ all the instruments of statecraft – political, economic, financial, technological, and military – to shape the views and actions of their competitors to their advantage.

Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)

2 April 1997, Moscow, Idaho

The Chinese believe that, for most of recorded history, China was not just the most populous but also the most prosperous, technologically most advanced, most powerful, and -- arguably-- the best governed of all human societies. Chinese regard their eclipse by the West in what they call “the recent past” (the last few centuries) as an anomaly that time and hard work will correct. Most Chinese now believe that, in the century to come, their nation is destined to resume its natural place as the preeminent society on the planet. They may be right. Even if they are wrong, their cocky self-confidence that time is on their side has major international implications.

China’s rise to wealth and power is the leading factor in the Asia-Pacific region’s progressive displacement of the Atlantic community at the center of world economic affairs. The challenge of fitting China into the existing world order does not, however, stop with economics. China’s rise also has enormous political and military implications. Its effects will be felt not just in Asia but throughout the world.

The Economic Challenge of China

Between 1980 and 1995, the Chinese economy more than quadrupled in size. From 1991-1995, its average annual real growth rate was 11.8 percent. Measured in terms of purchasing power parity, China now accounts for about 8 percent of global GNP. Most economists expect that the Chinese economy will continue to grow at 8 - 10 percent for the next fifteen years. It will again quadruple in size, before growth rates begin to decline. Before 2020, they believe, China is likely to overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy (thus resuming the rank it had until 1850). By 2030, China’s economy may be larger than those of the United States and Japan combined.

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is achieving this growth, in part, by integrating its now largely marketized economy with the more advanced Chinese economies in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan. It is also opening itself to the non-Chinese world. In the past five years, China absorbed $114.4 billion in direct foreign investment and another $46.9 billion in foreign loans. (About 70 percent of “foreign” investment came from Chinese entrepreneurs in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan.) Over this period, China’s trade rose 19.5 percent annually, its imports and exports totaled $1,015 billion, and the country was visited by more than 200 million foreign tourists. The PRC’s foreign exchange reserves rose from $11.1 billion in 1990 to $105 billion in 1996. Foreign exchange reserves of the “greater Chinese” economy (comprising the mainland, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan) now stand at about $250 billion.

The PRC’s integration into this “greater Chinese” economy and the East Asian economic region is being accomplished informally, by traders and investors rather than by governments or regional institutions. Now that colonialism, World War II, civil war, Soviet communism, and Cold War containment have receded into history, clan and family ties between Chinese overseas and on the mainland are being rapidly reknit. The Taiwan Strait has presented the most dramatic example of these trends. Despite the political estrangement between the authorities in Taipei and Beijing, Taiwan entrepreneurs have invested more than $28 billion on the Chinese mainland. Cross-strait trade now approaches $30 billion annually. Over a million people travel to the mainland from Taiwan each year.

The Chinese mainland’s rates of growth resemble those of other, smaller East Asian societies in recent decades. As in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea, such growth over three or four decades will eventually lift Chinese living standards to levels equivalent to those in middle-income European countries. There are, however, important differences between China and the newly industrialized countries (NICs) of Asia. About 90 percent of China’s future capital needs can be met from domestic savings. China’s economy has, like that of other East Asian economies, benefited enormously from access to North American and European markets. Over thirty percent of China’s exports now go to the United States alone. However, China has a huge internal market, making it less dependent on exports than Taiwan or Korea at comparable stages of development. Moreover, intra-Asian trade, including China’s trade with Asia, is now growing much faster than trade with other regions. In the years to come, China’s dependence on both external and non-Asian markets like the United States will gradually decline.

The Chinese economy is nevertheless the engine that is accelerating the global shift of wealth and power to East Asia. Events in the region or between China and its trading partners may alter the rate of growth but are unlikely to reverse it. East Asia now contributes over 50 percent of the growth in the world economy. The region is doing so without having become fully part of the institutions that undergird the current international economic order. This order was crafted over the past half-century of Euro-American global dominance. It is now increasingly unsettled by the rise of China and other East Asian economies.

China’s growing economic weight and central position in what is rapidly emerging as the leading economic region of the world economy have yet to be reflected in its inclusion in global institutions and regulatory regimes. China is still excluded from the G-7, the World Trade Organization, the New Forum (successor to COCOM), the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), the Nuclear Suppliers Group, and most other institutions devoted to setting global policies on trade, investment, and technology transfer. No one has even thought about how to work toward the ultimate admission of China to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

In the early 1970s, the United States and others began a patient effort to incorporate China into the world order shaped by the Atlantic community over the previous half century. This effort faltered in the wake of international reaction to the suppression of the Tiananmen student rebellion in 1989. Yet it is hard to imagine that the institutions that constitute this order can retain their leading position if an economy that is soon to become the world’s largest is not fully integrated with them. Meanwhile, a rapidly expanding list of global and regional economic and politico-economic issues cannot be successfully managed without Chinese cooperation.

For example, China will soon overtake the United States as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. China is installing 17,000 megawatts of new power plants each year, almost all of them coal-fired. (By 2004 China will overtake the United States in installed electrical generating capacity.) Clearly, no effort to moderate the damage to the global environment can hope to succeed unless China is fully a part of it. Despite intense interest in environmental issues in Europe and North America, however, the effort to engage China in environmental dialogue and cooperation -- a major theme of Vice President Gore’s recent visit to China -- has barely begun.

China’s rapidly growing exports and internal market have continued to develop to a considerable extent outside the norms of the global trading system. This has created vested interests in China in patterns of economic behavior that disrupt and damage trade and investment with the industrial democracies. The fact that China is not a member of most multilateral regulatory regimes has so far left Beijing free to ignore complaints from its trading partners until they escalate into bilateral confrontation. In such raw tests of power, only a major trading partner like the United States has much chance of prevailing. As China’s economic prowess grows, Beijing’s bargaining power will also grow, making bilateral solutions to problems with China that are of wider international concern even more problematic. Yet, almost without exception, institutions formed since the end of the Cold War have excluded China.

China is already an exporter of high technology goods, many of them with military applications. As the Chinese economy becomes more sophisticated, such exports will greatly increase. We are learning, to our alarm, that no effort to regulate trade with “rogue states” or in technologies relevant to weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems can hope to succeed if China remains outside it. The limits of what can be accomplished by bilateralism are already apparent. Consider, for example, the decidedly mixed record of unilateral American attempts to regulate exports of Chinese nuclear and missile technology to Pakistan. As China grows, the bilateral leverage of the United States and other countries over it can only diminish. Yet there is no effort being made to bring China into membership in (and hence into compliance with) the multilateral regimes that attempt to regulate the international transfer of sensitive technologies.

Finally, China’s opening to the outside world and the concomitant collapse of Chinese totalitarianism have allowed the emergence of transnational Chinese criminal gangs. Such gangs are now involved in the drug trade and the smuggling of Chinese emigrants under conditions approximating those of the eighteenth century African slave trade. They are developing linkages to organized crime in Russia, Europe, and the Americas. The full cooperation of the authorities in Beijing with multilateral institutions like InterPol is essential to deal with these problems. The Asia-Europe Meeting has created a multilateral forum joining European and Asian customs officials in discussion of them. Yet the principal markets for drugs and destination of illegal migrants are the United States and Canada, which are not part of this forum.

A persistent problem in dealing with China is the inability of the central government in Beijing to obtain the compliance of provincial and local authorities with the agreements it concludes with foreign governments. Difficulties over the enforcement of intellectual property rights are a case in point. China lacks the legal system, including the courts, trained judges, and legal enforcement mechanisms that more developed countries can rely upon to implement effective controls over commercial behavior. Only 10 percent of Chinese judges have any legal education. Everyone knows this to be the case. Even the Chinese will admit it when embarrassed into doing so. Yet there is no concerted international effort underway to aid China in law and administrative reform or in public administration and judicial training.

The absence of an international strategy by which to promote China’s adherence to the norms fostered by global institutions is especially striking given the success efforts to integrate China into the world order registered in the 1970s and 1980s. China can, of course, be counted upon to bargain for privileged status and exemption from the rules applied to other countries. Nevertheless, once admitted to a club, the record shows, China works hard to learn, adopt, and apply the club rules. China’s socio-economic transformation over the past two decades owes much to its admission to institutions like the IMF, IBRD, ADB, and the UN specialized agencies, and to its subsequent adoption of the modes of analysis and policies they favor.

The lack of a strategy for speeding China’s integration into global institutions and Chinese effective application of global norms is potentially very serious, given the high stakes involved. It cannot be in the world’s interest to wait to begin managing the consequences for the international state system of China’s rise to wealth and power. Problems are accumulating, not diminishing. China’s bargaining position is strengthening, not weakening. It is in this context that the Clinton Administration is to be commended for its belated efforts to bring China into the WTO, and hence into compliance with the global norms we hope will govern international trade and investment through the next century.

The Politico-Military Challenge of China

As China’s wealth grows, both its military power and political influence are also growing. The implications of this for the Asia-Pacific region are well understood by China’s neighbors. Without exception, they seek economic benefits from closer ties with China, while keeping a wary eye on Beijing as they move to accommodate it politically. China now enjoys its most cooperative relations with Southeast Asia in 500 years. China’s relations with Russia are the most mutually respectful in over 300 years. Its relations with Europe, including Europe’s great powers, are the most satisfactory to it in nearly two centuries. Beijing’s relations with New Delhi are the least strained since the 1962 Sino-Indian border war. Its relations with Islamabad and Dhaka are as sound as ever. Despite an audible undercurrent of Japanese concern about China, Sino-Japanese relations are as good as they have been in a hundred years. Yet two centuries of weakness have left China with many points of dissatisfaction.

China is now the only great power to have had major portions of its historical territory and population detached from it by the military intervention of other great powers[1] -- European powers in the cases of Macao and Hong Kong, Japan and the United States in the case of Taiwan. Beijing is determined to reunite these disparate Chinese societies under a single sovereignty, if not a single politico-economic system. China will accomplish such reunification through negotiations, if possible (as it has proven to be for Hong Kong and Macao), or by force, if necessary (as India did with Goa and Indonesia with Irian Jaya and East Timor). The peaceful reversion of Hong Kong and Macao to China will occur in 1997 and 1999, respectively. The question of Taiwan’s relationship to the rest of China remains unsettled.

China is also the only great power to lack secure and recognized borders with most of its neighbors. China has now settled all of its inner Asian frontiers through negotiations with Russia and the newly independent Central Asian states. The list of Chinese border disputes remains, however, the longest such list in the world. China has unsettled economic zone (seabed) boundaries with both North and South Korea. It disputes the Senkaku (or Diaoyutai) archipelago with Japan. China contests sovereignty over islets and reefs throughout the South China Sea with Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei, and Malaysia. Its claims to economic zones in the South China Sea generate a seabed dispute with Indonesia. The Sino-Indian border has been established de facto but not de jure. China is determined to define secure and recognized borders with all these neighbors by negotiated territorial adjustments as in the case of its inner Asian frontiers, if possible, or by military action to defend its sovereignty, if necessary.

Unlike reunification with Taiwan, none of these border issues requires major territorial or politico-military adjustments for its resolution. Sino-Korean differences must in practice await Korean reunification for their resolution. Neither China nor Japan has so far seen any pressing reason to address the question of sovereignty over the Senkakus. A Sino-Indian border settlement is implicit in the status quo and could be formalized whenever the two sides are politically inclined to formalize it. China’s full acceptance of the Law of the Sea Treaty (expected to be ratified by the National People’s Congress later this year) will provide a legal framework for negotiation of claims in the South China Sea. China’s neighbors have few concerns about its actions in the short term. They are all concerned, however, that China’s military power relative to them is steadily growing. This has given them an incentive to explore solutions to territorial issues that China has heretofore seemed to lack.

The reemergence of military tensions, including Sino-American naval confrontation, in the Taiwan Strait has changed this situation. Until 1994-1995, Chinese leaders (like most politicians in Taiwan) believed that Taiwan had only two conceivable futures: the status quo (as it might be amended by cross-Strait interaction) or reunification. In these circumstances, Beijing felt no sense of urgency about the Taiwan issue. China’s leaders could live with the status quo because the only way they could envisage it changing was by Taiwan’s drawing closer to them and eventually accepting their leadership of a loosely reunited China. They sought to promote interdependence and dialogue across the Strait to advance their long-term objective of negotiated reunification.

By 1995, however, Beijing had become deeply concerned that Taiwan’s democratic politics were centering on the quest for an identity separate from China. Responding to popular opinion on the island, the leadership in Taiwan began to provide inducements to third world capitals to allow the establishment of Taipei embassies alongside Beijing’s diplomatic representation. Taipei redoubled its efforts to upgrade its representation in the capitals of great powers. It vociferously sought a separate seat in the United Nations General Assembly. The Taiwan leadership launched a campaign of nominally private but very political travel abroad to raise Taiwan’s international profile. Beijing concluded that Taipei was bent on acquiring the attributes of independent statehood on the diplomatic installment plan. Notwithstanding Taipei’s protestations of fidelity to the principle of “one China,” Beijing saw Taipei’s efforts as crafting a basis for long-term separation from China. This conclusion was buttressed by the main opposition party in Taiwan’s open espousal of independence. From Beijing’s perspective, Taipei’s actions threatened to alter the status quo in such a way as to preclude peaceful reunification.

Taipei’s efforts to expand its options gave Beijing a sense of urgency about the Taiwan question it had previously lacked. When political warnings failed to deter Taipei, Beijing resorted to intimidation through military measures short of war, such as exercises and missile tests that underscored Beijing’s ability to strangle Taiwan’s economy. These measures were intended to force Taipei to reverse course or to come to the negotiating table. Chinese posturing, however, belatedly evoked countervailing shows of force by the United States, neutralizing Beijing’s pressure on Taipei to negotiate.

American naval deployments were undertaken to underscore the longstanding interest of the United States in a peaceful, rather than violent, settlement of the Taiwan question by the Chinese themselves. They were not intended to signal support for Taiwan independence. Ironically, however, by making it clear that the United States would counter and offset Beijing’s use of measures short of war to force Taipei to the negotiating table, U.S. actions have greatly diminished the prospects for peaceful reunification. If Beijing cannot force Taipei to the table, and the United States will not, it is highly unlikely that Taipei will ever negotiate. From Beijing’s point of view, China now has only two options: doing nothing while Taipei works toward a “two Chinas” or “one China, one Taiwan” outcome, or going to war for reunification, despite the danger that the United States might be dragged into the conflict. Revising this calculus is now an urgent task for American diplomacy.

Even political dissidents in China see the Taiwan issue as a quarrel among Chinese, to be settled by Chinese without foreign interference. Resentment of American intervention in “China’s internal affairs” is high. Beijing is on the verge of embarking on the long-term military build up necessary to acquire the ability to overrun Taiwan even against U.S. opposition. China’s recent embrace of Russian positions on various international issues, including NATO expansion, provides a basis for expanded military cooperation with Russia while calming China’s northern flank.

As Beijing increases its military capabilities against Taiwan, it will not abandon its efforts to achieve reunification by peaceful means. It will continue to attempt to intimidate Taiwan into negotiations while seeking to minimize the resulting strain in its relations with the United States. At the same time, it will wish to limit collateral damage to its relationships with its Asian neighbors from tension and possible conflict in the Taiwan Strait. As a result, China is likely to pursue compromise on South China Sea territorial issues (and perhaps even the Senkaku dispute) as it did with Russia and the newly independent Central Asian states. By eliminating potential sources of conflict with the members of ASEAN and Japan, China can hope to provide reassurance that its aggressive stance on the Taiwan issue is sui generis and without wider implications for the region. Beijing’s most recent military procurement decisions, as well as its diplomatic overtures to Southeast Asia, are consistent with such a strategy.

These ominous trends might, of course, be reversed were Taiwan to be persuaded that it should enter into active negotiations on reunification with Beijing or otherwise provide convincing reassurance that it does not seek a future distinct from association with China. Taipei is, however, unlikely to seek to accommodate Beijing in this manner. Nor are foreign governments likely to be willing or able effectively to press it to do so. Taiwan will continue to attract Western and Japanese sympathy as a democratic underdog menaced by the communist dictatorship on the Chinese mainland. This will stimulate widening concern about the implications of rising Chinese military power -- no matter what Beijing does to allay such concerns.

In terms of deployed forces and raw combat power, if not in terms of technological prowess or power projection capabilities, China is already the preeminent military power in Asia. (The recently reaffirmed U.S. forward presence in Japan and the surge capabilities it facilitates are a potent qualifier to this Chinese military ascendancy.) Chinese defense expenditures have heretofore been relatively low in relation to GNP. Most of China’s neighbors (e.g., Russia, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and even India -- let alone the U.S. armed forces in the Western Pacific) have far more advanced capabilities than the PLA. China is determined eventually to match the forces on its borders, but has deferred military modernization while building the economic base for it. In constant dollars, Chinese defense spending grew hardly at all over the past decade. (Nominal budget increases to keep pace with high rates of inflation led the press to perceive increases where none had yet occurred. China’s secrecy about its defense budget and force structure aggravates its neighbors’ tendency to exaggerate the growth in Chinese military power.)

The relatively low priority assigned to military modernization over the past decade and more reflected Beijing’s judgment that the short-term risk of a major conflict on China’s borders was slight and that a resolution of the Taiwan issue could, like the Hong Kong and Macao questions, be peacefully achieved. Recent events in the Taiwan Strait have clearly altered these judgments. The Chinese defense budget is likely to rise accordingly, though the focus of PLA modernization will shift largely to building the eventual capability to conquer Taiwan. Strategic nuclear forces and other weapons systems with the capacity to deter U.S. intervention in any battle for Taiwan are similarly likely to receive much greater emphasis in PLA modernization. Notwithstanding China’s single-minded focus on Taiwan, its greater emphasis on military modernization will accelerate its acquisition of significant force projection and strategic weapons capabilities, speeding its emergence as a world, rather than just a regional, military power.

Is China Analogous to the Soviet Union?

The prospect of a more powerfully assertive China inevitably awakens memories of the recent Euro-American struggle with the former Soviet Union. It leads to speculation that China, like the Soviet Union, may disintegrate. (One of the unfortunate byproducts of the collapse of the Soviet Union is that, having lost their jobs, many Western specialists on Soviet affairs turned to Sinology. Having failed to predict the Soviet Union’s collapse, they seem determined to anticipate China’s. Having given Moscow’s intentions the benefit of every doubt, they appear determined to brand Beijing as an enemy before it can reveal itself to be one.) It is, however, a mistake to draw many analogies between the USSR and the PRC.

The Soviet Union was a multinational empire, established by czarist and communist conquest from Moscow. Its dominant Russian nationality was a bare majority within its imperial structure. The Soviet Union was driven by the impulse to spread its ideology wherever opportunities presented themselves. To that end, it maintained a huge military presence in satellite states along its borders. Moscow’s strategic ambitions led it to provide expensive military and economic assistance to like-minded states as far away as Cuba and southern Africa. Rigid central planning ultimately produced a declining economy unable to bear the very high level of military spending the Soviet state demanded. Until its final days, Moscow sought to overthrow the international status quo and impose its own, rather than to join the existing international order and its institutions.

By contrast, China grew to its present borders over the course of millennia of gradual expansion and assimilation of minority peoples. The 94 percent of the Chinese population who consider themselves Han share a nationalist passion for unity, order, and international respect for their country’s historical borders. They have no sympathy and even less tolerance for efforts by Tibetans or other minority peoples within these borders to exercise self-determination. They do not seek to bring additional non-Han peoples into their polity. Contemporary China has no ideology it can explain to its own people, still less an ideology it seeks to export to others. It has no satellites and maintains no forces beyond its borders. China’s increasingly decentralized economy is the fastest growing in the world. Its defense budget could be greatly increased without putting much if any strain on its economy. China seeks to join the existing international order, not to overthrow it.

Nor is China likely to disintegrate as the Soviet Union did. Economic growth has indeed altered the relationship between the central and provincial authorities. As acquisitive individualism succeeded austere communitarianism as the national ethos, the Chinese Communist Party lost much of its discipline, along with its ideology. In the absence of government institutions to replace it, the provinces, to some extent, went their own way. In the early stages of economic reform, new challenges to government posed by the requirement to manage a market economy were met, if at all, largely at the provincial, rather than the national level. Beijing is, however, now well along in its efforts to create the central institutions necessary to manage an increasingly dynamic and integrated national economy. Resistance to this recentralization by the provinces has not led to separatist sentiment. On the contrary, the spirit of nationalism is on the rise throughout China. This makes it less likely than ever that Beijing will tolerate separatism in regions with substantial populations of ethnic minorities, like Tibetans or Uighurs.

Finally, the Soviet Union was a horrifying violator of the human rights of all whom it controlled. For all the Western pressure on Moscow on human rights issues, it took the collapse of the regime to bring about significant improvement. Unlike the former Soviet Union, however, China is carrying out far-reaching economic and social reforms. These may or may not lead in time to political reforms, as happened, for example, in the formerly Leninist Chinese society on Taiwan. Nevertheless, it is arguable that the course of events elsewhere in East Asia will prove to be a better predictor of China’s future than that in the Soviet Union. (If so, a policy based on protest of egregious incidents while assisting the process of institutional reform in China, similar to the approach followed in Taiwan and South Korea, could work better than a policy based on pressure and protest alone.)

In short, Beijing does not think or behave like Moscow when it was the capital of the USSR. China is not an implacable foe of the West or the world order the West has created. The PRC is unlikely to follow the USSR into disintegration and collapse. The challenge to the world posed by the rise of China is different. In some ways, it may prove more daunting.

Conclusion

Nearly two centuries ago, Napoleon advised his fellow Europeans, “let China sleep. When it wakens, it will shake the world.” There is now no prospect that China will return to the slumber of past centuries. The twenty-first century will see China resume its traditional pride of place among the world’s societies. The question before Europeans and North Americans is not how to prevent what cannot be prevented. It is how to ensure that the rise of China in the new millennium buttresses rather than erodes the international system we have constructed with such difficulty in this century. To that end, we must urgently consider how to speed China’s integration into existing institutions on acceptable terms. Equally important, we must decide how best to ensure that China’s determination to rectify the borders imposed upon it by the ages of imperialism, fascism, and the Cold War does not lead to long-term confrontation and strategic realignments adverse to Western interests.

^[1] Japan, of course, disputes sovereignty over the four “Northern Islands” with Russia. Spain and the United Kingdom have differences over Gibraltar. These disputes do not, however, involve significant populations or extensive territories. Nor do they have the emotional force of China’s claims to Macao, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

Security is a prerequisite for the prosperity, welfare, and economy of any society. Throughout history, nations have sought security through the establishment of empires, no-go zones [cordons sanitaires], buffer states, as well as military, economic, political, or cultural spheres of declared strategic interest or dominant influence. There are alternatives to these safeguards, among them systems based on the shifting coalitions of balances of power. But it is natural for states to want to have friends rather than enemies on their borders and for great powers to expect deference rather than challenges to their security from the collusion of lesser states with great power rivals.[1]

Both nations and empires wax and wane. As they do, they shape political, economic, and military interactions in the regions around them or dependent upon them. Some states seek the protection of greater powers. Others reject and resist others’ hegemony.[2] Spheres of influence are creations of statecraft intended to fend off potential competitors.

Why Spheres of Influence are Established

U.S. secretaries of state have recently taken to declaring that “the United States does not recognize spheres of influence.”[3] In light of Americans’ continued insistence on the validity of the Monroe Doctrine, this is more than ironic.[4] The United States may refuse to recognize or respect other nation’s spheres of influence or their right to establish them, but it insists on enforcing its own, which, though officially undeclared, is no longer limited to the Western Hemisphere but worldwide.[5]

Spheres of influence are assertions of an exclusive right to supervise or participate in deciding the alignments and affairs of another nation or nations in relation to still others either in general or in specific domains.[6] As such they are manifestations of international contention between peers.[7] They can be formal[8] or informal and defensive or domineering. Elites in the societies within them tend to learn the language of their sphere’s dominant nation, to assimilate its industrial and military standards as well as its cultural and commercial practices, to send their children to study in its educational institutions, and to prefer its goods and services over those of its rivals.

The term “sphere of influence” first appeared in the division of Africa at the Berlin Conference of 1884 – 1885, which apportioned dominance of the continent between Britain, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. In 1885, a bilateral agreement between Great Britain and Germany divided control of the Gulf of Guinea between them. Each undertook not to interfere in the interests of the other in its designated sphere. In 1890, the two concluded a similar division of spheres of influence in East Africa.

The concept of spheres of influence inspired the organization of the United Nations Security Council, whose permanent members each brought with them dominance of distinct groups of other countries.[9] The General Assembly, by contrast, enshrines the principle of the sovereign equality of states.

In the absence of an international system based on shifting coalitions to balance hegemonic ambitions,[10] spheres of influence are inextricable from the rivalries between great powers like China, India,[11] Iran,[12] Russia, and the United States. This makes it timely as well as important to review them, their origins, their purposes, and their intensity, all of which vary from case to case. Understanding and coping with great power rivalry demands recognition of the interests that spheres of influence serve as well as the degrees of deference, subordination, or exclusiveness they seek to enforce.

History suggests that great powers establish spheres of influence to limit the autonomy of lesser states and thereby:

• exclude competitors from markets they wish to dominate with mercantilist policies,

• deny other powers influence in a region while enhancing their own,

• deny the strategic use of territory or resources to potential adversaries,

• forestall the incorporation of potential buffer states into others’ spheres of influence,

• assure the ideological conformity or allegiance of client states and their elites,

• gain or maintain access to territory and facilities from which to project power,

• subordinate and exercise quasi-imperial control over lesser states.

Spheres of interest are instruments of statecraft and diplomacy designed to deter and counter prospective adversaries by measures short of war. They presume a relatively stable distribution of power in the international state system as opposed to one in which relations are fluid.

Spheres of influence demand deference and restrict the geopolitical or geoeconomic freedom of maneuver of the countries or regions within them. As such, they are inherently hegemonic. They fall into two broad categories: (1) passive, defensive efforts to deny influence to other potential other competitors, and (2) active, assertive efforts to dominate the strategic choices of the nations within them, usually to bar and counter the influence of a single rather than multiple adversaries.[13] Each has different implications for competing powers, and each requires a distinct response from them.

Exemptions from Spheres of Influence

Great powers trying to project their power or deflect that of potential adversaries seldom find it difficult to secure the deference of those they whose autonomy they seek to limit. Still, a few less powerful states or groupings of them have been able to preserve their national identities and autonomy through a combination of armed neutrality, studied inoffensiveness, and recognition or acknowledgment of their status by potentially predatory powers.[14] These stances both deter and mitigate threats by others to subordinate or subjugate them.

The Origins of Spheres of Influence

Just as Rome and Carthage competed in the 3^rd and 2^nd centuries BCE to control peripheral areas of the western Mediterranean,[15] in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, Britain, France, and other European imperialist powers competed to divide areas far from home, like India,[16] China,[17] Southeast Asia,[18] and Africa,[19] between them. The initial impulse for these divisions was mercantilist[20] but they evolved into primarily military contests aimed at geopolitical dominance. They persisted as political demarcations until overwhelmed by World War II and the subsequent end of the colonial era.

Formally declared primacy in a defined area, like the U.S. Monroe Doctrine’s assertion of a unique right to exclude the Western Hemisphere to expanded influence by extra-regional powers or the proactive partition of China, the Middle East, and Africa between European great powers, was a feature of the 19^th century colonial world order. As the century ended, spheres of influence constituted proto-imperial impositions of exclusive politico-military and ideological control on the societies within them.

Consistent with this, the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine amended it to proclaim a U.S. right to intervene militarily to correct “flagrant and chronic wrongdoing by a Latin American nation.” The new policy was implemented with vigor. [21] In the 1930s, when Germany and Japan attempted to erode American primacy in countries like Brazil and Peru, the United States tempered its unabashed interventionism by adopting what it called a “Good Neighbor Policy.” Still, during World War II, Washington felt free to kidnap and intern thousands of Latin Americans of German, Japanese, and Italian descent.[22]

World War II, the Cold War, and Decolonization

The defeat of Germany in World War II and the subsequent Communist victory in the civil war on the Chinese mainland enabled the Soviet Union to control central and eastern Europe[23] as well as Korea north of the 38^th parallel. In the first decade after the 1949 proclamation of the People’s Republic of China, Moscow appeared to have gained paramount influence in China and north Vietnam.[24]

The United States had previously restricted its aspirations to overlordship of the Western Hemisphere under the Monroe Doctrine. But, once engaged in a global struggle with the USSR for global strategic and ideological hegemony, it began to build new, extra-hemispheric spheres of influence based on treaties offering protection from the USSR to an expanding inventory of states in Europe and Asia. Within these spheres, America demanded varying degrees of allegiance from those it had offered to protect. In the context of the Cold War’s static bipolar world order, they were an important stabilizing factor.

In Europe in 1949, the United States sponsored the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to hold the USSR and its ideology at bay, submerge the traditional antagonisms of western Europe’s great powers (France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom) in an American-led alliance structure, and facilitate the economic and political recovery of western Europe. As a purely defensive alliance of democratic states led by the United States, NATO very effectively served all three purposes throughout the Cold War.

In maritime Asia and the Pacific, having defeated Japan, Washington fell heir to Tokyo’s wartime sphere of influence. To secure this sphere and thereby protect its new Asian client states, the United States began to build a series of bilateral alliances[25] to contain China, the USSR, North Korea, and North Vietnam.

America called the areas of the world in which it exercised dominant influence “the free world.”[26] In the four-decade-long “Cold War” (1948 – 1991),[27] Soviet and American-led ideological and geopolitical blocs each sought to achieve dominant ideological and political influence everywhere they could and to prevent the other from doing so. The withering away of Euro-Atlantic nations’ empires in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, with which this struggle coincided, created both independent states and apparent power vacuums. The newly independent states of the so-called “Third World” were fertile ground for both overt and covert US-Soviet proxy wars, notably in Indochina, West Asia and North Africa, the Congo, Lusophone Africa,[28] the Horn of Africa, and Afghanistan.

In 1961- 1962, The USSR took advantage of a recent (1959) regime change in Cuba to establish a strategic outpost ninety miles from the United States.[29] Cuba’s defection to the Soviet bloc triggered a violent U.S. reaction to the challenge this posed to Washington’s Monroe Doctrine assertion of hegemony in the Americas. The Soviets, in partnership with Cuba, looked for openings to entrench their ideological, if not their military influence in Nicaragua, Chile, and Grenada. In each case, the United States forcefully intervened to uphold its strategic paramountcy in the western hemisphere. [30] More recently, Washington has relied on economic warfare plus covert action to challenge and overthrow ideologically heterodox regimes in Latin American countries like Bolivia and Venezuela.

In the 1960s, Britain’s need to reduce its overseas commitments “east of Suez” led it to concede its sphere of influence in the Persian Gulf[31] to the United States. By 1967, countries in this region were independent but drawn to the United States by their need for protection from each other as well as from Iran. In the early 1970s, the United States buttressed China’s exit from the Soviet bloc by offering it politico-military protection from the USSR. Later in the decade, Washington took advantage of Egypt’s desire to make peace with Israel to remove it from the Soviet sphere of influence in the Middle East.[32]

Spheres of influence do not necessarily disappear as colonial empires contract or are abandoned, though allegiances sometimes change. Since granting independence to its African colonies in 1960, France has maintained an internationally acknowledged politico-military and monetary sphere of influence in them, sometimes called Françafrique.[33] In 1968, the USSR retroactively justified its invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia by formally claiming a right to reverse any effort to dislodge its version of “socialism” in central and eastern Europe. [34] When applied to the ‘Communist bloc,’ this Soviet parallel to the Monroe Doctrine produced a definitive rupture in Sino-Soviet relations and opened the way for the United States to court China as a partner in the containment of the USSR.

Contemporary Spheres of Influence

Today, with the notable continuing exception of the Monroe Doctrine, spheres of influence are usually neither formerly declared nor negotiated between great powers. India’s sphere of influence in sub-Himalayan Asia,[35] Iran’s in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen,[36] Australia’s in the south Pacific,[37] and South Africa’s in southern Africa[38] are informal. To formalize them would pose an obvious challenge to the Westphalian principles of state independence, immunity from military intervention, and sovereign equality on which the United Nations system and the post-colonial world order are grounded. But the fact that spheres of influence are undeclared should not obscure their continuing relevance. [39] They are assertions of military, economic, technological, and political dominance that are as likely to evoke challenge as acquiescence from others especially in periods of major shifts in balances of power and prestige.

Spheres of influence both constrain and stimulate great power strategic interactions. As such they are a factor that statecraft and diplomacy cannot ignore.

Post-Soviet Europe

Beginning in 1989, the Soviet empire and then the Soviet Union itself imploded, disappearing as a security threat to the rest of Europe, China, the Middle East, and the world. NATO’s “Partnership for Peace”[40] briefly held out the promise of a Europe-wide cooperative security architecture in which the reconstituted Russian Federation as well as the United States would both participate and play a stabilizing role. But instead of dismantling the alliances and protective arrangements it had established to deal with now vanished Cold War threats, as the 1990s proceeded, Washington embraced the Russophobia of central and eastern European countries and their American diasporas by reemphasizing NATO as a defense against possible threats from a revived Russia. The United States undertook to expand NATO not just to the frontiers of the former USSR but beyond them.[41] This was an impulse born of America’s so-called “unipolar moment,” in which it sought universal deference to its values and interests and began to launch massive interventions to change regimes that refused to comply. In doing so, it set aside the UN Charter and other foundational elements of international law.

Belying its original purely defensive raison d’être, NATO then vivisected Serbia (ripping Kosovo from it), joined the post-9/11 American effort to pacify and transform Afghanistan, and helped overthrow the government of Libya. Russia and other great powers came to see NATO as a threateningly offensive tool of American foreign policy. Meanwhile, the alliance, which was coterminous with an American sphere of politico-military influence in Europe and the Mediterranean, resumed justifying its continued existence by reference to the threats from Russia it had helped to resurrect.[42] Eventually, Russia resorted to shows of force followed by military intervention in Ukraine to block any further expansion of the American military sphere of influence in Europe.[43]

In its long history, Europe has been at peace only when its major powers have all been included in a cooperative security system. The Concert of Europe kept the European peace for a century. The exclusion of Germany and the USSR from the councils of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s catalyzed World War II and the Cold War. The attempted exclusion of Russia from a role in the maintenance of peace and security in Europe in the 21^st century has deprived it of diplomatic alternatives to a relapse into belligerent behavior.

The Middle East

In the Middle East, the collapse of the USSR orphaned Iraq and Syria, both of which had remained part of the shrunken Soviet sphere of influence that followed Egypt’s defection to America. No longer constrained by Moscow, Iraq gambled that it could alleviate the financial exhaustion of its eight-year war with Iran[44] by seizing Kuwait and its oil riches. In response, a UN-authorized coalition of forces led by the United States and Saudi Arabia liberated Kuwait.[45] Syria joined this coalition, signaling a willingness to explore relations with the United States as a partial substitute for the support of the vanished USSR, but was rebuffed due to its hostility to Israel.

In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq, ousted its government, and attempted to incorporate it into the American politico-military sphere of influence. The U.S. achieved military dominance in Iraq only to see Iran gain a paramount position in its politics. The concurrent U.S. effort to engineer regime change in Syria failed, entrenching Iranian influence there and providing an unexpected opportunity for a resurgence of Russian influence in the Asad government.[46] The destabilization of Iraq and Syria provoked a backlash by Islamist extremists, who briefly erased the border between the two and established an “Islamic state.” Turkey incorporated parts of northern Iraq and Syria into its military and economic spheres. The United States established a blatantly illegal military presence in Syria. After the withdrawal of all but a residual U.S. military training mission,[47] China became the preeminent foreign participant in the Iraqi economy.[48] Meanwhile, “fracking” enabled the United States to resume its historic status as a major energy exporter and made it the swing producer in global energy markets. This reduced the centrality of the Persian Gulf in U.S. global policy. The American commitment to Persian Gulf security diminished concomitantly.

As the 21^st century proceeded, U.S dominance of the affairs of the “Middle East” eroded. Despite the resurgence in Russian influence and intermittent French attempts to reassert a leading role in Lebanon, regional rather than external powers began to drive politico-military rivalries and dynamics there. China is displacing other great powers as the region’s largest economic partner, but the Middle East is no longer in the sphere of influence of any great power or divided between several, as in the past.

The U.S. “Pivot” to East Asia

In Asia, the disappearance of the USSR as a shared Sino-American adversary eliminated the major rationale for strategic cooperation between Beijing and Washington. The US-China diplomatic finesse that had set the Taiwan issue aside to cooperate in the containment of Soviet ambitions began to break down. Ideological differences reemerged to estrange the United States from China.[49] The return of China to wealth and power after its two-century-long eclipse by the West and Japan began to erode the primacy the United States had exercised in the Asia-Pacific since the defeat of Japan in 1945. Alarmed American strategists and military planners began to view China as a potential “near peer competitor”[50] of the United States. America reaffirmed its post-Cold War determination to prevent the rise of any power anywhere that might rival it.[51] The U.S. military progressively diverted reconnaissance and other resources previously devoted to Russia to targets in China, stepped up aggressive military activities along China’s borders, and attempted to enlist NATO members in support of efforts to balance rising Chinese power. But the United States proved unable to develop or implement a strategy to retain its previous economic leadership in the region, which became steadily more centered on China.

Sino-Russian Entente

NATO’s expansion and what the United States called its “pivot to Asia” produced a growing, openly hostile presence, headed by senior U.S. combatant commanders, on the peripheries of both Russia and China that aimed at militarily containing both. Not surprisingly, both pushed back. Moscow escalated its objections to further expansion of the American sphere of influence represented by NATO and warned that it would have to react militarily if this were not halted. Beijing renewed its drive to end the division of China produced by U.S. military intervention in the Taiwan Strait to separate the combatants in the Chinese civil war. Sino-American hostility grew apace.

As the 21^st century began, Russia had no acknowledged sphere of influence in Europe, though its European neighbors (other than the newly established state of Ukraine) remained careful not to provoke it.[52] But, as the newly globalized American sphere of influence (represented in Europe by NATO) neared its borders, Moscow became obsessed with strategic denial of neighboring countries to dominant America influence. Meanwhile, longstanding objections by China to continuing U.S. support of Taiwan (the Chinese island province to which the US-supported losing side in the Chinese civil war had retreated) intensified. China sought to remove Taiwan from the U.S. sphere of influence in Asia and to deny it status as an independent polity. Despite having no claims of its own, the United States challenged China’s territorial claims in the East and South China Seas.

Washington’s labeling of both Russia and China as ideological and geopolitical adversaries and its treatment of them as such gave their partnership a common focus and helped to consolidate it. Escalating U.S. pressure pushed these two formerly estranged great powers into an increasingly open and comprehensive anti-American entente, committed to coordination of policies and actions directed at reducing the menacing military presence and hostile political influence of the United States on their respective peripheries.

NATO, the EU, Turkey, and Russia

By 2020, five post-Cold War enlargement rounds had extended NATO to all of Europe other than its officially neutral states[53] and expanded the alliance to thirty members. For most of these, especially the new members, NATO was still a purely defensive alliance. They had no significant ability to contribute to expeditionary military operations and sought dependence on the United States, NATO, and its larger member states for their defense.

But the post-Cold War era saw NATO cease to emphasize its defensive character and to become a platform for offensive military operations in the Balkans and “out of area” interventions by “à la carte” coalitions led or backed by the United States.[54] Efforts to include Russia in consultations with the United States and NATO about European security issues foundered. Meanwhile, Turkey both distanced itself from the United States and, like Russia, set aside its centuries-old aspiration to be recognized as part of the European community of nations centered on Berlin, London, Paris, and Rome. And, as Sino-American relations turned adversarial, U.S. efforts to enlist NATO and its members in operations directed at countering Chinese naval power in the South China Sea helped convince China that it should share Russian opposition to further NATO enlargement.

Post-Soviet Central Asia

The United States and the European Union (EU) briefly challenged China and Russia for influence in post-Soviet Central Asia, but it soon became obvious to them that they were at best marginal players in the region. Russia and China did not have to do much to deny them significant roles in its governance, economic development, and foreign relations. An effort by Turkey to assert a pan-Turkic sphere of influence has yet to succeed.

In Central Asia, the newly reconstituted Russian Federation has worked out a de facto division of influence domains with China. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization,[55] provides a forum and mechanism in which the two countries can cooperate with the countries of the region to deny the region to Islamist extremism, terrorism, separatist movements, and regime change through “color revolutions.” Meanwhile, given Beijing’s insistence on Westphalian norms of non-intervention, China seems content to leave military intervention in Central Asia to Russia and its partners in the Russian-sponsored Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). [56] The CSTO, which took its current form in 1999, [57] has defined a military sphere of influence for Russia in Central Asia,[58] where it is the universally acknowledged “first responder.”

On a visit to Kazakhstan in 2013, Chinese president Xi Jinping announced what has become known as the “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI). This began as a framework by which to build infrastructure, facilitate trade and transit, and connect all points in the Eurasian landmass, maritime Southeast Asia, and East Africa to China but has since expanded to encompass the globe. Moscow has linked its Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) to the BRI. Russia is ruled by realists who recognize that they do not have the capacity to compete with Beijing in trade and investment in the lands between them, which are unlikely to be able to resist the attractions of China’s huge and expanding market.

Central Asia illustrates a likely global future in which worldwide and regional orders are both multipolar and multidimensional in terms of the domains they cover. There are already four overlaid spheres of influence there:

• A post-colonial Russian sphere of linguistic and cultural influence with its center of gravity in Moscow.

• Dominant Russian politico-military influence through the CSTO, which protects the region’s regimes from “color revolutions.”

• A shared Sino-Russian antiterrorist sphere of influence embodied in the SCO, which is directed at neutralizing extremist and separatist movements and preventing them from penetrating China’s or Russia’s borders.

• The absence of effective military, economic, technological, or political competition from the United States or the EU.

• An emerging Chinese sphere of economic influence.

The “Indo-Pacific”

In the Indo-Pacific[59] too, multipolarity and multidimensionality are becoming the norm, with different great powers now engaged in competition for dominant roles in an expanding variety of military, economic, technological, and political domains. In this region, as in others, the United States is perceived to be progressively less engaged than it was in the last century. Meanwhile, geographic propinquity gives China military advantages that the United States lacks. China’s economic size gives it influence, but the rules for trade and investment are being made plurilaterally, not by China, and without participation from external powers like the United States.[60] Politically, China currently inspires more anxiety in its neighbors than emulation. Japan remains the most trusted power in East Asia and the Pacific. Despite India’s inclusion in the concept of the ‘Indo-Pacific’ geopolitical zone, it remains largely sidelined.

The Indo-Pacific region, which coincides with the area of responsibility of the former U.S. Pacific Command,[61] now encompasses:

• An intensifying Sino-American contest for strategic control of Taiwan,[62] which China seeks to wrest from the U.S. sphere of influence and bring under its renewed control.

• An increasingly Sinocentric Asian regional economy, in which Asians make the rules for trade and investment without the participation of the formerly dominant United States (or the EU).

• Vehemently asserted but slowly eroding American regionwide politico-military leadership.

• ASEAN determination to avoid having to choose between China and the United States even as some ASEAN member states begin to make such choices in favor of China,

• Troubled relations between a neutral Myanmar and its neighbors, fellow ASEAN member states, Bangladesh, China, India, and the West.

• Australian confirmation of military dependence on the United States and cooperation with a rearming Japan in the context of deteriorating Sino-Australian relations.

• An US-aligned Australian sphere of influence in the South Pacific that appears to be eroding as China establishes a competitive presence. [63]

• Strategic hedging, self-strengthening activity, and increasing regional outreach by formerly submissive U.S. allies in northeast Asia.[64]

• Indian politico-military hegemony in South Asia (countered only by Pakistan).

• Independent buffer states between China and India (Nepal) and China, South Korea, and Japan (North Korea).

• A strengthening Chinese military presence in the South China Sea.

• A restive, nonaligned, potential great power in Indonesia.

China’s “Belt and Road Initiative”

The BRI began as an effort to extend China’s domestic industrial policies[65] to countries beyond its borders. It was framed as a means of exporting surplus Chinese industrial capacity to build infrastructure[66] that could connect all the countries of the Eurasian “world island” and East Africa to China. But as other countries have sought to tap Chinese capital and construction expertise, the BRI has expanded to include partners states on every continent, including Africa and the Americas. In Africa, BRI-related investment has become the largest source of funding for economic uplift, dwarfing financial support from institutions like the World Bank. China’s domestic savings are being channeled into foreign investment in development, not just through the BRI, but through new institutions[67] that are compatible with and complement the Bretton Woods framework.

The BRI finances investment in infrastructure to raise economic efficiency and bring into being a worldwide logistics network that is connected to China but available to others. It emphasizes market opening and includes the negotiation of free trade agreements and standardized arrangements to speed customs clearance, bonded storage, and the transit of goods. It imposes no requirement for Chinese partners to exclude relationships with other countries. So, it has little if anything in common with mercantilism.[68]

Nevertheless, linking other countries’ economies to China undercuts their previous dependence on the United States and its allies. Even if the BRI continues to avoid efforts to exclude others from trade and investment in the countries that participate in it, it gives them an incremental stake in good relations with Beijing to balance their interest in cooperating with other great powers. This makes it likely to create a politico-economic circle of deference for China, if not dependence on it and an exclusionary sphere of influence.

Although the BRI is geoeconomic, rather than geopolitical, in nature, and has no unified planning apparatus or oversight of the projects it fosters, it is viewed with alarm by the United States, which sees it as a threat to its previous global primacy and as a potential Chinese sphere of influence. So far, U.S. opposition to the BRI has taken the form of coercive diplomacy and hostile information campaigns. This approach has registered few if any successes because it misconstrues the geoeconomic nature of the BRI as geopolitical. Fiscal and other constraints make it difficult, if not impossible for the U.S. to offer attractive alternatives to cooperation by BRI member countries with China. Neither the United States nor its European allies now have the financial or engineering capacity to compete effectively with Chinese policy banks or construction companies.[69] The old adage, ‘you can’t beat something with nothing’ applies.

Neo-Mercantilism and Technological Spheres of Influence

Under the Trump administration, the United States responded to the challenge of China’s growing economic strength and technological competence by adopting neo-mercantilist[70] policies. These policies have been continued by the Biden administration. While they pay lip service to the need for the reinvigoration of the American political economy, they aim at hamstringing the Chinese economy and retarding its technological advance. They have so far galvanized rather than curbed efforts by China to reduce its longstanding dependence on the United States for imports of food and high-tech components for manufacturing.[71] Meanwhile, Washington’s and Beijing’s efforts to decouple high-tech supply chains is leading to the emergence of new technological spheres of influence with incompatible industrial and consumer standards.[72]

The Global American Sphere of Influence

Washington no longer frames its arguments for and against policies in terms of the provisions of the UN Charter or major international legal conventions. Instead, it promotes the idea of a monolithic “rules-based order” in which liberal internationalism serves as a thin cover for U.S. primacy.[73] The “rules-based order” amounts to the assertion of a global sphere of influence in which the United States, assisted by the Anglosphere and a few former colonial powers,[74] sets and enforces the rules. American primacy and overlordship are symbolized by the unique,[75] comprehensive set of U.S. regional military commands. These span the globe and are headed by quasi-viceregal four-star flag officers. The US-directed “rules-based order” is institutionalized and reinforced:

• Militarily, by a network of some eight hundred bases beyond U.S. borders,[76] the world’s widest ranging (if no longer the world’s largest) navy, counterterrorism operations in much of the world,[77] and the world’s greatest volume of arms sales.

• Economically, through use of dollar sovereignty and dominance of key multilateral institutions[78] to impose a bewilderingly complex set of financial and other sanctions on other countries.[79]

• Technologically, through the extraterritorial application of U.S. export and retransfer controls.[80]

• Informationally, by the dominant role of U.S. media and digital communication platforms.

• Politically, by regime-change operations, selective democracy promotion,[81] adjustments in levels of foreign assistance,[82] the enforcement of the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine,[83] and the denial of technology and arms sales to countries that cooperate with designated U.S. adversaries.[84]

In effect, Washington now claims and seeks to exercise a right to help determine the policies and international alignments of all the world’s countries other than China, Iran, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and the Russian Federation, all of which it regards and has designated for military planning purposes as implacable adversaries. In what some have called “a contest for the allegiance of humanity,” countries in the spheres of influence of other great powers or not yet incorporated into the U.S. sphere are either courted[85] or subjected to coercive diplomacy through sanctions[86] or thrown into anarchy by regime-change operations.[87]

But in a period of major global power shifts, as formerly eclipsed civilization-states like China, India, and (in their own views) Russia and Turkey resurge to wealth and power, the static partitions established by spheres of influence deter less than they invite challenge. This defeats their purpose, which is to protect the security, political culture, and domestic tranquility of the states that establish them. The once-monolithic U.S. global sphere of influence is under attack as other nations seek to deny territories and activities to American dominance and to compete in domains other than the politico-military. What seems to be replacing the once-unified world order is a congeries of regional, overlapping, multidimensional, political, economic, informational, technological,[88] and military spheres of influence

Conclusion

In the beginning, there were military empires forged through conquest. Then there were trading empires that evolved into political control of areas like India and Indonesia. Some spheres of influence were devoted to denying other powers influence in areas of strategic interest to those proclaiming them. Now the norm is spheres of influence that seek a measure of exclusivity through demands for deference and the power to veto the decisions of the countries they incorporate about military, economic, technological, informational, or political matters. The global U.S. sphere of influence is comprehensive but of this kind. It is now being challenged in various regions of the world and globally, through the rise of other innovative economies and information systems. Rivalry between the world’s greatest powers directed at defending or expanding the arenas in which they exercise primacy may still drive their strategic decisions. But regional powers have their own ideas about this, and their views are gaining ground.

As the world traverses the third decade of the 21^st century, the worldwide ascendancy and global sphere of influence of the United States is under challenge from its designated adversaries, particularly Russia and China:

• Latin America is building new relationships with China, Russia, Iran, and Turkey in defiance of the Monroe Doctrine.

• In the Asia-Pacific, China proposes the negotiation of a “new type of great power relations” that would give it a significant role in the management of the region. In the absence of such an agreement, it is exploring the possible use of force to remove Taiwan from the U.S. sphere of influence and integrate it with the Chinese mainland.[89]

• In Europe, Russia insists, at a minimum, on strategic denial of Ukraine to the U.S. sphere of influence represented by NATO, demands the rollback of the U.S. sphere to limit potential threats to it from its immediate neighbors, and may, at a maximum, be seeking to incorporate Ukraine into a reestablished, broad Russian sphere of influence.

• In the Middle East, previous great power spheres of influence, including the six-decade-long primacy of the United States, are challenged by Islamism and nationalism, and are giving way to regional dynamics driven by local religious and geopolitical rivalries.

• In Africa, new regional alignments are emerging, as the French retreat from Islamist attacks in Françafrique, Nigeria establishes a regional order through the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), South Africa exercises dominant influence in its neighbors, and other local spheres of influence emerge.

• The global dominance of U.S. media has been greatly eroded by the emergence of foreign competitors,[90] unattractive parochialism, corporate censorship, and increasing domestic focus. Information dominance is challenged by locally sponsored social media and the emergence of sequestered national media zones in places like China and Iran.

These are strategic developments with enormous implications for global peace and development Denying the validity and role of spheres of influence neither erases them nor helps deal with them or the process of their demise. Understanding what is at stake is essential to dealing effectively with conflicts between great powers. Spheres of influence have been an integral part of great power competition. They differ in their purposes and consequences in the varying domains they affect. They are now generating more instability and conflict than they confine. Spheres of influence have been an abiding phenomenon of statecraft and diplomacy that deserves a great deal more study than it has so far received. It is time to consider the alternatives to them.

[1] Consider the cautious approaches to relations with the United States of Canada and Mexico, both targets of past U.S. aggression.

[2] Hegemony generates its own antibodies.

[3] https://www.rferl.org/a/u-s-doesn-t-accept-spheres-of-influence-blinken-says-in-comments-aimed-at-russia/31241682.html

[4] https://grahamefuller.com/washington-denies-reality-of-spheres-of-influence-a-new-pinnacle-of-hypocrisy/

[5] The U.S. continues to attempt to bring Cuba and other countries in Latin America, like Venezuela, to heel. Yet it rejects any effort by Russia to incorporate Georgia or Ukraine into a Russian sphere of influence as illegitimate, while insisting on its right to include both countries in its own sphere admitting them to NATO. In Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America, the United States is currently engaged in coercive diplomacy and economic warfare to exclude Chinese companies from any role in telecommunications or infrastructure investment. U.S. policies in the Indo-Pacific seek to sustain American military primacy and the hub-and-spoke alliance system that implemented policies of “containment” in the Cold War. In the Middle East, where American influence is visibly in retreat, the U.S. focus is on rolling back the sphere of influence its and its security partners’ bungled military interventions in Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen enabled Iran to create.

[6] For example, politico-military, economic, technological, etc.

[7] The concept of spheres of influence, like so many other elements of modern statecraft, emerged from the projection of power abroad by the many competitive powers that made up the European state system. Imperial China’s position as the center of gravity in the “tributary state system” did not give it a sphere of influence in the modern sense. The tributary system might best be described as a “circle of deference.” Unlike s sphere of influence, it was not part of a competition for hegemony with a peer competitor of China because there was none. Nor, despite insistence on deference to its court rituals by foreigners seeking the favor of the emperor, did China usually seek to regulate the behavior of so-called “tributary states” toward each other. Much like the nominal allegiance of European princes to the Pope, the sycophantic deference of lesser rulers to the Chinese emperor was a matter of self-interest as well as tradition. The emperor’s recognition conferred trade advantages and prestige upon them and provided them with a measure of diplomatic, if not military protection from each other. It also encouraged China to leave them alone, rather than to attempt to make them outright vassals (as it did, with varying degrees of success, with Korea, Tibet, and Vietnam). In Asia, the sphere of influence was an artifact introduced by European, American, and, later, Japanese – not Chinese – imperialism and applied to China, not by it.

[8] The “Monroe Doctrine” was the first formal declaration of a sphere of influence by any country, though the term itself was not used in diplomacy until 1885. In its original form, it was an effort to deny extra-hemispheric powers spheres of influence that might threaten U.S. security. (The 1904 ‘Roosevelt Corollary’ transformed it from an instrument of strategic denial into an active assertion of U.S. dominance of the Hemisphere.) Proclaimed by U.S. President James Monroe December 2, 1823, on the advice of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, the Monroe Doctrine demanded the respect of European colonial powers for the independence of states in the Western Hemisphere and declared that any effort on their part to “extend their system to any portion of [the] hemisphere [would be seen] as dangerous to [U.S.] peace and safety.” In 1864, as the U.S. was preoccupied with its civil war, France installed Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph von Hapsburg-Lorraine as the emperor of Mexico. In 1865, with the civil war behind it, the U.S. massed 40,000 troops on the Mexican border and demanded that the French remove him. The French withdrew their forces from Mexico. Maximilian was then captured and executed by the forces of Benito Juárez.

In 1895, the United States threatened to go to war with Britain if it intervened in Venezuela.

In 1917, a German proposal of an alliance with Mexico helped persuade the United States to enter World War I.

[9] As early as 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt envisaged a post-World War II world managed by what he called “the four policemen” or “four sheriffs,” each of which would be responsible for maintaining peace in its sphere of influence. In his naïve conception, Britain would be in charge in its empire and Western Europe, the Soviet Union in eastern Europe and the central Eurasian landmass, China in East Asia and the western Pacific, and the United States in the Western Hemisphere. At the insistence of British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, France was later added and recognized as responsible for the affairs of its empire.

[10] In a system based on balances of power, a state that seeks hegemony will be balanced by coalitions among its rivals for hegemony. The classic exposition of such as system is Henry A. Kissinger’s “A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh, and the Problems of Peace, 1812-22,” 1957.

[11] See note #16.

[12] Iran has created a politico-military sphere of influence in the Fertile Crescent (Iraq, Lebanon, occupied Palestine, Syria) and Yemen at the expense of Saudi Arabia and the United States. See also note #33.

[13] Spheres of influence are not the same as colonial empires, communities of settler states, or linguistic communities. Spheres of influence preserve but constrain sovereignty; colonialism extinguishes it. The age of European global ascendancy that began with the 16^th century and ended in the 20^th included the establishment of new states through migration from other countries and created settler states. The primary example of a community of sibling settler states is the Anglosphere (Britain plus Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States), but there are others (e.g., France and Québec, Portugal and Brazil.) Linguistic communities are a legacy of imperial expansion, e.g., the Anglophone countries of the British Commonwealth plus the Philippines, the Arab world, the Francophonie, the Lusophone countries of Africa plus Timor Leste, and the twenty-plus countries where Spanish is the official language. There are obvious affinities among such members of former empires, but, unlike great power spheres of influence they are not the result of contemporary primacy by a single great power.

[14] For example, Switzerland has remained independent by virtue of the strategic convenience this offers the great powers that surround it, a tough citizen army trained to exploit its difficult topography for defense, and its scrupulous neutrality in times of peace as well as war. Its neutrality was recognized at the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

Austria was freed from great power occupation and exempted from their spheres of influence by the Austrian State Treaty of May 15, 1955.

Finland severed its union with Russia in 1917. It lost ten percent of its territory in the Winter War of 1939–1940, the Continuation War of 1941–1944, and the War of Lapland of 1944–1945. It has since refused to compromise its independence and distinctive democratic social order while prudently maintaining cordial relations with Moscow and avoiding obvious challenges to core Russian interests. Finland’s conduct proves that there is nothing ideologically pernicious about prudent self-restraint that recognizes the potential perils of offending more powerful neighbors.

See also the discussion of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), below, and at note #39.

[15] The three Punic Wars were fought from 264 BCE to 146 BCE and culminated in Rome’s destruction of Carthage.

[16] The 18^th century military struggle between the British East India Company and the French Compagnie Française des Indes for direct control in India continued until the British victory at Plassey in the Seven Years War (1756 – 1763) ended it. The French, having been denied empire, then cultivated a sphere of influence with warring Indian states by supplying them with advisers and trainers, turning them against the British, and thus indirectly imperiling the British presence in India while Britain and France contested control in Europe. In response, the British cultivated and conquered Indian states, ultimately achieving imperial control of the subcontinent.

[17] Foreign nations initially competed for trade with China by establishing “treaty ports’ within which their law, rather than Chinese law, applied. They then sought to divide the Chinese hinterland into mercantilist spheres of influence within which only they enjoyed the right to trade, invest, and proselytize. On the eve of the Chinese revolution of 1911, Russia claimed the largest such sphere, followed by Britain, France, Japan, Germany, and Italy. The United States, under the “Open Door” policy it adopted after its conquest of the Philippines, abjured the establishment of its own sphere of influence in China but claimed equal access and commercial rights in others’ spheres. In 1895, Japan annexed Taiwan from China, while removing Korea from the Chinese sphere of influence. In 1905, it annexed Korea.

[18] By the beginning of the 20th century, Southeast Asia other than Thailand (which had been divided into British and French spheres of influence) had been subjected to the colonial rule of Britain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the United States.

[19] This process culminated in the Berlin Conference (also known as the “Congo Conference”) of 1884-1885,

[20] Mercantilism is an economic policy designed to maximize the exports and minimize the imports for an economy. The states that practice it use all elements of state power, including the military, to protect home markets and defend their privileges in markets abroad from competition by others.

[21] By 1904, the U.S. had already seized Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spain, threatened to go to war with Great Britain over Venezuela, and intervened to detach Panama from Colombia. It subsequently invaded Nicaragua, Honduras, Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Cuba, Panama, Costa Rica, and Grenada and engaged in covert regime change operations in many of these countries as well as in Chile, Venezuela, and Bolivia. The first version of the Monroe Doctrine had been passive and defensive. The second was active and domineering.

[22] https://gaic.info/history/the-world-war-ii-latin-american-internment-program/ & https://www.latinousa.org/2014/06/13/japanese-peruvian-internment-camps/

[23] Meeting with Joseph Stalin in Moscow, in October 1944, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, a committed imperialist, privately proposed specific percentages of influence to be exercised by each party in the countries of eastern Europe and the Balkans. Stalin agreed, but the subsequent imposition of what Churchill called “the iron curtain” ensured that, except in Greece and Yugoslavia, Soviet influence excluded any influential role for the British or other Western powers.

[24] The division of Korea and Vietnam laid the basis for subsequent wars to reunite them. In Korea, the north Korean invasion of south Korea failed. In Vietnam, the north Vietnamese were able to conquer south Vietnam.

[25] These protective U.S. alliances included Australia and New Zealand (1951), the Philippines (1951), the Republic of Korea (1853), the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO, including Australia, France, New Zealand, Philippines, Thailand, and the United Kingdom, 1954), and Japan (1960).

[26] “Free” appears to have meant little more than ‘not subordinate to the USSR or China.’ The term was an appealing but inaccurate description of an agglomeration of democracies, dictatorships, military regimes, monarchies, and kleptocracies whose only thing in common was their affiliation with the United States rather than its adversaries.

[27] The Cold War began with the 1948-1949 Berlin airlift and ended with the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union.

[28] The 1975 revolution in Portugal led to the dissolution of the Portuguese Empire and to the emergence of pro-Soviet regimes in Lusophone Africa (Angola, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tome e Principe). With the demise of the USSR, these countries left the Soviet orbit and were increasingly connected to post-apartheid South Africa.

[29] This was an ill-considered response by the USSR to the U.S. emplacement of nuclear-armed missiles aimed at it from Turkey.

[30] These U.S. reactions included the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and other efforts to produce regime change in Cuba, the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the 1973 overthrow of the government of Chile, the 1981 – 1988 Contra war in Nicaragua, and the 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada.

[31] Britain had dominated what is now the United Arab Emirates as well as Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar since the early 19^th century, when the British rulers of India intervened to eliminate piracy and secure lines of communication between India and the British Isles. Similar strategic concerns about lines of communication between Asia and Europe have driven the informal U.S. security commitments to Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states. The fall of the Shah of Iran and his replacement by Shiite Islamists hostile to the United States and the Sunni Arab monarchies of the Gulf encouraged them to place themselves under American influence and protection.

[32] The 1979 “Camp David Accords” were accompanied by an Egyptian shift away from Moscow to allegiance to and dependence on Washington. Since then, Egypt has received substantial annual subventions from the United States.

[33] The French continue to police their African sphere of influence and to sustain a monetary union with them. The Euro-pegged currency known as the CFA franc is used in Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal, and Togo. France requires these countries to maintain 65 percent of their hard currency reserves in the French Treasury.

[34] The USSR intervened in Hungary on November 4, 1956, and in Czechoslovakia on August 20, 1968. On November 13, 1968, in what became known as the Brezhnev Doctrine, Leonid Brezhnev, the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, declared that no member country could leave the Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact or disturb a ruling communist party’s monopoly on power.

[35] No external great power has ever attempted to interfere with coercive policies by India in its region. None challenges Indian suzerainty in Bhutan. None actively opposed the Indian annexation of Goa or Sikkim, separation of Bangladesh from West Pakistan, prolonged occupation of Sri Lanka, blockade of Nepal or counter-coup intervention in the Maldives. On the other hand, no other naval power has accepted India’s intermittent claims that it is entitled to primacy in the Indian Ocean.

[36] Bungled American policies in the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula set the stage for a major expansion of Iranian politico-military influence in the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula. Both Israel and Saudi Arabia now feel strategically encircled by an Iranian sphere of influence.

[37] See https://www.australianforeignaffairs.com/essay/2019/07/our-sphere-of-influence

[38] South Africa is now at the politico-economic center of the sphere of influence defined by the Southern African Development Community (SADC), originally established to coordinate efforts by its neighbors to end its apartheid and colonial control of Namibia. SADC now consists of Angola, Botswana, Comoros, the D. R. of the Congo, Eswatini, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe in addition to South Africa.

[39] A negative case in point is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The governments of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand established ASEAN in 1967. Its purpose was to promote peace and security in Southeast Asia and to accelerate economic development despite the ongoing wars between the United States and Chinese and Soviet-aided forces in Indochina. After the 1975 communist victories there, ASEAN helped its members adjust to the changed balance of power and expanded to include Brunei, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia. Today, ASEAN is a means by which its members can avoid incorporation into the spheres of influence of any of the great powers contending for strategic primacy in Asia. It enables them to speak collectively to external great powers about their shared security, economic, and political concerns. Such powers recognize “ASEAN centrality,” accept that ASEAN is non-aligned between them, and seek to cooperate with it rather than antagonize it. Like Switzerland, ASEAN balances its relationships with those most likely to limit its independence and leaves ideology to ideologues.

[40] Proposed by the United States in October 1993 and formally launched by NATO in January 1994.

[41] As early as the U.S. midterm elections of 1994, both the Republican Party and the Clinton administration were courting ethnic Slavic and Baltic voters by suggesting early membership in NATO for their ancestral homelands. By December 1994, Russia, which professed to have been seeking partnership with the United States, angrily declared that it felt threatened and betrayed. (See “NATO Expansion: What Yeltsin Heard” and referenced National Security Archive documents at https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2018-03-16/nato-expansion-what-yeltsin-heard. The Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland were admitted to NATO in 1999, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania (all formerly part of the USSR), Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004, Albania and Croatia in 2009, Montenegro in 2017, and North Macedonia in 2020. In 2008, when NATO declared it would be prepared to admit Georgia and Ukraine to membership, Russia warned that it would regard this as “a direct threat” to its security.

Meanwhile, the United States briefly attempted to establish its influence in Central Asia before ceasing to contest the dominant politico-military influence of Russia and the economic influence of China there.

[42] In 2020, when the United States and other NATO countries, citing election fraud, refused to recognize the Lukashenko government, Belarus placed itself under Russian protection, thus confirming its position as part of a residual Russian sphere of influence in eastern Europe.

[43] By 2021 – 2022, Russia had built enough military strength to mount a diplomatic challenge to the continued expansion of NATO. Moscow demonstrated its ability to overwhelm Ukraine and to signal that admitting it to NATO membership might trigger a nuclear confrontation with the United States. It demanded that the United States and NATO end the menace such expansion posed to its peace of mind. Russia initially denied that it had any intention of invading Ukraine. But when it received no U.S or NATO answer to its demands, it attacked, changing its apparent objective from strategic denial of Ukraine to the U.S. sphere of influence to the incorporation of Ukraine into a reestablished sphere of influence of its own.

[44] 1980 – 1988.

[45] Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 4, 1990. It agreed to a ceasefire with U.S. and Saudi-led forces at Safwan on March 3, 1991.

[46] https://www.usip.org/publications/2021/02/what-russias-endgame-syria

[47] https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/12/09/us-just-ended-combat-iraq-thousands-of-troops-will-stay-put-now.html

[48] https://plus.iru-miru.com/en/article/42718

[49] The brutal military suppression of the 1989 student and worker uprisings in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and elsewhere in China put human rights issues at the center of the relationship at a time when the end of the Cold War had made America feel omnipotent. Meanwhile, Taiwan, which had been a dictatorship, democratized, endearing it to American proponents of democracy promotion abroad.

[50] The U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment invented the “peer competitor” concept as a means of modeling force structure and guiding the development of military capabilities in the absence of a real-world high-tech enemy like the USSR. The enemy it posited would be able to match and counter any capability the U.S. armed forces might field. Such a “peer competitor” was a maximally challenging enemy in war games and the perfect driver of weapons procurement. In time, defense planners settled on China as the real-world “peer competitor.”

[51] https://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/08/world/us-strategy-plan-calls-for-insuring-no-rivals-develop.html

[52] For example, Norway, the only founding member of NATO to border Russia, has long barred the peacetime stationing of troops and offensive weapons from other NATO countries on its territory. See also the discussion of the armed neutrality of Finland, above.

[53] Austria and Switzerland are officially neutral and internationally recognized as such. Finland, Ireland, and Sweden have remained outside alliance structures, though all three are part of the American politico-economic sphere of influence in Europe. Bosnia & Herzegovina and Ukraine aspire to join NATO. Moldova is constitutionally neutral. Serbia seeks to join the EU but not NATO.

[54] Fourteen of NATO’s then-nineteen members participated in the US-led 1999 air war with Serbia. NATO commanded the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan in which a total of fifty nations took part, many of them not NATO members, but most NATO members declined to join the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. 9 NATO member states spearheaded the 2011 intervention in Libya, which was joined by two non-NATO members. The majority of member states did not take part in the conflict.

[55] Established in 1996, the SCO has become the world’s largest regional security organization in geographic scope and population, covering three-fifths of the Eurasian continent, two-fifths of the world population, and about one-fourth of global GDP. Its current members are China, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

[56] China registered no objection to the CSTO intervention in Kazakhstan. The “Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence,” which have been central tenets of Chinese foreign relations since 1954, are a succinct restatement of Westphalianism and hence the principles of the United Nations Charter. They are “mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, mutual non-aggression, mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs, equality and cooperation for mutual benefit, and peaceful co-existence.”

[57] Current CSTO members are Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan. In January 2022, the CSTO sent troops to restore order and protect the government from an insurrection in Kazakhstan. This was its first such intervention.

[58] The CSTO bars its members from joining any other military alliance.

[59] As a strategic concept, the “Indo-Pacific” combines East and South Asia. It originated as a Japanese formula to justify including India in efforts to balance Chinese influence in Southeast Asia.

[60] Key institutions include the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), which Japan rescued from U.S. withdrawal and which China as well as the United Kingdom aspire to join, and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a free trade agreement between 15 Asia-Pacific countries, including Australia, Brunei, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.

[61] Renamed the Indo-Pacific Command in 2018.

[62] See https://chasfreeman.net/war-with-china-over-taiwan/, https://chasfreeman.net/will-the-chinese-civil-war-end-with-a-bang-or-with-a-whimper/, and https://china.usc.edu/daniel-kritenbrink-and-ely-ratner-testimony-us-partnership-taiwan-dec-8-2021.

[63] France and New Zealand also hold sway in parts of the Pacific.

[64] U.S. forces occupied Japan after World War II and never left. The U.S. troop presence there and in South Korea has long been unpopular. Japanese and Koreans tolerated it because of the Soviet threat to their independence and the perceived military superiority of North Korea to South Korea. With the end of the Cold War and the remarkable ascendancy of the Republic of Korea (ROK) over its northern rival, this tolerance is increasingly fragile. Meanwhile, Washington’s stridently anti-Chinese posture has fed concern that Japan and the ROK could be dragged willy-nilly into a Sino-American war and erratic American foreign policy behavior has raised doubts about the reliability of U.S. security guarantees.

[65] In China, the state sets strategic development objectives, which it supports with project finance from its banks. Projects are conceived by entrepreneurs (both state-owned and private) to respond to market conditions and designed to be profitable. Officials are rated on how well they support the creation of enterprises and jobs consistent with these objectives. The combination encourages strong public-private partnership that is supportive of national objectives.

[66] Roads, railroads, pipelines, fiber optic cables, ports, airports, industrial and free trade zones.

[67] For example, the Silk Road Fund (established 2014), the 105-membeer Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (established 2015), and the New Development Bank (formerly the BRICS Bank, established 1917).

[68] See note #18.

[69] Lacking the capacity to carry out a politico-economic strategy to counter rising Chinese influence, the United States has sought to answer it with increased military spending and deployments, accompanied by coercive diplomacy through financial sanctions. But this approach does not provide alternative financing or a substitute for Chinese investment and construction projects, and therefore does nothing to reduce the BRI’s appeal.

[70] Neo-mercantilism is a revived theory of mercantilism emphasizing trade restrictions policies justified by “national security” concerns. It seeks to increase domestic employment through protectionist measures, while using export controls and restrictive immigration policies to limit foreign access to scientific knowledge and technology with military applications.

[71] China is no longer the fastest growing market for U.S. exports, as it once was. The imposition of tariffs has exacerbated supply chain problems resulting from the COVID-19 epidemic and fed inflation in the U.S. economy. There has been no significant “reshoring” of industrial jobs from China to the United States.

[72] The U.S. campaign against Chinese telecommunications companies like Huawei and ZTE and its efforts to choke off Chinese access to extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) technology and equipment exemplify this effort to divide the global technology market. The irony is that, in many instances, the United States cannot itself produce alternatives to Chinese products.

[73] The new “rules-based order” omits references to the United Nations Charter and international law. Due to domestic political gridlock, the United States is no longer able to ratify international treaties and conventions, but it insists on its right to interpret them without regard to the views of others. The “rules-based order” presumes that the United States and its key allies (in the G-7) have the authority to make the rules, determine when and how to apply them, and exempt themselves from them while imposing and enforcing them on others.

[74] The “G-7,” whose members are Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States.

[75] No other country defines defense in global terms rather than by reference to its homeland.

[76] 170 of which reportedly have golf courses!

[77] According to the Cost of War project sponsored by the Watson Institute at Brown University, in 2021, the U.S. military was engaged in such operations in eighty-five countries. https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2021/US%20Counterterrorism%20Operations%202018-2020%2C%20Costs%20of%20War.pdf

[78] For example, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT).

[79] Countries or regions subject to direct U.S. sanctions (either unilaterally or in part unilaterally) include (but are not limited to) the Balkans, Belarus, Burma, Burundi, Central African Republic, China, Cuba, Democratic Republic of Congo, Hong Kong, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Nicaragua, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, Ukraine/Russia, Venezuela, Yemen, and Zimbabwe. U.S. secondary sanctions target normal arms-length commercial activity that does not involve a U.S. nexus and may be legal in the jurisdictions of the transacting parties. While U.S. individuals and entities must adhere to primary sanctions as a matter of U.S. law or face potential criminal/civil penalties, secondary sanctions present non-U.S. targets with a choice: do business with the United States or with the sanctioned target, but not both. Targeted sanctions prohibit US persons from transacting with an individual or entity designated by the State or Treasury Departments under a specific sanctions regime.

[80] The United States now gives export controls and economic boycotts extraterritorial application. As a result, persons and companies in other states are prevented from exporting to or investing in the states targeted by the U.S. The U.S. previously argued (e.g., in the case of the Arab boycott of Israel) that this was illegal under international law.

[81] It is instructive to contrast the U.S. reaction to the 2013 military coup in Egypt and the 2021coup in Myanmar. Egypt is in the U.S. sphere of influence while Myanmar is outside it.

[82] For example, adjustments in aid policy toward El Salvador after its August 2018 switch in diplomatic relations from Taipei to Beijing and similar moves after anti-Chinese riots in the Solomon Islands in 2021.

[83] See note #21.

[84] For example, the termination of previously agreed cooperation in developing and building the F-35 “Lightning II” with Turkey after it bought the Russian S-400 air defense system and threatened sanctions on India for the same transgression.

[85] For example, Ukraine.

[86] For example, Cuba, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Venezuela.

[87] For example, Libya and Syria.

[88] The exchange of technology may be regulated by governments, but it takes place without much reference to them through companies, universities, and research institutes. Non-state actors play a significant role, as illustrated by the cyber attacks on Russia by ‘Anonymous’ following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

[89] The Taiwan issue – the question of what political relationship Taiwan should have with the rest of China – is not just an issue of Chinese nationalism. For China (and, less convincingly for the United States) it is a geostrategic issue. On the eve of Japan’s surrender, the State Department published a note on Taiwan (cited in Akira Iriye, Across the Pacific: An Inner History of American–East Asian Relations (New York: Imprint, 1967), p. 221), which remarked:

“Strategic factors greatly influence the problem of Formosa [Taiwan]. With the exception of Singapore, no location in the Far East occupies such a controlling position.

“Formosa is separated from the continent of Asia by one hundred miles, from the main island of the Philippines by two hundred miles, and from Kyushu, the nearest home island of Japan, by seven hundred miles. Flying distance from military airports in Formosa is 559 miles to Canton, 438 miles to Shanghai, 1,290 miles to Tokyo.

“Formosa, larger than the State of Maryland, stands in a strategic relation to the China coast comparable for the United States to an imaginary island of such size one hundred miles off the coast of North Carolina, four hundred miles from New York City. Every point off the entire coast of China falls within a radius of 1,100 miles. A radius of 2,000 miles includes Burma, Singapore, Borneo, Guam, and Japan, including Hokkaido.”

[90] U.S. media are now grossly ill-equipped and staffed to cover events abroad. The vacuum is being filled by state-owned foreign news services like the BBC. Al Jazeera, Sputnik, Xinhua, and the like. The U.S, which once commanded the global information domain, is no longer able to dominate it. Domestic media designed to appeal to partisan audiences at home alienates, rather than engages audiences abroad. Great powers are being driven to recognize the need for information strategies. The United States, having euthanized the U.S. Information Agency after the end of the Cold War, is, however, a holdout.

We are here to avert a tragedy – the apparently inexorable unfolding of foreseeably terrible events. As German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has just warned us, we are in the midst of a “breakdown of values” that is turning the world “into a den of robbers, where the most unscrupulous take whatever they want” and where entire regions or countries are treated as the property of a few great powers.

My country, the United States of America, is the most powerful in the world. It has now followed its Israeli protectorate into protracted war on the truth, repudiation of the rule of law, and shameless bullying and violations of the sovereignty of all who oppose it. The already wealthy once again feel free to rob the poor with impunity. We are back to the law of the jungle and aggressive imperialism. Ever more governments emulate the Mafia’s protection racket practices and intimidation techniques. If this is not stopped, we are headed for a second Dark Age.

The purpose of international law has always been to ensure that the strong could no longer victimize the weak. Insistence on this principle, even if imperfectly respected, is what has separated civilization from barbarism. If the law is no protection, nations will be forced to rearm against potential attack by others. If they face the threat of nuclear, chemical, or biological attack, they will build their own weapons of mass destruction to deter this. If alliances are no longer reliable, nations will hedge or simply abandon them to combat or cut their own deals with adversaries. This is not speculation. It is the visible trend of our times.

As we have seen in the case of the Gaza genocide, words alone cannot halt atrocities. Nor can unenforced decisions of the United Nations or international courts. Intensifying citizen protests have failed to wean allegedly democratic governments from tolerance, complicity in, or support for increasingly blatant crimes against humanity and brutal efforts to subjugate or curtail the freedom of independent nations and peoples.

The collective West continues to profess that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, [and] that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. But this now has no credibility. We support Israel’s ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, its efforts to dismember Syria, its depredations in Lebanon, and its preparations for renewed aggression against Iran and Yemen. To defend this hypocrisy, our democracies now emulate authoritarian regimes by suppressing freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and academic freedom. We have abandoned due process to punish anyone who effectively refutes the official narrative. Evidently, we believe that it is necessary to betray Western values to save them. This is a disastrous misjudgment.

In the new world disorder, neither the norms of international law nor public opinion constrain the behavior of great powers. They have learned how to manipulate their citizens’ perceptions of reality to assure public support and achieve impunity for their amoral abuses of power. Mass media faithfully echo official propaganda, journalists self-interestedly amplify it, while corporate media platforms treat anything that challenges it as seditious and ban it.

Western media refused to consider or report the strategic anxieties that prompted Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. They portrayed the U.S. effort to exploit Ukraine’s distress to requisition its rare earths as compassion, not greed.

Unconcealed vanity and hubris have now brought about U.S. naval acts of piracy against Venezuela and murders of its citizens in its near seas, the decapitation of its government, the theft of its natural resources, and its proposed reduction to an economic colony of the United States. So much for the respect for national sovereignty that is the foundation of the United Nations Charter and international law!

The United States now unabashedly presents itself as an untrustworthy expansionist power that substitutes unilateral diktats, intimidation, and the use of force for diplomacy. This gangster logic is contemptuous of the interests and honor of other countries. It now menaces Greenland, a self-governing part of Denmark, a member of NATO and a loyal ally of the United States. The transformation of the U.S. from protector to predator threatens not just to splinter the core of Western civilization but to unravel the transatlantic alliance.

Washington seems to have decided to abandon Europe to its fate in order to impose a tyrannical monopoly on the political economy of the Western Hemisphere. It aims to expel the influence of competing great powers and keep them at bay, especially China, without regard to the interests of those the United States proposes to dominate. This brutal reinvention of the Monroe Doctrine seems less likely to bring the nations of South America to heel than to encourage them to seek Chinese and other foreign protection against North American control. The kickoff was military aggression against Venezuela, but Washington has made it clear that this was merely an opening move, with much more belligerence to come.

Meanwhile, Israel continues to defy international law and norms of human decency with impunity. It seeks to annihilate those Palestinians it cannot subject to apartheid. It treats the scheduling of negotiating sessions with its opponents as opportunities to murder them, not to make peace. It signs ceasefires only to violate them. Its armed forces and security services routinely invade the sovereignty of its neighbors. It has no plan for peaceful coexistence with them. Its aims instead to consolidate a US-backed Israeli sphere of influence in West Asia within which it can continue to expand at will. This is a formula for the ongoing destabilization of the region in endless, escalating warfare and resistance to maltreatment through terrorism. It promises even greater insecurity not just for Israelis but for their Western backers.

The world cannot permit a continued descent into a moral and legal abyss. If governments do not counter lawless behavior with concrete actions, the precedents now being set in Europe, West Asia, and South America will be replicated elsewhere and life everywhere will be increasingly nasty, brutish, and short.

Rhetorical resistance to lawlessness is not enough. We have come to a tipping point. If we cannot now persuade our governments to take effective action to punish and deter further crimes against the Westphalian order of sovereign states, it and the rules-regulated international order it birthed will surely perish from the earth.

We must now acknowledge the reality that the structures we created to promote peace and progress after World War II have finally failed. Their failure is mirrored not only in the absence of effective statecraft to resolve conflicts, but in domestic constitutional crises and the erosion of democratic freedoms everywhere. It is past time for a fundamental reappraisal of institutions and policies that have manifestly failed by the governments responsible for their failure.

In this regard, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni is entirely right to make the commonsense argument that peace in Europe demands that Europeans talk to Russia, not just among themselves and to Ukraine. Like it or not, Russia is part of Europe. Without dialogue with Russia about the warfare that threatens Europe and is consuming Ukraine, Europeans cannot resolve the conflict or protect their long-term security interests. The United States is no longer able or willing to do this for them. It is surely anomalous that Europeans should entrust the crafting of a peace that is central to their subcontinent’s stability to amateur envoys of an American president who says he regards them as competitors and who seems to have little interest in them except as wealthy purchasers of American weaponry.

Recent U.S. efforts to subjugate Venezuela underscore the dangerous unrealism of the argument that “every country [including Ukraine] has the right to choose its international alliances” without regard to the impact of their alignment on others. Unscrupulous predators now take what they can; their prey yield what they must. Might may not make right, but it is foolish to ignore it. Whatever Mexico may think about past U.S. aggression, it is careful not to align itself against the United States. Vietnam prudently avoids military alliances aimed at China as Bangladesh does against India. There is no future for a less circumspect approach by Ukraine to its mightier Russian neighbor.

Russian statecraft is dominated by memories of foreign invasion from both the east and west. Moscow’s security anxieties are not irrational. Both France and Germany have invaded Russia. Any peace in Europe must address both Russian anxieties about another Western attack on it, especially as Germany rearms, and Western concerns about Russia. Europeans need to take charge of defining their own destiny. They – non-Russian and Russian alike – are the parties directly at interest in composing a mutually reassuring security architecture for their subcontinent. Prime Minister Meloni deserves the support of other European leaders in a joint effort to engage Russia in dialogue about how peace in Ukraine might help bring forth such an architecture.

Peace in Europe would benefit the entire world, but it alone would not cure the manifest infirmities of our legacy global institutions. If the United Nations Security Council cannot regulate world peace and development or enforce the decisions of the International Court of Justice, we must explore work-arounds and alternatives to it. There is nothing to prevent countries from gathering in ad hoc conferences to agree on the application of collective rules and actions that address common concerns. There is nothing to prevent members of the crippled World Trade Organization from recreating its functions at the regional level. There is no reason to allow the ideal of universality to preclude action at less than universal levels to address and resolve problems that most members of the international community regard as urgent. If the U.N. system, like that of the League of Nations, has failed, it is time to discuss how to repair or replace it.

The breakdown in values to which German President Steinmeier referred has engendered a disastrous collapse of international law and institutions. It took a devastating disintegration of global order in two world wars to give birth, respectively, to the League of Nations and the United Nations. The current world disorder could well produce another global war, this one nuclear and possibly fatal to our species. Surely, it is in our collective interest to forestall this by taking action to reconfigure the dying 20^th century system to create something better.

I sense that our governments are beginning to understand that, in the newly anarchic circumstances, they cannot continue business as usual. We must demand that they meet the challenges of the day and no longer allow them to silence those who insist they do so.