This week, our guest is Charles Kupchan, Professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. We discuss Charlie’s first visits to China and the Soviet Union, naiveté and NATO expansion in the 1990s, the dangers of the current conflict with Russia and China, the possibility of a new American foreign policy paradigm, global interdependence, and an endgame in Ukraine.
This week, our guest is Charles Kupchan, Professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. We discuss Charlie’s first visits to China and the Soviet Union, naiveté and NATO expansion in the 1990s, the dangers of the current conflict with Russia and China, the possibility of a new American foreign policy paradigm, global interdependence, and an endgame in Ukraine.
*The Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.
**The first twelve episodes of this podcast were published by the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.
(Transcripts may contain a few typographical errors due to audio quality during the podcast recording.)
[00:00:00] Peter: Hi, I'm Peter Slezkine, Director of the Monterey Trialogue, a program hosted by the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. Since the middle of the 20th century, relations among the United States, Russia, and China have had an enormous impact on each country separately and on the world as a whole. The purpose of the Monterey Trialogue is to better understand these extraordinarily complex and consequential relationship by directly engaging with experts from all three countries.
Our guest today is Charles Kupchan, Professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. From 2014 to 2017, he served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for European Affairs on the National Security Council in the Obama White House. He was also Director for European Affairs on the NSC during the first Clinton administration. Charlie is the author of a remarkable number of books, the most recent of which is Isolationism, A History of America's Efforts to Shield Itself from the World, published in 2020.
Welcome to the podcast.
[00:01:05] Charles: Good to be with you, Peter.
[00:01:06] Peter: So, from what I understand, at some point before the period covered in this bio that I just read, you studied Chinese and spent some time living in China. And meanwhile, your brother, Cliff Kupchan, currently the chairman of Eurasia Group, studied Russian and spent a couple of years living in Moscow. So, how did two brothers end up in such distant and different lands? What did you make of China on that first visit? And what kind of conversations did you and your brother have about these different experiences at the time?
[00:01:37] Charles: Well, interestingly enough, Cliff and I grew up in a family that was oriented toward the hard sciences. My dad was a professor of chemistry at University of Wisconsin and then University of Virginia. He and I, we're both planning to go into the hard sciences. I was a biology major and he was pre-med. In my case, it lasted about two weeks, and I decided that I didn't want to spend four years in college wearing lab coats and looking at test tubes. And so, I said, “I need a new major,” and I ended up gravitating to East Asian studies, I think, in part, because my dad was someone who focused in what's called natural products chemistry and had been to China just before I started college to study various kinds of herbal medicines. And I think that piqued my curiosity. So, I went into East Asian studies. My brother got very close to going to med school, but he then pivoted away and became interested in Soviet studies. So, I went to college for two years, learned a reasonable amount of Chinese, went to Middlebury summer school, did learn Chinese.
[00:02:45] Peter: Very nice.
[00:02:53] Charles: Let's give Middlebury a shout out, and then ended up deciding to take a leave of absence from college, in part, to go learn Chinese. So, I made my way across Europe. This was 1979, the year that the U.S. established relations with China. And I was in Greece at the time. So, I remember going to the Chinese embassy in Athens, saying, “Hey, I'm, you know, a 19-year-old. I'm an East Asian studies major. I was planning to go to Taiwan to study Chinese, but why don't I go to China?” And they looked at me like I was nuts, of course, and said, “We don't know what you're talking about.” And so. I ended up going to Taiwan, studying Chinese. Then, before I went home, I went to China. The only way to get in was with a tour, so I was on a tour, but that was my first exposure to China.
[00:03:52] Peter: So, your first exposure to China was in 1979?
[00:03:54] Charles: Correct. Actually, it may have been 1980 by the time I got there, I can't remember. But, you know, it was fascinating. I was, for many people, the first non-Chinese person they'd ever seen, except, perhaps, on TV. So, oftentimes, there were crowds, dozens of people following me around. The fact that I could speak Chinese made it even weirder.
[00:04:19] Peter: Where did you go in China?
[00:04:20] Charles: I'm going to guess that we went to Beijing, Nanjing, Wuxi, Guangzhou, I think, were the four stops. Maybe, a 10-day, 10-day trip. My mom was with me. So, anyway, I went back to the United States, went back to college, studied for another couple of years, got my degree in East Asian Studies, went to Oxford on a fellowship to go to grad school. East Asian studies didn't exist. Well, it did exist. It entailed studying Mencius and Confucius, which was not my cup of tea. So, that's when I began to gravitate toward mainstream international relations.
[00:05:04] Peter: And on that first visit, do you remember what people asked you? Was it more that you were just an exotic individual from some faraway land? Or, did they have particular questions that were repeated over and over again in each of the cities that you visited?
[00:05:18] Charles: I don't remember the conversations. I think it was more, what I would call, mutual wonderment. I, as an American, was in China for the first time. Many Chinese were like, “Who are you? Why do you look so different? Why do you speak Chinese if you're not Chinese?” You know, in the cities, it was a little bit different. I do remember, I can't remember where we were, but we were staying in a, a small town and I went for a long run into the countryside and wandered onto a collective farm, I think. And then people were just like, “Who is this guy?” And, it was like being on another planet.
[00:05:56] Peter: Do you think that your current perception of China is colored by the fact that you were there at the first possible moment, that many commentators in international relations, deal with China as the behemoth that it has become, and you've seen how it has gotten to Z from A?
[00:06:11] Charles: I don't think that’s the case. My understanding of China is more based upon trying to keep up with books on the subject, what's in the news, and very importantly, going. I think that it's very important to be in China, to talk to Chinese and just see, in many respects, the miracle that modern China has become, because I, I think many, many Americans don't have the opportunity to see, and that's important.
[00:06:45] Peter: So, what about Russia? When did you first go to Russia?
[00:06:49] Charles: I first went to Russia in nineteen-eighty… I'm going to guess it was two. A friend and I, since we were living in the, in the UK at the time, it was, it was a relatively easy trip. We went on a, a mission, if you will, where we were visiting opposition figures and refuseniks. And so, spent a lot of time during that trip being chased by the KGB.
[00:07:18] Peter: And you knew who they were. I mean, they were, somebody pointed them out, or you could just tell by their comportment…
[00:07:22] Charles: They were following me. I mean, fortunately, I was given some instruction. One, interestingly enough, was that I should put on the top of my suitcase, a copy of Time Magazine and Newsweek and the Times of London and other things, that they would focus on and say, “What do we do? Should we seize these? Can we take them into the country?” And then they wouldn't look further. And then further, I had medicine that I was bringing to people and radios and other items that would have been confiscated. But it worked because they found these printed materials, and then he went and talked to his supervisor. And I, I don't remember whether they confiscated them, and I think they probably did, but they didn't look through the rest of my luggage. And so, the stuff that I was bringing in to people got in.
[00:08:13] Peter: Who are you visiting, do you remember?
[00:08:14] Charles: I don't remember names, no.
[00:08:18] Peter: But so, none of the big celebrities? Nathan Sharansky?
[00:08:19] Charles: No, no, no. These were dissidents, a lot of Jews. Obviously, this would not be what you would call a good first impression. Although, interestingly, a quick anecdote. A couple of years later, I went into Eastern Europe through the Berlin Wall, spent a night in East Berlin, took a train to Poland. And there, I had arranged to meet with members of Solidarity, including well-known members. And what was very interesting to me is that, when I was in the Soviet Union and I went to meet somebody, I would go to point A, someone would meet me at point A and take me to point B. This was all a way of avoiding the KGB. In Poland, the members of Solidarnosch, who were underground, because at this time martial law had been imposed, would say, “I want to meet you in the lobby of the main Western Hotel.”
[00:09:19] Peter: The more eyes on you, the better.
[00:09:22] Charles: They lived in what they called internal exile. They wanted to say to the state, “I may live in Poland, I may not be able to leave Poland, but I'm a free person, and I want you to see that I'm meeting with Americans.” That's when I got the sense that, boy, the cat's out of the bag here.
In some ways, what I was witnessing in, I guess it would have been ‘83 in Poland, was the beginning of the end, right? Because there, civil society and the state had become divorced. And you couldn't put that back in the bag. And then that spread to other parts of the Eastern Bloc. And the next thing you know, people are crawling across the Berlin Wall. And few years later, the Soviet Union implodes. Was very much, in my mind, in my experience, a revolution from below.
[00:10:13] Peter: And now, here we are, however many decades later, with Russia and China reprising their roles as the United States principal adversaries. How did we get here? Is this something that you could have envisioned in 1980 in China and 1990s in Russia?
[00:10:28] Charles: I think that there was an enormous amount of naiveté in the 1990s and overconfidence in the neoliberal paradigm. And we figured that we were just going to open up the West, open up the world's markets, and that, ultimately, emerging powers, China, in particular, would find it so alluring that they would dock in our harbor. And that, yes, China would emerge as a leading global power, but it would buy in to the order on offer. And as a consequence, we're seeing what, you know, Frank Fukuyama called the end of history.
And I think we mistook ideological convergence for the quiescence that came with a world dominated by the United States. And as someone who's basically a realist, I was very skeptical in the 1990s and said, “It ain't going to work this way.” And that when you see a world in which power is more diffused, in which there is a de-centering of the international system, geopolitical competition is going to kick back in big time.” Did I think it would be quite as bad it is today? No. And I think there were some missteps that were made along the way, one being that I think the U.S. could have, and should have, done more to anchor Russia in the post Cold War settlement.
I was working in the Clinton White House in ‘93 and ‘94, arguing passionately against the enlargement of NATO. I lost that fight, and, you know, we still don't have any consensus in the United States or abroad about whether NATO enlargement was a good thing or a bad thing, but I do think it's safe to say that understanding the rift that has emerged between the West and Russia requires understanding how the Russians interpreted the enlargement of NATO.
[00:12:41] Peter: Obviously, expanding NATO up to Russia's borders precludes anchoring Russia into a European security system. But the question remains how it could have been anchored into such a system in the first place. So, what possibilities were there at the time? What were you arguing for?
[00:12:55] Charles: What I was arguing for was the reliance on what we call the partnership for peace as an institution that would open its doors to all interested parties and that NATO enlargement would basically be put on hold indefinitely, and that, rather than creating this dynamic where everybody lines up and wants to get in, you would simply say, “Okay, NATO is the anchor. It's going to stay where it is. It's an insurance policy. And maybe, one day, we will enlarge it if some country turns into an aggressor state. But for now, we're going to build a new pan-European security architecture around that core.” And you could have done it through the OSCE, the Partnership for Peace. There were lots of options. But instead, we proceeded with the enlargement of NATO. I think it has had good effects and I think it's had bad effects, but it has proved impossible to shut down. And that's because, you know, once Poland comes in, then the Baltics say, “Well, what about us?” And then the Baltics get in and the former Yugoslav republics, well, what about us? And then Georgia and Ukraine say, “So, what about us?” And the end result is that we roll the greatest military alliance in history right up to Russia's borders. And in my mind, Russia is understandably uncomfortable with that turn of events, just as the United States would be uncomfortable if Russia formed a military alliance with Canada and Mexico.
[00:14:36] Peter: Yeah, it's funny. Everybody remembers that Kennan, at the very end of his life, warned against expanding NATO further eastward, in Ukraine, in particular. But he was making these same warnings in 1949 saying that NATO membership should be very clearly delimited in that there was always a problem that, if you extended a certain distance, then it raises the question of who is a member? Who's not a member? And why is somebody left out in the cold beyond the bounds?
[00:15:02] Charles: Interestingly, earlier, in Yalta, there was a very realist compromise that was struck, and that was to provide Russia a strategic buffer zone. Today, there is no strategic buffer zone.
[00:15:17] Peter: Well, Yalta became a shorthand for horrible policy along the lines of Munich in this entire Cold War period.
[00:15:23] Charles: Exactly. And, and that's, the world that we continue to live in that is full of ambiguity, because some people would say Yalta was great. It was a realist compromise that created stability. Others would say it was a sellout. And that's why we had to enlarge NATO, because we were making good on the moral compromise that we made with Stalin.
But we live in a pretty dangerous world now because, not only is NATO cheek by jowl with Russia in Ukraine, in the Baltics, U.S. is cheek by jowl with China, right, in the Korean Peninsula, Japan, Taiwan. There isn't much strategic buffering going on in today's world. And that's why I think we all have to be extraordinarily careful.
[00:16:13] Peter: Yeah, there's not much room to step back.
[00:16:15] Charles: There's not much room to step back. And also, I think, when there is so little room for error, things can spin out of control. And we've seen in the war in Ukraine, whether it is Russian aircraft forcing down an American drone, a Russian missile falling on Polish territory, we're now in a big debate in the United States about whether Biden should approve deep strikes on Russian territory using American weaponry. Putin is saying, “If you do that, we will consider Russia to be at war with NATO.” Arguably, this is the most dangerous moment we've been in since the Cuban Missile Crisis. And maybe, even more dangerous because there was no war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was the Cold War. This is a hot war.
[00:17:05] Peter: Well, and then there was still a sense that nukes were new and terrifying, and the horror of the moment was well understood by all involved.
[00:17:15] Charles: Moreover, we had, during that era, an array of arms control agreements. Conventional arms control, nuclear arms control START, the intermediate INF, intermediate range, ABM treaty. It's all gone, to the best of my knowledge, START II expires, when, Peter? Next year, 2025? I can’t remember. Soon.
[00:17:41] Peter: Middlebury has a good nuclear program that I am not a part of.
[00:17:44] Charles: Okay. It's sometime soon. And now, you have China coming online as a full spectrum nuclear power, building a lot of nuclear capability. But we're in a world in which arms control has fallen out of fashion. That makes the situation even more dangerous.
[00:18:00] Peter: So, the realist argument, I suppose, is that the United States, Russia, and China are all enormous beasts that are bound to come into contact on this small globe. But let's try to delve into the American psyche for a moment. Hollywood makes different kinds of villains. What sort of villains are Russia and China in the Washington imagination? And you can add in radical Islam, so-called, if you'd like, as the third adversary the United States, has faced or conjured for itself since World War II.
[00:18:34] Charles: Well, radical Islam dominated the scene for obvious reasons after September 11. And Russia and China took a backseat. That period of history came to an end, effectively, with the withdrawal of Afghanistan. That marks the end of the so-called global war on terror, even though Iraq, in Syria, there's still a battle going on against the Islamic State. But the United States foreign policy community, the Pentagon, State Department, it pivoted back to great power competition.
[00:19:10] Peter: How are China, Russia, and Islam, however diffuse, conceived here? Because the image of the adversary, in some sense, then produces a certain kind of policy. So, China is associated with certain narratives, is represented in certain ways. Russia in different ways. Radical Islam terror in entirely other ways. So, what are those images, those three distinct images, if they are, in fact, distinct? And how has that affected our policy in ways that can't be explained purely by realist metrics?
[00:19:44] Charles: I mean, I think that, had it not been for Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it would be all eyes on China, and the so-called pivot to Asia would be more robust. And I think that the focal point of American grand strategy would very much be the Indo-Pacific.
That's not the case today because there's a big war going on in Ukraine and the United States is doing its best to make sure that Ukraine doesn't lose. And so, I think that, you know, looking over the horizon, it's going to be about China. And that's because China, in a way, that Russia does not threatens to fundamentally alter the global distribution of power. And I think the American foreign policy community has not yet begun to get its head around the idea that there may soon be another country out there that has a larger GDP than that of the United States, and that will likely turn into a peer competitor.
Militarily, it will take time, but technologically, and we're headed into a world in which the technological space will be at least as competitive as the geopolitical space, I think the U.S. has met its match. There was a report not long ago from an Australian think tank, and I can't remember the numbers exactly, but China led on the majority of sectors that are categorized as leading technology. And you look at the Chinese progress on all kinds of things — from solar panels to electric vehicles, to Tencent, Alibaba — these are now world-class companies. And as a consequence, it really is a kind of bipolar competition that we see re-emerging.
Russia is a different kettle of fish, right? Russia has not turned the corner to become a 21st century knowledge economy. The Russians haven't really moved past being a country heavily dependent upon income from fossil fuels. And fossil fuels are not the wave of the future. And I think one of the reasons that Putin is such a troublemaker is that he has no other real sources of legitimacy. He hasn't delivered to the Russian people, And so, he feeds them a diet of Eurasian nationalism, or Russian nationalism, or whatever you want to call it, in a way that I think does a great disservice to the Russian people. And frankly, I think the invasion of Ukraine is a strategic mistake that Russia will be paying for for generations, a sort of inflection point in Russian history.
[00:22:47] Peter: To push back on this point about China being the obvious challenge, that has been the narrative in D.C. for a while now, multiple administrations. These economic indicators that you mentioned have been evident for a while. Everybody was looking at graphs and charts years ago. Nonetheless, it is in Europe that conflict is hot. It is with Russia that the United States is engaged in this indirect war. And perhaps, everything was on a trajectory for the pivot to the East to finally be consummated. And then Putin made a crazy move and the U.S. was redirected. But one can say that that crazy move did not come out of a vacuum, that the pivot to the East was never quite realized because Atlanticism is at the foundation of the American order and creates its own inertia and forces the Western gaze to Russia that Russia plays a certain role in this construction, and that it's not entirely an accident that here we are once more in Europe.
[00:23:55] Charles: Well, I would agree and I would disagree. I would agree in that I think that the Atlantic connection is deep. Part of it is historical, ethnic, cultural, linguistic ties. I think part of it is a result of the process of elimination. That is to say that we've had presidents from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, they really came into office as post Atlanticists. In the case of Bush, he was like, “Europe, get out of the way. I'm going to attack Iraq. You either join us or shut up.” And then I think Barack Obama was, “Well, that Atlantic bond was good, did a lot of good in the world, but it's now time to look beyond and to the global south.” And, you know, by mid-career, mid-tenure, he was an Atlanticist. And I think that's because, in the end of the day, he realized that, when the United States needs help in the world, the best place to look is Europe. And I don't see that changing any time soon.
[00:24:58] Peter: But that's what I mean. In some fundamental sense, the Atlantic connection, really, is at the core of the American order in that people in Washington look around, survey the global scene, and measure relative power in the U.S. and China and decide that that should be the focus. But no matter what ideas they come into the White House with, no matter what charts they put on the table, Europe ends up predominating Russia as the enemy on the other side of the Western sphere becomes the focus no matter how often it's dismissed as a gas tank with guns.
[00:25:34] Charles: I don't think so, because if we look back to the pre-2014, pre-2022 world, there was a lot of contact with Russia. There were pipelines being built from Russia to Europe. Many Europeans now regret, including Angela Miracle. And so, I don't think that it was foreordained that there would be a return of a geopolitically divided Europe with NATO forces now being deployed from northern Finland all the way down to the Black Sea. That's a response to a decision that the Russians made to launch a war to subjugate Ukraine. And to put it mildly, it hasn't gone over very well.
And not just here. One of the things I would point out, Peter, is that it was always the U.S. that was pushing the Europeans to do more, right? Bob Kagan said, Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus. It's now the opposite. It's the Europeans that are saying, “Hey, it's time for tanks. Let's do F-16s. Let's take deep strikes into Russia.” And they have to pull Biden along. I think the invasion of Ukraine has just really been a shock and a wake up call many Europeans, understandably.
But I still would maintain that, in this town, despite the war in Ukraine, it's China that animates the country's juices. It is China that Republicans and Democrats turn to to find a smidgen of bipartisan cooperation. Right now, we're in the, leading to the presidential campaign, Democrats and Republicans agree on virtually nothing, including Ukraine, right? Where Trump is saying, “We're done with this. Let's negotiate an end. No more aid to Ukraine.” But the one thing that they agree on is standing up to China. And that's because I do think that there is a sense that we now face a peer competitor of a sort we've never faced. It's worth keeping in mind that the Soviet Union topped out at 55% of American GDP. We are soon going to be living in a world in which China's GDP is larger than that of the United States.
[00:28:00] Peter: I think this is fair. Although, there were certainly people in the ‘50s and ‘60s who were writing articles about how enormously successful the Soviet economy was, how swiftly it was growing, how soon it would outpace the American economy, how large the Soviet Union was, how many men it had under uniform relative to the West. So, the current adversary often looks strong at the moment. Maybe in hindsight, after it has collapsed, it looks a bit different.
[00:28:31] Charles: I'm more making an objective observation. That is to say that the U.S., assuming it ends up in a geopolitical competition with China, will have its work cut out for it. And simply because, number one, the Chinese represent more of a full spectrum peer competitor. And number two, I think that, if you look at trade flows and investment flows, the Chinese through the Belt and Road Initiative and through other kinds of activities, are really reaching out to the global south in a way that the Soviet Union tried to, but didn't succeed in doing.
[00:29:12] Peter: So, excuse a perhaps naive question, but what is the problem with having a peer competitor? Is there just a deep seated feeling in the United States that we have to be number one, or is there some physical rule to the game that requires confrontation among entities of equal size?
[00:29:29] Charles: Well, I'm sort of telling you where I think Washington is. I'm personally not there, right? I think we are inevitably headed into a multipolar world, not just a bipolar world. You can't stop history. We're not going to prevent China and India from turning in to, perhaps, the two largest economies in the world. We're just going to have to learn to live with it. That, to me, is the kind of punchline of where I think we're heading.
But I do think that, in two critical respects, it's extremely hard for the American foreign policy class to get its head around that trajectory. One is primacy, right? There is a sense that the United States is and must be at the top of the pile until the end of time. And number two, that the United States has a kind of messianic mission to spread liberal democracy around the world.
And so, the idea that the world's largest economy may well be a one party state run by something that calls itself the Chinese Communist Party, that is something that, in some ways, is incompatible with the narrative of American exceptionalism. And I think partly explains why there is such a head of steam here in the United States to stand up to China.
In my own mind, I would say that the jury is out. I see a lot of things that China does that make me uncomfortable, that would suggest to me that China has maligned ambition, whether it is claiming islands in the East and South China Seas, whether it is interfering in democratic electoral politics. At the same time, I think a lot of what China does is consistent with what any great power does when its light bulb goes on and says, “We deserve a level of geopolitical influence commensurate with our economic strength.” And I think one of the conversations that we need to have in the United States is, what kinds of behavior are just matter of course for a rising great power? What kinds of behavior are unacceptable? We're not having that conversation. Instead, we're just throwing the book at China.
There is, in my mind, a school of IR thinking that would help us avoid a fractured world. And that's pragmatic realism. But that's hard to find these days. You know, we live in a very politicized and ideological time. Ultimately, I do think that realism will prevail because cold, hard reality sinks in. But getting there is not easy.
[00:32:31] Peter: So, in your book on the history of isolationism, you call for a policy that finds the middle ground between the traditional policy of new world non-entanglement that dominated for much of America's history, and the liberal internationalism that came out of World War II. In a more recent foreign affairs article, you make the same point.
I completely agree with the policy suggestion.
[00:32:56] Charles: You’re a very wise man.
[00:32:57] Peter: Well, I pick good guests. And it makes perfect sense in terms of material reality, the objective facts that you have been describing, that there is a position somewhere in the middle that actually corresponds to American capabilities. The problem seems to be on the ideological side, that this shift that you describe in your book from isolationism to internationalism was a succession of paradigms, that the isolationist period had to be destroyed politically in order for this next form of policy to be put in place.
So, it seems like it would be very difficult to find a political compromise between these two paradigms, that there is a material middle point, but there is not an ideological middle point, that you would need a third. entirely new paradigm that would then produce a set of policies that would have the less than global reach but more than national scope that you are advocating. So, what kind of ideological framework would produce a policy that ended up in this middle ground?
[00:34:05] Charles: I think that the break point was, really, Trump's first election, in which Trump said, “From this day forward, it's America first. It's only America first.” And he was, in many respects, responding to a primal scream in the American electorate that was, you know, “Too much world, not enough America. What about me? What about the main street in my town in Wisconsin where I grew up? What about the fact that our high school has closed because there aren't enough kids there? What about us?”
And for many Americans, liberal internationalism has more or less left them behind, right? They've seen their wages declined by 60, 70%. They've seen their sons and daughters sent off to fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya, Syria, trillions of dollars in expenditure, with almost nothing good having come out of it. And so, the American electorate was like, “What the hell's going on here, you guys? Cut it out.” And Trump was elected on that, but, but he overcorrected, he went too far, in my mind, to the doing too little paradigm and the, the non-entanglement paradigm.
[00:35:32] Peter: But is it an accident? What I'm asking is whether there are only two paradigms available now. There is the one that reigned supreme for much of American history that Trump has revived. And then there was liberal internationalism that was the dominant paradigm since World War II.
Trump is recovering an old paradigm, not creating a new one. He's just going back to the 1930s narrative. So, what new narrative can we come up with politically?
[00:35:57] Charles: We’re getting there. And in some respects, I think President Biden started down that road when he first came into office. He completed the withdrawal from Afghanistan. He talked about a foreign policy for the middle class. He assumed an industrial policy. He kept the tariffs on China. He, kind of, backed off from this pedal internationalism that had been essentially guiding the U.S. since Pearl Harbor. And then the war in Ukraine comes along, and I think he, kind of, lost that agenda.
I do think that we will see, depending on who wins the November election, either a kind of return to a Trumpian neo-isolationism, or if Kamala Harris gets elected, the beginnings of an effort to forge that new paradigm. You know, Kamala Harris may have been a student of Joe Biden. He was her mentor, in many respects, in the White House. But she hails from a different generation. She hails from a different cross section of American society. She doesn't bring to the table the same paradigm that Joe Biden did.
And so, here, I'm just grasping at straws. I don't know Kamala Harris. But I'm guessing that this next administration, because there's a generational change, could be the beginnings of the effort to cobble together the kind of middle ground paradigm that you're talking about.
[00:37:25] Peter: Well, I'm still trying to figure out what it would look like. So, you say that Biden comes in with a slightly more moderate foreign policy, especially before the outbreak of war in Ukraine, and actually retrenches from Afghanistan and so on. On the other hand, his big campaign slogan was democracy autocracy that predates the Ukraine war. That is liberal internationalism par excellence, that the whole globe is divided into these two diametrically opposed ideological camps. Trump has his America first position that is about the national interest narrowly defined.
Of course, both Trump and Biden, in office, did less or more than what they promised ideologically, because it is impossible if you're Trump to extricate the United States from all of its existing entanglements, and it's equally impossible to actually pursue a policy that divides the world into democracies and autocracies and consistently act in accordance with that division. So, they're both more moderate than they pretend. But nonetheless, the paradigms seem to be totally opposed and fairly rigid and consistently proclaimed. And there's no middle point between them conceptually. So, Kamala Harris, who is now from a slightly different generation and different cross section of society, how could she describe America's purpose in the world that would differ from Biden?
[00:38:50] Charles: Yeah. First things first, and that would be to rebuild the political center in the United States. Liberal internationalism survived for decades because it was supported on both sides of the aisle. Right now, our political center is on life support, and it needs to be rebuilt. For me, that starts with getting working Americans back up on their feet.
And Kamala Harris, as a candidate, has been talking about that, the opportunity economy. Biden started down that road, but he couldn't get it through congress, right? A lot of the stuff that he wanted — subsidies for child care, free community college, getting economic assistance into the bloodstream of heartland America — he got some of that stuff, but didn't get most of what he wanted. So, for me, the starting point for rebuilding a stable, steady brand of American internationalism is rebuild the political center. That means rebuilding the middle class.
[00:39:55] Peter: But why would that have such an effect on the U.S. role internationally? Because, of course, it's oversimplified, but if we take American foreign policy to be divided into the two stages of isolationism and internationalism, domestic policy has varied greatly. The U.S. has been, more or less, wealthy. Wealth has been distributed more or less evenly. It has been more or less political turmoil and domestic unrest. So, a healthier United States is clearly in the benefit of the nation. But in what way would it cardinally change the way the United States acts in the world, which seems to have been consistent across a whole series of domestic configurations?
[00:40:33] Charles: Because I think that the average American voter needs to understand that there are connections between the international and domestic. And if Americans feel that they can't put food on the table, that they go to the store and they can't afford eggs and milk and bread, it's very hard to sustain support for internationalism of any sort, because people are going to say, “Why are we buying F-35s when I can't feed my children?”
[00:41:12] Peter: Well, unless you say you can't feed your children because the Chinese took your jobs, it's part of a grand communist conspiracy. We need the F-35s to push back against them. And then we will once again live happily and healthily.
[00:41:26] Charles: Well, I think that part of it is going toward an international trading system in which the benefits are more widely distributed. I mean, let's be honest. Our trade deals, over the last several decades, have benefited a small slice of the American population, right? Who was at the table when these deals were struck? CEOs of major international corporations. Where was labor? Not at the table. Where was civil society? Not at the table. Where were the environmentalists? Generally, not at the table.
So, I think what we can get to is a policy which salvages a global, integrated, interdependent system, but distributes goods more equitably, both within the United States and internationally. And so, we got to figure out how to get to that point. But I do think that, you know, you have to rebuild American strength from the inside out. And that if we don't do that, we will live in a country in which there is very little common ground and in which American foreign policy swings wildly.
But I do see us approaching an inflection point, because whether Kamala Harris wins or whether Donald Trump wins, I think we are at the cusp of mapping out a new kind of foreign policy. That generation that cut its teeth on liberal internationalism and Pax Americana, they are slowly receding from the scene.
[00:42:59] Peter: Unclear what the younger generation has to propose in positive terms, but hopefully, it amounts to something productive.
[00:43:07] Charles: If you look at, at opinion polling, they care a lot more about climate change and about immigration and about issues that are more domestic in nature. And, you know, let me just add one other point here of how important it is to find this middle ground and get this right. And that is that we now live in a world in which we collectively cannot afford geopolitical fracture. Global warming, pandemics, nuclear proliferation, and I can list 10 more things, these are all global challenges that require collective initiative. That wasn't true during the Cold War, right? We were in our corner. The Soviets were in their corner. We had a few arms control agreements. But there was no global agenda that required cooperation of the sort there is today.
So, we have to figure out how to cooperate across ideological dividing lines. The United States and China have to figure out how to complement their competition with a strong element of cooperation. I think if you look at Ukraine, if you look at Gaza, if you look at Africa, American interests and Chinese interests are not that far apart. We need to find a way of clearing the air so that those common interests can come to the fore.
[00:44:35] Peter: Global interdependence, clearly, has only been progressing. What is, perhaps, ironic is that these sorts of declarations have been made for about 150 years. The end of the 19th century, everybody was talking about how the world was interconnected like it had never been before, for good or ill. People were moving around. Some of them should be prevented from coming to the United States, or everybody is now trading with one another, peace is finally perpetual. And then, the middle of the 20th century, again, we are totally interdependent. The world has never been so small. 1990s, globalization, earth is flat, and so forth.
So, at many of these moments that often are either preceded by or followed by global confrontation, there is a discussion of how we have never been so intertwined as a planet. That does seem to be the trajectory, but then there seem to be the familiar rhythms and patterns that repeat, nonetheless.
[00:45:31] Charles: For sure, this is not the first time that somebody has pronounced interdependence to be here to stay, and war, as Norman Angell put it, just before World War I, is irrational in this world. But I do think that there are multiple measures that suggest that we are more intertwined than we've ever been, and that we will, in fact, sink together if we don't row together. And perhaps, the Monterey Trilogue is at least one drop in the bucket when it comes to supporting the kinds of constructive conversations that need to take place across ideological dividing lines, if we are going to eke out the minimum level of cooperation among great powers that is really essential to our collective welfare.
[00:46:24] Peter: One quick follow-up on your previous comment about economic revitalization, that there need to be certain parties who come to the table and create a more harmonious economic whole, that then would create a foundation for a better foreign policy. What is the unit for this economic bargain? Because on one hand, it's the United States. That's the way our political system works. On the other hand, the United States presides over a larger global order. If you look at the sanctions regime, it's a very specific set of countries. If you look at the influence of the dollar, it's larger.
So, who should be at the table for this new bargain about the construction of a new economic reality? Is it something that can happen just in the United States? Does it have to involve Europe and American allies and partners everywhere?
[00:47:15] Charles: I mean, I think there are two key components to this. One is to prevent prudent de-risking from turning into a kind of slippery slope of decoupling. I understand why the Biden administration is trying to make sure that we build semiconductors in the United States. I understand why the U.S. is trying to make sure it has access to critical minerals that go into electric batteries. But I don't think it would be advisable for us to just keep going forward and forward and forward to the point where we just don't trade with countries that we don't consider to be friendly. I mean, if the U.S. and China go the way of the U.S. and the Soviet Union, it will have disastrous effects upon the global economy. So, we need to find a way of not throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
And then the other is that the conversation that we have here in the United States about gainful employment in the digital era is a conversation that every country in the world has to have, because the industrial era is day by day in the rearview mirror, right? More and more people in the U.S., in China, in South Africa, in Nigeria, in Indonesia, are going to be working in services. They're going to be working in workspaces that are primarily digitized. That, in my mind, is one of the main reasons that the West right now is living through this strange era of political dysfunction. It's because the digital era is massively disruptive on socioeconomic orders. So, this has to be a global conversation. We have to ask, what are normal citizens going to do in 20 years to earn a living wage? We haven't answered that question yet. But it seems to me that that should be the basis for a global conversation. And I would argue that we need to stand up, what I would call concert-like groupings, where the U.S. and Russia and China and the EU and India and representatives from the global south are sitting in a room not much bigger than this one, not at the UN, not vetoing each other, not giving speeches and ragging on each other, but trying to work collectively to tackle these big issues.
[00:49:57] Peter: How would that work? I mean, how, in practical terms, do you see that being possible?
[00:50:02] Charles: Well, it would happen because some rather courageous and bold leaders propose it. And I have to say that I'm deeply perturbed by the absence of strategic dialogue in the world in which we live. I mean, there is no strategic dialogue between Russia and the United States. In case of U.S. and China, there, now, is maybe a little bit. You know, the regional commanders have agreed to talk to each other, and Jake Sullivan seems to have a relationship with Wang Yi, at least one that allows them to meet four or five times now. But the Chinese top level and American top level, the Russian, there should be as deep a level of diplomatic contact with them as there is with our allies in Europe. And so, I think what you would need to do is just propose, “Let's get around a table. Let's create these informal contact groups and we roll up our sleeves and we get at it.” It, in my mind, is irresponsible that those conversations are not taking place.
[00:51:12] Peter: Do you think the Russians and Chinese would respond positively if the next American administration proposed something along these lines?
[00:51:20] Charles: Ultimately, yes. Would it take a little bit to get there? Yes, but I think that China, for sure, Russia, you know, given what's gone down in Ukraine, I think it's going to be hard to reestablish some kind of constructive dialogue with the Russian government until the Putin era is over.
[00:51:49] Peter: But in the meantime, a slightly different level of Russian interlocutor.
[00:51:56] Charles: Yeah, and at a minimum, there should be more contact about deconfliction, about avoiding escalation. This is a very dangerous war on the doorstep of NATO. Putin's talking about using nuclear weapons. We ought to be in a world in which there is, at least, more discussion about these kinds of dangerous issues.
[00:52:20] Peter: Well, so final question about a dangerous issue that will, at some point, require discussion. How does the Ukraine war end? What is a realistic settlement that could endure, or the general outlines of such a settlement?
[00:52:34] Charles: Well, I think that the battlefield speaks for itself. And by that, I mean nobody's going to win this war. The Russians don't have the combat capability to defeat Ukraine. Ukraine doesn't have the manpower or the staying power to drive Russia off its territory. And as a consequence, I think that the definition of success for Ukraine should be creating a front line that is sufficiently strong that the Russians give up, that the Russians simply say, “We're not going to expend another 100,000 or 200,000 troops because we're not going to get anywhere. So, let's call it a day.”
And then, you know, you end up trying to negotiate a ceasefire. And you defer to a later day what happens to those parts of Ukraine that are under Russian occupation. In an ideal world, you restore Ukraine's territorial integrity at the negotiating table in a post-Putin era. And in the meantime, rather than giving the money and the arms to Ukraine that end up getting expended on the battlefield in the next 48 hours, they turn themselves into a stable, prosperous, functioning democracy capable of self-defense for the indefinite future. Because we don't know whether Putin would try this again two, three years down the road. My best guess is that Ukraine is not going to get into NATO any time soon because there's no consensus. So, what does that mean? Make sure that war doesn't break out again by giving the Ukrainians the strength that they need to repel any Russian attempt at further conquest.
[00:54:28] Peter: Thanks for listening to the Monterey Trialogue Podcast. Make sure to subscribe to the show, so you don’t miss out on any episodes. I’m Peter Slezkine. The Monterey Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and produced by University FM.