What is a foreign policy of restraint? Are the Anglosphere and Western Hemisphere key to American interests? Will the transatlantic alliance endure? Do Russia or China pose substantial threats to the United States? *The Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.
What is a foreign policy of restraint? Are the Anglosphere and Western Hemisphere key to American interests? Will the transatlantic alliance endure? Do Russia or China pose substantial threats to the United States?
*The Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.
(Transcripts may contain a few typographical errors due to audio quality during the podcast recording.)
[00:00:00] Peter Slezkine: I'm Peter Slezkine, Director of the U.S.-Russia-China Trialogue Project at the Stimson Center. 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 trialogue is to better understand this extraordinarily complex and consequential relationship by directly engaging with experts from all three countries.
My guest today is Emma Ashford, senior fellow with the Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center. So, this is our first in-house interview. Emma, welcome to the podcast.
[00:00:43] Emma Ashford: Great. Thanks so much for having me, and welcome to Stimson.
[00:00:46] Peter Slezkine: Thank you. It’s not the first time you've welcomed me to Stimson. I think you showed me around a bit a couple of months ago when I first arrived, but you are one of the reasons why I came here. I've been a long -time fan of your essays, publications, interviews of all sorts.
[00:01:01] Emma Ashford: That's very kind of you to say. I think we're all excited that we can have a program that is able to talk to folks in not just the U.S. but also in Russia, China, traditional adversaries and not just U.S. allies. I think that's really important for understanding how the world works.
[00:01:18] Peter Slezkine: Well, and the transatlantic relationship revolves around Russia these days. So, I've been talking to Germans and other Europeans all the time. Whether they're allies or adversaries is a matter of perspective, I suppose.
[00:01:31] Emma Ashford: Well, I imagine we'll talk a lot here about the Trump administration. And there might be different opinions inside the Trump administration on that question.
[00:01:38] Peter Slezkine: So, you are one of the leading lights of the restraint movement. Can you explain what that means?
[00:01:46] Emma Ashford: I'm not 100% sure that I can, but I have been trying for quite a long time. What I would say is there is an academic debate about grand strategy in which there is a grand strategy called Restraint written by an MIT professor, Barry Posen. About 2014, I think, was when his book came out. And it basically advocates that the U.S. pull back from many of its overseas commitments, maintaining a few of them, but pulling back from many of them, and that the U.S. can fundamentally be very secure if it does this.
And that's Posen's argument in a nutshell. What I would say Washington thinks of as restraint, though, is something much broader. And it is this political movement, civil society movement, whatever you want to call it, of folks who generally think that the U.S. is over-leveraged in foreign policy in some way, right? So, maybe they don't share all of Posen's prescriptions.
Maybe instead of wanting to pull back militarily from Europe and the Middle East and Asia, they instead want to prioritize. They want to pull back from Europe and focus instead on China, but maybe these are people instead who are conscientious objectors or pacifists or maybe they're folks who think that the U.S. has just grown its alliance commitments too much in the post-Cold War period. And if we want to maintain a, you know, healthy military, then we can't do this. So, there are a lot of different people inside what you might call restraint coalition today. Some, like myself, are more, sort of, old-school realists, right? We are thinking about balance of power in the world.
And in that context, I think the U.S. is over-leveraged. But this movement has been growing for a number of years. And I think you're asking this question and we're having this conversation at just a really interesting time because it's not just the elements of restraint have been picked up and talked about by political candidates or media figures.
We're now starting to hear this kind of talk from inside the Biden administration a little bit, but particularly inside the new Trump administration, we see a number of restrainers or prioritizers or other aligned folks who are starting to make their voices heard in the policy space. So, if, like me, you think the U.S. needs to change its foreign policy, it's, kind of, an exciting time.
[00:04:16] Peter Slezkine: Is restraints, like realism, a universal theory of international relations that could be applied anywhere or espoused by representatives of any nation, or is restraint basically a matter of reorganizing the American Empire specifically?
[00:04:35] Emma Ashford: I think it depends on who we're talking about.
[00:04:38] Peter Slezkine: I mean, are there restrainers in Australia who you talk to or restrainers in Iran?
[00:04:44] Emma Ashford: So, something I always try and teach my students or if we have interns is that realism in particular, right, let's just go with the versions of restraint that are realist in basis. And that is a universal philosophy. It's one that has principles that you can apply if you are in charge of basically any country, but those prescriptions will look very, very different depending on where you sit in which country.
So, if I were going to go to Estonia and I were a realist and I was sitting in Estonia, then my foreign policy might involve trying to increase the U.S. commitment to my country because I can't defend it without that. It might look at building stronger military ties with my neighbors, getting myself wound into the European Union in such a way as to increase my security, but, you know, if I'm a realist sitting here in Washington D.C., that's not at all what I'm going to argue.
I'm going to talk about does the U.S. have the resources to keep going with all its military commitments that it was doing during the post-Cold War moment? And so, the policy prescriptions, even if myself and that Estonian were both realists, our policy prescriptions conflict.
[00:05:52] Peter Slezkine: So, restraints is the policy prescription that you, as a realist, would advise Americans to adopt at this moment in the country's history.
[00:06:02] Emma Ashford: Exactly. And again, there are folks who think that broad-based restraint, so the U.S. should do less everywhere, that that's the way to think about this policy prescription, and then there's folks that tend to think of it more like a rebalancing of U.S. commitments, to look at the threats that are out there facing us in the world. And basically, for almost everybody, it's, you know, China is a bigger threat than almost anything else. We should be prioritizing our resources in that direction.
[00:06:28] Peter Slezkine: You've been talking mostly about alliances, security, military. Is restraint mostly a matter of retrenching on the military front, reducing military commitments and military intervention? How much of it is ideological or economic? Is there something in restraint that, sort of, opposes the liberal project, even if it's done in means that are other than military, for example, through USAID?
[00:06:57] Emma Ashford: So, I think this is a part of why it makes so much sense to think about restraint as a coalition rather than one specific thing. And that's because, you know, there definitely are people in the, let's say, new right, supporters of Donald Trump who are very much opposed to the Western liberal project, who have close ties with folks in Hungary, for example, and who want the U.S. to become a more socially and culturally Conservative state, but there are also people who support broad-based restraint who are, like myself, free traders and pretty socially liberal.
And so, if you think about a coalition, this starts to make sense. You asked about is it just military? And I would say that, for the most part, that's the thing people generally agree on, that the U.S. is, in a military sense, over-leveraged.
[00:07:51] Peter Slezkine: Well, and let's forget the coalition for a second or maybe for good and you can speak for yourself, actually.
[00:07:56] Emma Ashford: Sure.
[00:07:56] Peter Slezkine: Probably simpler. So, do you think the military overextension in the liberal project are one and the same?
[00:08:04] Emma Ashford: I do not necessarily think that U.S. foreign policy in the post-Cold War period, that this expanding liberal sphere where we bring, sort of, more and more countries into the Western community, I don't necessarily think that is reflective of liberalism, writ large, right? The U.S. and many Western European states were liberal societies during the Cold War even though we weren't out there necessarily proselytizing and trying to bring a bunch of states under our banner.
[00:08:35] Peter Slezkine: Well, that's arguable. The U.S. had an extensive aid network, ideological instruments, radio-free Europe, free Asia, and Congress of cultural freedom, which were extensive, well-financed, and global in reach.
[00:08:52] Emma Ashford: Okay. Let me frame this another way then because you are right. I think, in the Cold War, we engaged with the Soviet Union in this ideological struggle, right? And it was liberal Western capitalism against socialism. And so, we did. We engaged in various activities, as you note, to try and sway states to one side or the other.
That looks very different than what we did in the post-Cold war period, where the U.S. is the only superpower left standing after 1991. And we basically go out and convert significant parts of the world, particularly in Europe, but in a trade sense, we see it in Asia as well, the idea that we had reached the end of history and that everybody was going to eventually adopt this model, right?
We were going to see the Russians and the Chinese. We would get them into European security. We would get them into the WTO. And that would cause them to become more liberal over time. And so, for me, I think, that first period, the Cold War was bounded by some understanding of what is possible.
[00:09:49] Peter Slezkine: Maybe but not indefinitely and not categorically because the idea was that the free world was everything but the communist world. The communist world was a pathological piece of a globe that ultimately would become liberal and then free in its entirety. And thus, Kennan wrote that communist bloc contain the seeds of its own destruction one way or another. If we contained it for long enough, eventually, the communist would, I don't know, take off their shackles and join the club.
[00:10:17] Emma Ashford: Collapse under the weight of their own internal contradictions, perhaps. But no, I mean, look, I think, again, we were constrained by the existence of another superpower, right? There were limits to what we could do in terms of spreading liberalism.
And so, you know, yes, you see the U.S. engaged in extremely active, kind of, ideological covert warfare fights in Latin America over whether regimes are going to be friendlier to the U.S. or the Soviet Union, but we don't see this assumption that the U.S. is going to be engaged in a project of just spreading democracy everywhere and that this is, kind of, an inevitable project. And I think, after the Cold War, those constraints go away, right?
U.S. foreign policy has always been this tug between liberal values on the one hand and realist principles on the other. And what makes the post-Cold War period so unique is that we just didn't have to worry about those realist principles because there was basically no threat to the United States during this period.
I mean, we could bracket terrorism for obvious reasons, but there was no great power that could challenge the U.S. in any sphere, economic, political, military. And so, we had free reign. And I think what happened is, during that 30 years, that liberal impulse got a little out of control, a lot, out of control if we're honest.
[00:11:33] Peter Slezkine: And so, how should we recalibrate? It seems like external constraints are the forcing mechanism once more. It turns out that the world will not be one vanilla liberal whole and that there are other powers that operate according to different principles. So, where does that leave us?
[00:11:52] Emma Ashford: Well, I think it's not just even the rise of other great powers. The U.S. has run into problems trying to pursue this agenda for years now, right? We didn't exactly succeed in Iraq. Libya did not turn out to be a democratic paradise, right? And that just turns out regime change and building a democracy in some of these states is really hard. That was a constraint, too.
And now that we see Russian pushback in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, we see Chinese pushback on questions like Taiwan and China's growing power, I think, policymakers, they're stuck with this mindset where they remember we can just do whatever we want, but they're facing a world where it's becoming increasingly difficult and dangerous to pursue that path.
[00:12:35] Peter Slezkine: You mentioned democracy promotion in the Middle East as an obvious and total failure. Sociologically speaking, to what extent is this restraint policy just a function of our generation growing up, that the formative years of our childhood were spent watching this failure in action, and that is, sort of, the lesson learned by those who are now grabbing the reins in Washington slowly but surely?
[00:13:06] Emma Ashford: There's certainly a generational element to this. And if you look even at polling, there is very clear polling evidence that folks, basically, again, our age and younger, I believe the technical term is geriatric millennials, if you want to feel old-
[00:13:20] Peter Slezkine: Geriatric millennials?
[00:13:22] Emma Ashford: ... apparently, but folks who are about 40, 45, and under, and that they view the world just in a very different way, right, that they don't necessarily see it as America's role to be spreading democracy or liberal values, that they don't necessarily see America as exceptional, or at the very least, when you ask them what kind of role they want the U.S. to play in the world, they say a shared role or a role with other nations rather than America should take the leading role in the world.
And so, that is a generational shift in attitudes that contrasts very strongly a bit with Gen X, but very much with the baby boomers and the Cold War generations that came before them. So, some of this is just generational change if we've seen these failures, but I really do think that we would not be having this conversation if it were not also for some of these very visible manifestations of the constraints that are growing, so rise of China, the failures of some of the U.S. economic state craft towards China and others in recent years, and then the war in Ukraine, I think, is probably the most visible of these.
[00:14:39] Peter Slezkine: Well, we'll get to that in greater detail in a moment. So, the boomer generation sought to oppose totalitarianism and advanced liberalism freedom democracy. These are vague projects that did not necessarily result in success. Although, I suppose the collapse of the Soviet Union is seen as a triumph by this generation.
The, what, geriatric millennials, the group to which we belong, no longer pursues this project. So, what has come in its stead, ideologically speaking? We don't want to be everywhere once slaying monsters and promoting democracy in every jungle and desert from one corner of the globe to the other. So, what do we want to do?
[00:15:13] Emma Ashford: Well, what we have in its place is huge mess, basically, and a debate that is happening both inside the Democratic Party, inside the Republican party, across the parties on issues of foreign policy. And this is part of, I think, what has made it so hard for U.S. allies and adversaries in recent years to understand what's going on in Washington.
It's not that there is some clear policy choice on foreign policy that the electorate is getting to weigh in on, right? We do see signs that candidates that push a more restrained foreign policy tend to do better, particularly in certain places where the costs of the war on terror were very high, but what we mostly see is, kind of, this internal elite contestation, right?
Foreign policy, very much an elite sport. And we see Democrats, you know, when they had this primary with a lot of different candidates, Joe Biden ends up winning out, they're having debates about the failures of the war on terror during that process. We see Donald Trump emerging in 2016 saying the Iraq war was a mistake, something that very much put him at odds with his peers and the Republican party. That's now become a mainstream issue in the party.
And so, it's not an issue where one side or the other has new views, but it is an issue where, inside each party, there's fights over policymakers over does the U.S. keep doing what it's doing, very military heavy primacy, trying to be a security guarantor to the world, or do we opt for something less than that? And I don't think we have a clear view yet of what that less than looks like.
[00:16:49] Peter Slezkine: But it does seem that the Republican party or the MAGA movement has a better answer for that than the younger generation on the left that also wants to do less because, on the MAGA side, it's pretty clear that the national interest, American values, American security, prosperity for American passport holders, is the logic.
And that provides some substance to this argument. I don't think it works fully because I don't believe that the United States is, in fact, a nation. I think it is entangled all over the place and has an empire that it doesn't really acknowledge and has to contend with that fact, but nonetheless, it's pretty easy to sell to an electorate that, I don't know, American citizens should come first and that what we do in the world should benefit Americans at home.
Is that the, sort of, ideological substance of a restraint position? Is that the best way to advocate doing less in the world, or is that the only alternative to, sort of, liberal universalism and Cold War politics, or is there something else?
[00:17:53] Emma Ashford: I ask myself this question a lot, to be honest. I think, I mean, look, you have identified some of the problems on the left. I think people on the left, within the Democratic party or not, tend to be more naturally averse to the use of military force, tend to be much more averse to the idea of America having overseas alliance networks or empire, whatever you want to call them. That's traditionally baked in on that side of the aisle.
[00:18:19] Peter Slezkine: But they also don't like nationalism, which means that it's hard to present a coherent alternative.
[00:18:24] Emma Ashford: Exactly. Matching universal values with a restrained foreign policy is difficult. And I think you can see this pretty clearly. You can see Democrats coming out and protesting against Iraq, and then Barack Obama is the one who goes into Libya, right? You can see progressives railing again against overseas wars and then backing USAID to Ukraine.
And again, I think there's some good arguments for in the early days of the war that that probably was the right, even progressive, approach, but they couldn't figure out when to stop because whenever things' a universal value, you can't talk about interests. And so, I think you're right that it is just easier for folks on the right to talk about things in terms of the national interest, in terms of America first.
And that has made it, I think, a little easier for them to build a coherent project. Although, even there, I think we're complicated by we have a president who has some rather unusual and erratic predilections. And that's made it more complicated on that side of the aisle.
[00:19:27] Peter Slezkine: Well, given that the current administration uses this nationalist framing and that has empowered, to some extent, many of your restrainer friends and colleagues. Let's then tackle your accent and origin. Where are you from?
[00:19:47] Emma Ashford: Sure. I thought you wanted a superhero origin story there for a minute.
[00:19:50] Peter Slezkine: Well, maybe that's what we'll get.
[00:19:52] Emma Ashford: So, no, I'm Scottish. I was born and raised in Glasgow in the United Kingdom. And I came here when I started university to the United States. So, I'm an American citizen now. I have American children. And I love it here. But I would probably be lying if I said I think my experience growing up in Britain in the, I mean, post-Imperial era, but, you know, the era of Margaret Thatcher, things at home are extremely depressed economically, Glasgow was not a booming city when I was a child, the British Empire had collapsed, but British politicians didn't really seem to realize that.
And I do think a lot of that has shaped just how I think about foreign policy. I mean, I don't think America is necessarily going to go that way and lose its power and prestige, but I think it would be nice if we could avoid making some of the mistakes that British policymakers did.
[00:20:42] Peter Slezkine: What are a few mistakes that stand out that you can counsel Americans to avoid?
[00:20:48] Emma Ashford: I mean, look, overextension remains a significant one. I mean, much of the reason why the British Empire lost its power and prestige has to do with the costs of World War I and World War II. And those were, if not unavoidable, then largely unavoidable. But, you know, you look at some of the decisions that were made in the aftermath of World War II by various different governments to resist giving control back to places like India to get involved in the Suez Crisis, rather than working out a deal with Nasser in Egypt.
And what I see across a lot of those decisions is just an unwillingness to accept that British power and prestige had fallen. And I think the harshest lesson for British policymakers really was, particularly after Suez, when it turned out it was the Americans who told them they had to stop, and you can't do this anymore. And so, I think, again, it's a natural process of decline for many states. We see this in history a lot. But there are ways that policymakers can manage it, so states come back strong. And I'm not sure Britain did that after World War II.
[00:21:54] Peter Slezkine: Well, Britain's problem is that it is a tiny island that had a globe-spanning navy and set of colonies and bases. So, it's hard to retreat gracefully from that global position if all you have to retreat to is, again, a tiny little island from which you emerged. Whereas the U.S. is, on one hand, the heir to Britain's global naval empire. On the other hand, it is a massive continental empire. So, there is a fairly formidable fortress to retreat to.
[00:22:27] Emma Ashford: Yeah. This is the core insight of Barry Posen's arguments about restraint, which is basically that America is so secure that even if we were to retreat all the way and pull back from the world, in all senses, we would still be able to provide for prosperity and security. And I don't go that far. I think we should be out there in the world trading, talking to people.
I think we have some security concerns. But you're absolutely right. The U.S. is this continent, right? We have mostly friendly neighbors to the north and south, fish to the east and west as the old saying goes. And we don't necessarily have to worry about significant military threats in the way that, again, a state like Estonia has to.
[00:23:10] Peter Slezkine: So, do you think the Wilsonian, Rooseveltian, FDR not Teddy, argument about the interconnection of the world, the indivisibility of global security, do you think that is total bullshit or there is something to it? Like, if there is a dominant Eurasian power, then we are in a weak and vulnerable position or ultimately what happens on the other side of the fishpond is for others to worry about.
[00:23:38] Emma Ashford: I am a good realist. I worry about regional hegemony, right? I don't want to see any one country consolidate enough power that they end up like the Soviet Union, able to threaten the U.S. militarily.
[00:23:53] Peter Slezkine: Do you think the Soviet Union threaten the U.S. militarily?
[00:23:56] Emma Ashford: I do.
[00:23:56] Peter Slezkine: In what way? The Red Army was going to cross the Iron Curtain, end up in Lisbon or somewhere in Africa, and then... I mean, this was the argument before U.S. intervention in World War II. And one could make ethical arguments, economic arguments, but the Roosevelt crowd insisted that, ultimately, there was also a security argument.
And those on the other side, I think, responded very convincingly by saying that, if the Nazis subdued all of Europe and then ended up in Africa and then tried to take their ships and planes across to Latin America and then make it up to North America, that would be a very difficult logistical and military enterprise, not one likely to succeed.
[00:24:38] Emma Ashford: It would be very difficult, but not impossible. And I think, if I go back even to George Kennan who wrote about the industrial heartlands of Western Europe, right, there was a fundamental economic rationale for why we did not want the Soviet Union to control all of that territory, its economic output, its markets, right?
[00:25:00] Peter Slezkine: But Kennan also opposed NATO. He thought that military alliance with Europe was unnecessary and did not actually address the real problem. And the only reason to join NATO was to solve European psychology in the aftermath of a devastating war, that they wanted the military support. And by giving it to them, we could get them to acquire the self-confidence necessary to address the actual economic and political problems.
[00:25:29] Emma Ashford: I mean, I think we could have a much longer discussion about the ways in which U.S. policy towards Europe has effectively been a Band-Aid for European psychology for a very long time, right, but whether you buy the arguments about helping Europe build back up after the war or whether you buy the arguments that it's much more about smoothing over disagreements and trying to see that Western Europe can work together, I do think there was a role for the U.S.
And to bring us, sort of, forward into the future or today, I don't see that level of threat emanating from Russia. They can barely conquer parts of Eastern Ukraine. I do see that kind of threat emanating from China, right? Maybe it's not a territorial threat. It would be challenging for the Chinese to conquer large parts of, you know, what is a predominantly maritime region in Asia, but I do think they have enough, sort of, economic and military clout to keep the U.S. out of Asia, make it hard for us to engage in trade and commerce, make it more difficult for us to roam freely around the globe.
And so, again, I appreciate there's going to be people who are restrainers who very much disagree with me on this, but I do think that there are areas where we see the level of threat that really does require the U.S. to engage in a region. And today, I see that in Asia. I do not see it in Europe. I do not see it in the Middle East.
[00:26:52] Peter Slezkine: Well, so, let's get to the various conflict areas in a moment, but first, return to the Scottish restrainer question, not necessarily paradox, but, as we said, the current administration pushes the nationalist line as justification for a restrained position. Do you ever feel any tension in your role here? Because it's one thing for Samantha Power to come to the U.S. to promote the liberal order. In some sense, the fact that she is from some foreign land only demonstrates the power of this liberalism that is being spread from Washington.
So, it fits very neatly in that paradigm. But in the nationalist framework, it might be more difficult to give counsel in Washington with an accent from afar. Do you feel that at all, or do you feel like you have to justify yourself in certain circles or not at all?
[00:27:47] Emma Ashford: I have never felt that I have to justify it. I have thought about it a lot, though, because I think, from my point of view as somebody looking at the Washington foreign policy scene, it is quite easy to identify places where socialization within alliances or, basically, everybody getting friendly at European Embassy parties, where that actually is having some impact in shaping U.S. foreign policy. And I find myself quite uncomfortable about that. I think I'm lucky, right? I am here. I'm British, right?
And I typically don't see much of a tension between British interests and U.S. interests. There are divergences, absolutely, but I'm not Polish, I'm not Taiwanese. And so, for me, the question is not a concrete one. I am largely free, I think, to think of the national interest of my adopted country. And that's what I focus on. I don't work on British issues. And it rarely arises.
So, again, I think I'm very lucky. I think some folks from other countries who come here to the U.S. who genuinely, again, want to do American foreign policy in the national interest, I do think that's a much harder equation for them because you do always have that tug of you come from somewhere, you feel strongly about it, maybe you have family and friends there, and maybe there are tensions with U.S. foreign policy.
[00:29:06] Peter Slezkine: Do you feel that the Anglosphere ultimately is a coherent geopolitical entity that you are in the inner circle in that regard?
[00:29:15] Emma Ashford: I think it is true to say that the Five Eyes countries, right, which are all part the Anglosphere, have probably the closest alliance relationship of basically any set of countries, that there are interlinkages between their governments that, sort of, really tie them together at a practical level and again minimize these, kind of, divergences. I think there's also that shared history and culture.
So, again, it's not that there aren't policy divergences, I mean, right? Australian foreign policy interests are remarkably different from American or even from British, right? Let's not forget that Australia and Britain, during World War II, had some pretty serious divergences of opinion over what should be defended in the Pacific or not. But I do think that, again, in the current environment, in the current situation, you know, maybe 100 years from now, it will be different, but right now, to me, I do not see significant policy divergences between the five Anglosphere countries.
[00:30:16] Peter Slezkine: Is that something that you emphasize with your D.C. friends who might stress the national interest too much for your taste, that the anglosphere actually should be taken as a very important bloc that should be treated as such?
[00:30:32] Emma Ashford: I don't emphasize that, but in part, that's because I work on U.S. foreign policy.
[00:30:38] Peter Slezkine: No, but U.S. foreign policy is based somewhere. You have to take, I don't know, the United States, the Anglosphere, the liberal order as your basic unit of analysis. And what that unit is has all sorts of implications for what foreign policy do you feel fits the purpose best.
[00:30:54] Emma Ashford: I mean, look, I try to primarily focus in on the U.S. national interest. And I have, over the years, tried specifically not to work on British policy issues because I think that would make it harder.
[00:31:10] Peter Slezkine: Well, let's take an Anglo country that is tied very tightly to Britain, but is not Britain. Canada is in North America. Maybe calling the Prime Minister a governor is bad optics. But do you basically believe that if the United States needs to retrench, that a North American bloc that it includes a very intimate relationship between the United States and Canada is in the interest of both countries?
[00:31:37] Emma Ashford: Absolutely. I think policy, in the last few months on Canada, has been, in many ways, absurd, I mean, completely absurd. And I think we've even seen tensions between other Anglosphere countries over this, right? We've seen the Starmer government in the UK very much cozying up to the White House even as King Charles comes out to visit Canada and offers them support against Trump.
And so, there's these very internal tensions even here. But I mean, look, I think, again, just from a practical point of view, culturally similar, linguistically similar except the Québécois, and we are tied in not just through all these intelligence gathering networks, but NORAD when it comes to the Canadians, right? The Canadians are a vital part of the U.S. I mean, these days, with ICBMs, it's not so much an early warning radar, but the Canadians are important to U.S. security, particularly as the Arctic warms and becomes more of a region of interest.
[00:32:30] Peter Slezkine: So, let's say that you were to write the next national security strategy or some secret version of it, so we don't have to worry about public reaction. Would you put the Anglosphere or, like, the U.S., Canada, North American fortress in there as an important category that should be considered in the formation of U.S. foreign policy, that this is, in some sense, a bastion, this is an inner circle, that this is a huge advantage in how we exist in the world relative to other powers is that we have this set of islands, we have this North America that is, again, easily defended, shared culture, shared language, shared history?
[00:33:08] Emma Ashford: I would make, I guess, three points. And I think what's really interesting is that, each of these, you can see, in the Trump administration, there is some nugget of similarity, right, because, again, it's interests based. So, you know, one is that it would very much be in the U.S. interests for Canada to be spending more on its military and doing more to carry at least some of the burden even within this, sort of, united American continent bloc.
Second being that I really would not restrict this to Canada simply because of cultural similarity, right? So, and again, I think that's very much a core realist principle is culture is great. It may help smooth things over. It may give us historical ties or practical ties, but it doesn't necessarily mean our interests are always the same, and it doesn't mean we shouldn't work with others.
So, I would say it's not just Canada, right? We should be trying to build closer ties within U.S., Canada, Mexico, but also further down into Latin America, the U.S. backyard, which we have ignored for many, many, many years. And it would very much be in our interests to try and build those interconnections. This administration has a lot of issues with doing that because of their stances on trade and migration and things like that, but I do think it would be in the U.S. interests to have a more of a hemispheric approach to security.
[00:34:32] Peter Slezkine: Well, and that was U.S. policy all the way through, I don't know, 1947 when the Rio Pact was signed, the first ever U.S. International Security Pact, a couple years before NATO. And it was sold as the model for NATO. But then, essentially, we traded Latin America for Europe and have forgotten about it ever since. Just put out fires when they arise inevitably.
[00:34:52] Emma Ashford: Yeah. And I think, in some ways, Latin America has been a bit of a victim of our military first foreign policy, right, which is that even if you need a military deterrent in Europe, right, let's just bracket that, it doesn't mean you stop paying attention in Latin America. And during the Cold War, that meant a lot of covert action, but in the post-Cold War period, we just really stopped trying. We did NAFTA with the Canadians and the Mexicans, but just really nothing south of that. It was like we just decided it didn't matter anymore.
[00:35:20] Peter Slezkine: Well, and even during the Cold War, JFK's Alliance for Progress was sold as a development project but because of the anti-communist priorities, very quickly morphed into a security alliance with nasty military regimes, and the development angle disappeared overnight.
[00:35:37] Emma Ashford: So, this is a problem for, let's say, restraint realists as a broad coalition, right, is disagreements over what you replace U.S. military presence with. For myself, I would very much like that to be free trade, right, some kind of trade pact that allows us to incorporate countries in Latin America to build...
[00:35:58] Peter Slezkine: But free trade within certain bounds, like, you have a kind of new commonwealth? Presumably, it's not free trade with China anymore.
[00:36:03] Emma Ashford: Ideally, we would build on NAFTA, right? And it would be in ways that do enhance the U.S. interests. I'm not saying everything should be unfettered, but I'm saying that is a way to increase our ties in Latin America. It's a way to keep the Chinese out a little more. And it's a way to try and mitigate some of the development and migration issues that we're seeing.
People don't need to migrate to North America if there are opportunities in their home countries. But the problem is, of course, that then, on the other side of the ledger, there are very, sort of, nationalist autarkic understandings of trade where maybe the best way to do this is just to cut the U.S. off from everybody. And that denies you all of those, sort of, economic tools for diplomacy.
[00:36:46] Peter Slezkine: So, where does Europe fit in? We've identified the Anglosphere as an American advantage and a tight military, cultural, and political bloc. The Western hemisphere, what about Europe? Was that, sort of, a misadventure for 70 years, the transatlantic relationship? Was it just a function of the Soviet threat? Where does it stand now? Do you think, in 20, 30, 40 years, the U.S. will be the patron of Europe still?
[00:37:17] Emma Ashford: Absolutely not.
[00:37:19] Peter Slezkine: What about two years, five years? Do you think, by the end of this administration, we'll be out more or less?
[00:37:24] Emma Ashford: I would give you pretty good odds that we'll have less presence in five years. If you said 20 years, I'd give you pretty good odds that we'll be most of the way out. So, I mean, look, I think, Europe, the transatlantic relationship, to my mind, was relatively fit for purpose for what it did in the Cold War. It was not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it generally succeeded in achieving what it was meant to do, deter the Soviets, protect Western Europe. And all of the back and forth, the spats about burden sharing and politics, and it still worked for all of that.
[00:38:01] Peter Slezkine: But then we should have shut shop in 1991.
[00:38:04] Emma Ashford: Exactly. I mean, that, I think, is the problem. After the Cold War, particularly NATO just morphed into something different. And I've done some work on this in the past academic work, focusing in on, sort of, the NATO bureaucracy is one reason why this happened, right? When you have a permanent bureaucracy, they want to find a new mission.
[00:38:23] Peter Slezkine: Or the same mission resuscitated.
[00:38:25] Emma Ashford: Exactly. Well, so, NATO didn't die after the Cold War. They pivoted to out-of-area missions, peacekeeping in the Balkan's counter-terrorism involvement of Afghanistan and Iraq. And then come 2014, as you say, pivot back to, "Hey, Russia's back." And now, we have this mission as well. But by the time we'd done that, what had become of NATO was completely unfit for purpose.
The U.S. was still providing all the resources despite relative parity between the U.S. and Europe in, sort of, terms of GDP and all of those things. It expanded so far it was practically indefensible, just in practical terms. And you'd added so many members to the coalition that no one can agree on anything. So, NATO, to my mind, became unfit for purpose.
[00:39:07] Peter Slezkine: Meanwhile, the same thing was happening in parallel with the EU, which also grew so big that it couldn't agree to anything, really.
[00:39:14] Emma Ashford: Exactly. Right? I mean, there's something to be said for the European community pre-Maastricht, right? I think that is what the UK wanted it to remain, for the most part, an open-trade organization, customs union, but not a monetary union with a currency, not a social and political melding that send all power to Brussels. And so, I mean, I see similar problems in the U.S.-European relationship in how this transatlantic relationship developed. The problem was the U.S. found ourselves basically stuck, right?
We couldn't withdraw because the Europeans can't defend themselves, but so long as we are there, the Europeans won't defend themselves. And that has been the position for a very long time. And it's still fundamentally the position today. It's going to take either a leader like Donald Trump or someone like him who's willing to, sort of, issue threats and make a hard choice.
And even then, the transition to European-led defense will be very difficult or at some point we're probably going to hit a crisis that causes the whole house of cards just to collapse, right, whether that's some Russian incursion into NATO territory where members don't come to the aid of the invaded party or whether that's some crisis in Taiwan or something else that pulls the U.S. away forcibly. I just don't see this persisting U.S. about 50 years. I don't see how this could possibly persist that long without something happening.
[00:40:44] Peter Slezkine: Well, let's talk about Ukraine because something is happening there. So, you said support for Ukraine at the start made sense. At this stage, would you just leave the conflict entirely and let a natural balance of power emerge regionally, or do you think the U.S. has leverage and should use it to achieve certain ends? And what would those ends be?
[00:41:12] Emma Ashford: I think this points to one of the fundamental problems with being an advocate for restraint, which is mistakes have been made in the past that have shut off good policy options. And now, where we are, there are no good options. So, we could make that argument about the Iraq war, for example, right? Once we invaded Iraq, then it was a question of, "Well, how do you stop groups like ISIS growing or how do you prevent terrorism?" and all of these questions that grew out of that initial error.
And so, from my point of view, I, sort of, see the Ukraine situation as very similar, right? Its roots are in the expansion of NATO and other entities into the post-Soviet space, these growing tensions with Russia, and even on a more narrow level, right, in the war itself since February 2022. I think it was the right choice initially to support and arm Ukraine, but the goal should have been to help to end the war in doing so, right?
And instead, I think what we see is that Western leaders in particular get a little overconfident, right? In February 2022, they think Russia's going to roll over Ukraine. And it's about saving what we can. And by May, we're talking about supplying Ukraine enough weapons that they can take this thing all the way to Moscow. I think U.S. policymakers, European policymakers got just infected with the sense of victory that we could do anything.
And instead of negotiating, we pushed forward. And so, for me, again, that's how we landed here, where I really do think the only options are either keep supplying Ukraine over the long term, and the long term 10 to 15 years, and I don't think we actually have the supplies and weapons and political will to do that, or sign a subpar peace agreement, or walk away and hope the Europeans pick it up. Those are the three options. And they're all terrible.
[00:43:11] Peter Slezkine: Well, which do you prefer?
[00:43:12] Emma Ashford: I would probably prefer the subpar peace option because I think Ukraine, despite all the talk about Russia using a piece to re-arm, I actually think Ukraine would probably benefit more from a ceasefire if the Europeans are serious about continuing to funnel money in arms, help Ukraine rebuild after the war. And I think they are, to some extent, serious about that. I think Ukraine could actually come out of even a subpar piece, better off and better prepared to fight again if they have to than this current crushing war, but again it's a terrible option.
[00:43:44] Peter Slezkine: But the problem with what you just described is that the Russians believe what you believe, which gives them very little incentive to stop because they believe they have the military leverage now, that if they keep pushing for another year or two, perhaps they can resolve the security problem that Ukraine constitutes from their perspective, more or less, definitively.
So, why would they stop and allow Ukraine to reconstitute with Europe's help? Especially since Europe has just removed Germany, removed the debt brake, they have launched all these military projects that I don't really believe in, but let's say they come to fruition. It's not now. It's one, two, five, 10 years from now. And then Ukraine supported by Europe would be much stronger than it is in the immediate term, whereas Russia's potential is limited long term.
[00:44:32] Emma Ashford: Yeah, I mean, look, to me, this is part of why it remains absolutely astounding that when you talk to particularly folks in Europe, but even some of the more hawkish folks here in D.C., that they continue to say that it's just about Russia will use a piece to re-arm and attack again, and Russia wants this. And to me, that just doesn't ring true.
[00:44:50] Peter Slezkine: I mean, Russia will re-arm. Ukraine will re-arm.
[00:44:52] Emma Ashford: Yeah.
[00:44:52] Peter Slezkine: Both parties will re-arm. The question is what will the balance be then relative to now?
[00:44:57] Emma Ashford: Right. That they think that this will put Russia in a better position just doesn't ring true to me. And I think there's some sort of bubble dynamics going on there where they're only talking to each other, but I do think, I mean, the fact that this, sort of, subpar piece would not be ideal for Moscow. This is, I think, why the administration is where it is today, right?
There was a lot of hope, I think, inside the Trump administration that if they offered a fairly good deal to Moscow and if they put a little pressure on Kyiv, then maybe they could at least get to some sort of imperfect ceasefire deal. And I think, now, where we've been for at least the last few weeks is instead this tug of war inside the administration of, "Well, do we keep pushing for that or do we just decide the Russians do want to keep going and we will just walk away and leave it to the Europeans?"
And so, I think, now, we're circling around those two options as the ones the administration is considering. I will say what is not on the table is just continuing to arm Ukraine. I'm pretty confident there is no one in this administration that is willing to go that route.
[00:46:01] Peter Slezkine: What about selling arms to Ukraine? I heard from a Ukrainian last week that they have hopes that they can use European money to buy American military equipment and that that would work for Trump because it wouldn't be a pure giveaway.
[00:46:16] Emma Ashford: That's very true. There are a few caveats or a few problems with it, though. So, one is it very much depends on what they want to buy. There are a lot of systems, lots of ammunition, things like that, artillery reloads where, you know, I think, yes, we could continue to sell those. And quite frankly, if it's European money coming in, Trump will paint it as a win.
There are other things the Ukrainians are going to want to buy, like air defenses or reloads for Patriot systems, HIMARS, et cetera, where we're actually supply constraint increasingly. And some of the prioritizers that went into the Trump Pentagon, folks like Elbridge Colby, they've been arguing this for quite some time now, that we simply don't have the physical means to keep sending these things to Ukraine. And I think even if Ukraine manages to drum up European money for these, they're going to find that they're going to be deprioritized when compared to Taiwan or other crises, probably Israel as well.
[00:47:13] Peter Slezkine: So, let's say that none of the actors in Europe, Ukraine, or Russia are quite ready for the kind of peace that the United States can propose at the moment and like-minded members of the administration are not interested in continuing to supply Ukraine as the U.S. has the past few years.
Is it conceivable that the U.S. just leaves the room, turns off all the lights, says, "It's your problem."? I mean, you said that that was a possibility, but would it be a total American exit from the conflict? And what would the consequences be? And would there then be an opportunity to come back in as a true neutral mediator and restart the peace process from a different position, or do you think an exit is an exit and then it's just a matter for the parties involved to figure out a balance?
[00:48:09] Emma Ashford: I'm not sure we can ever truly be a neutral in trying to mediate this conflict. And that's because even if the U.S. were to pull back from everything in the Ukraine conflict, we still have sanctions in place on Russia. So, we're still an interested party in some of the areas that Moscow would want resolved in order to end the conflict. And so, I just don't see us ever quite getting to that impartial mediator standpoint.
[00:48:33] Peter Slezkine: Well, and we're still the leading member of NATO. And if the Europeans are involved, then it's really hard to disaggregate European involvement from NATO involvement.
[00:48:41] Emma Ashford: Well, so, that is the other problem here, right, is that there has... It's funny. Since February 2022, there has both been just this insane conflation of Ukraine and NATO as exactly the same on the public messaging side. And then on the, sort of, signaling side from the Biden administration in particular, we saw this incredibly stark delineation, right, of Russia.
We are not coming into Ukraine, but we will defend every inch of NATO territory. We send troops. We send weapons systems, right, every inch of NATO territory. At the same time, as we're publicly messaging, that Ukrainian security is European security. And so, that very interconnectedness of the two is going to make it difficult for the U.S. to pull back entirely, right?
There are gradations of what one could do, right? So, simply doing what we have been doing, which is we've stopped sending money and I think we only sent one package of equipment since Trump came into office, and that was actually pretty recently, but we're at money from Congress. We stopped sending weapons, but we don't cut off intelligence sharing, right? That would be a very minimal pullback. And you would just see more European money in that case.
If the U.S., if the Trump administration then decided to, say, cut off intelligence sharing, right, I think that removes us from the role of proxy warfare belligerent in the conflicts and it pulls us back to just being... like countries like, Japan or South Korea, where we're doing sanctions, and we're maybe talking politically about it, but we're not actually supplying things into Ukraine. But in all of this, the U.S. would, I assume, mostly continue its role in NATO security.
So, many of the same U.S. military personnel who are having discussions now about Ukraine would still be in post in Europe having discussions about Baltic security or Polish security with regards to Ukraine. So, I mean, I do think the notion that we can just drop and walk away, unless we're also going to walk away from European security, which would be a substantially bigger choice, I think it's a little false to say we can just wash our hands with it.
[00:50:49] Peter Slezkine: But so then, basically, the status quo, the continuation of this war with some amount of American involvement is the likeliest scenario. And the hope is that exhaustion on both sides makes the peace, more or less, on offer now, more likely some number of months from now.
[00:51:10] Emma Ashford: Now, I'm not a military expert, but I've spent a lot of time around them. And, you know, my assessment from talking to folks who are specialists is that Ukraine is losing this war slowly, but there is virtually no prospect of them winning this war without significant additional aid. And I don't quite understand what I hear from Kyiv and from European capitals because I don't understand what it is they think is going to change that equation, right?
Whether the Russians stop now because of some kind of peace deal or whether they stop at the edges of the four territories they legally annexed or they go further, I think Moscow could decide that, but it's not clear to me what Ukraine could do to stop that or change that calculus more than they already have.
And so, I feel like particularly European capitals are still a little unrealistic about what's actually on offer or perhaps they're just cynical and they would prefer the war to continue with sanctions in place rather than the war stopping and sanctions being lifted, right? Maybe if you're Germany, that's a better outcome for you, but it's not necessarily a better outcome for Ukraine, so.
[00:52:31] Peter Slezkine: Well, and there's also a political calculus that the leaders of the major nations involved have made quite a few very impressive statements about the stakes of the Ukraine conflict. Their societies have paid a substantial price for waging it. And so, declaring it over and done with, with nothing to show off it would not be easy for Macron or whoever else to do, not to mention Zelenskyy himself.
[00:53:04] Emma Ashford: Yeah. And in terms of Ukrainian domestic politics, I mean, that's an even harder calculus because that's a calculus about telling people who have lost everything, lost their families, lost their homes, that it was for nothing. And I don't know how anyone, even a talented political communicator like Zelenskyy, can do that.
So, that's always tough in peace negotiations. I do think in Western European capitals, though, and even here a little in the U.S., particularly under Biden, because I think Trump just doesn't care, the problem we're seeing here is, in microcosm, it's the same problem we saw with the U.S. draw down from the war on terror, right? It's a sunk cost fallacy. It's we have done this much, and we don't have any prospects of winning, but it's not too costly to continue, so let's just keep going.
[00:53:52] Peter Slezkine: Well, it's a combination of sunk cost fallacy with organizational inertia that you have the machine is running and it's in place and it takes an active effort to stop the machine from running or to dismantle it.
[00:54:05] Emma Ashford: Yeah, exactly. And again, I think the only real reason, I think, if Biden or I guess Harris had won, we probably would be having this conversation, but we'd be having it in very different terms. And that's because physical constraints on weaponry started to bite, right?
So, we wouldn't be having the Trump, "I'm going to wash my hands of it," debate, but we would be having a debate about whether the U.S. can continue to give funding. We'd be having debates in Congress about how expensive it is. And so, the inertia exists, but at some point, reality does rear its head.
[00:54:36] Peter Slezkine: The billiard ball hits the wall and bounces in a different direction.
[00:54:41] Emma Ashford: Yeah.
[00:54:42] Peter Slezkine: So, you said Russia does not represent a substantial threat, at least to the United States, and that American security commitments in Europe are excessive, but that China is a real menace of some kind. So, what do you mean by that, that it just will prevent us from accessing Asia in roaming around, but why do we want to roam around? What is it in Asia that we would like to access other than TSMC chips?
[00:55:10] Emma Ashford: Well, it's the world's fastest-growing region-
[00:55:14] Peter Slezkine: Economically.
[00:55:15] Emma Ashford: ... economically.
[00:55:15] Peter Slezkine: Africa is the fastest growing in terms of humans.
[00:55:17] Emma Ashford: Demographically, that's true. But Asia, in terms of economic prospects and economic progress, they're the fastest growing. Asia is dynamic. It's home to not just one rising power in China, but two. India's there as well. It's behind China in this prospect, but it's there, too. And it's a very vibrant, valuable region. And I think the U.S. has a strong interest in being able to access the region, access its markets, engage in diplomacy, engage in trade.
And what I would worry about with a China that was much more dominant in the region is that it would be able to prevent us from doing that, maybe militarily, that it might be able to prevent us from accessing certain sea lanes in certain regions, or simply in terms of political and economic pressure, right, that they could shut us out of certain markets or countries.
And so, I think China has the power and capabilities to do that to Japan, South Korea, the Philippines. Russia doesn't have the ability to do that to Germany, right? So, again, I think we're just talking about vastly different scale at which these two countries can shape the regions around them.
[00:56:34] Peter Slezkine: Well, but China also has clear constraints. India is enormous and has water and mountains protecting it. And China and India have existed side by side for thousands of years. And neither has ever dominated the other. Japan has posed more of a threat to China historically than vice versa and is also an island far away. So, it's hard to imagine that China will exert military hegemony over that entire region. Taiwan, Korea is perhaps another story at some points in the future.
[00:57:07] Emma Ashford: Yeah. I do think Taiwan remains the one area of friction, sort of, the one point where U.S... I don't even want to say U.S. interests, but U.S. current commitments are going to come into conflict with what China wants. It's already coming into conflict there. And so, for me, that's the most concerning flashpoint for a future conflict.
[00:57:30] Peter Slezkine: But that's almost like Iraq, Ukraine in the sense that a decision made a long time ago for reasons that don't really apply at the moment, have to do with Chinese civil war and American anti-communism, that we are committed to Taiwan, have been for a long time, China obviously wants to resolve this rupture, so we're stuck. But Taiwan, by itself, other than, I suppose, TSMC, which is not something that can be easily bracketed out, is not hugely important. Geopolitically, it's the U.S.
[00:58:05] Emma Ashford: No, it isn't. And if it were left up to me, I would draw the line further out. I would draw the line at Japan, at South Korea, at the Philippines, I do think one big problem for U.S. policymakers today is that, during the post-Cold War period, the boundaries of America's, let's just say, sphere of influence, right, Graham Allison said we had a universal global sphere of influence, it pushed right up to the borders of everybody.
And so, it's not that we're talking about great powers, having some kind of buffer zone. Before we start talking about potential conflict, we're already there. We're already most of the way to Taiwan. But again, I think we have an interest not just in seeing that these states don't get conquered, but also in seeing that they're not subject to so much political coercion, that they agree to try and shut the U.S. out of the region, follow through on all of China's wishes. What we want is Asia, or I guess we're supposed to call it the Indo-Pacific now, what we want is that region to remain undominated by any one power, right?
[00:59:06] Peter Slezkine: Well, except for us. I mean, Japan has-
[00:59:08] Emma Ashford: No.
[00:59:08] Peter Slezkine: ... our military bases. South Korea is essentially an appendage of the American military.
[00:59:14] Emma Ashford: No.
[00:59:16] Peter Slezkine: Obviously, they're free to jail all of their leaders and impeach them how they like, but nonetheless, I mean, the South Korean military and the American military are pretty tightly integrated. Are they not?
[00:59:25] Emma Ashford: It's true. We have military presence in the region of South Korea. It's definitely both the biggest case and the most problematic case because, again, it's not really about China. We want our regional posture to be about China. And instead, we're dealing with this North Korea thing. So, that's an area where some rethinking is probably needed. But the U.S. hasn't had hegemony or primacy in Asia for, I mean, at least 10 years.
And this is where I would differ with folks in the Biden administration who wanted to regain primacy in the region, that we should go in more strongly militarily. I don't necessarily think that. I think that there are areas where we need to dial up, areas where we need to dial down, like South Korea, but my goal would be for us not to create a situation where China is so threatened that they react but rather to deter. Now, that's a very difficult needle to thread, and we have failed in history at it more times than I can count, but it's still the best option.
[01:00:21] Peter Slezkine: Or we can just extract all of the economic dynamism from East Asia by forcing TSMC, Hyundai, and Samsung to build beautiful big factories in the continental United States. And then once we've pulled all of their cool technology away from their homeland, then we can give it up to China. How's that for a cynical strategy?
[01:00:44] Emma Ashford: Well, I mean, it's the cynical strategy the Biden administration pursued. It's the cynical strategy the Trump administration appears to be pursuing. I mean, look, I think, let me paint a non-cynical portrait of that, which is concerns over Taiwan led policymakers to realize that there was this massive bottleneck in a critical area of technology, right, critical not just to the military, critical to pretty much everything we do every day here in the United States and Western Europe and elsewhere.
And we need to address that vulnerability. And in some ways, that is almost independent of the question about what we do over Taiwan. If anything, pulling those factories here, as you know, actually makes Taiwan perhaps a little more likely to get invaded by China, but from the point of view of U.S. security, it's better to deal with that potential vulnerability now.
And that's one of the ways that I tend to think about the world, and I think it's probably shaped by I started out my career studying oil and energy security. And chips are not oil, there is no direct connection there, but when you start to think about vulnerabilities and choke points and how you get these concrete resources, I think it does shape how policymakers react.
And we should be thinking a little more carefully about these things. Taiwan, right now, doesn't really matter because of liberal values. It matters because of its chip production. And how we handle that, well, maybe we defend Taiwan or maybe we just build chip factories here at home. So, I guess, you're right. I am pretty cynical about it.
[01:02:12] Peter Slezkine: So, finally, you wrote your first book, as you just mentioned, on oil. You have another one coming out soon on multipolarity. So, give us your perfect image of the forthcoming international system. How many poles will there be? Will they be equivalent entities or very different beasts inhabiting one ecosystem? How does it work?
[01:02:39] Emma Ashford: Yeah. I mean, look, it's a great question and I think one that is difficult to actually figure out at this point. So, I have one answer in the book that I think is potentially right, but there are a lot of very clever, smart people out there who I respect who have different answers to this.
[01:02:57] Peter Slezkine: Well, I'll interview them on other episodes.
[01:02:59] Emma Ashford: Awesome.
[01:02:59] Peter Slezkine: So, forget other clever people.
[01:03:01] Emma Ashford: So, for myself, what I see is I looked at a variety of different metrics of ways we could measure power, right? And again, that is a philosophical question with too many answers, but if you look at military capabilities, economic power, population, let's throw in their demographics, what you start to see, the picture that's emerging is the U.S. was, for a very long time, way out ahead of the pack. China has been slowly catching up, but so, too, are a number of other states. The U.S. is in what we call relative decline, right?
So, everyone else is rising to meet us. Even we're not declining, but everyone else is rising to meet us. And the picture that emerges for me is a system in which the U.S. and China are pretty much the top dogs in the coming decades, but where other states really do matter and they matter more proportionally than third-party states did during the Cold War, right? So, during the Cold War, it was just the U.S. and the Soviet Union, their alliance blocs. That was it.
There was basically no one else in military power, no one else in economic power. It was very minimal. Now, other states, not the U.S. and China, make up something like 50% of military capacity, economic capacity, et cetera. And these statistics are even further skewed by the fact that the U.S. has done a lot for years in suppressing the capabilities of its allies in the military space.
If they were actually free to exert their own military power, then things would look a lot more multipolar. So, that, to me, is what this multipolarity looks like. It looks like the U.S. and China, definitely up at the top, but there are a lot of other middle states that are really important, whether that's Western European states, whether that's Japan, South Korea, Australia, whether it's maybe Turkey in Europe, right, but states that can play different roles, economic, military, mediation.
And so, what I end up recommending in the book for the U.S. is just a strategy that plays on this flexibility. Rather than trying to lock us into alliance networks, we actually try and leverage this for our own good, letting us, sort of, work with different parties on different things to achieve our interests.
[01:05:09] Peter Slezkine: But so, Modi's foreign policy or Erdoğan's foreign policy would be a good model. Totally pragmatic. Make friends with anybody for as long as they are useful.
[01:05:23] Emma Ashford: Foreign policy is not a one-shot game in the language of game theory, right? We are goingto do this over and over again. So, there are reasons you might want to try and build trust and perhaps not pursue a Trumpian style of tariffs where you're constantly threatening people, but yes, a more transactional or at least a more interest-based U.S. foreign policy that would understand that we do, we have a lot in common with India when it comes to pushing back on China.
Maybe we don't have as much in common with India when we're talking about them trying to kill dissidents inside the U.S. or Canada, right? So, we can accept that there's going to be areas where we work with other countries because our interests align, and then there will be areas where we don't.
And I'm okay with that. I don't think we have to force everything into this global alliance frame that the Biden administration was so keen on. The important thing today for policymakers is to identify which states are the important ones? Who do we want to work with? And I think there was some progress made even during the Biden administration in the Indo-Pacific.
[01:06:31] Peter Slezkine: Are you making your big bet on India like everybody else, or do you have a slightly less rosy outlook?
[01:06:36] Emma Ashford: No. I do not have a rosy outlook on India. I worry that we're just recreating exactly what we did with China with India, right, helping a rising state to rise and arm because we think it will help us, and then we're going to be back here in 40 years saying, "Oh, no. India's rising."
[01:06:51] Peter Slezkine: Unless Pakistan and India can meet other in the meantime with our weapons on both sides.
[01:06:57] Emma Ashford: Then we can all take a break as radioactive dust. But, you know, I mean, look, I think we want to work with India where it’s possible. We do not want to necessarily empower them and make them our main partner, right? There were steps taken to build a stronger relationship with Australia. We talked a little bit about the Anglosphere. Actually, I think the U.S.-Australian relationship is going to be really important. There are basing issues that they can really help us out with. They're very well placed for, sort of, submarine defense and other things.
[01:07:25] Peter Slezkine: Not to mention America's insatiable appetite for beef.
[01:07:29] Emma Ashford: And natural gas, too. But yeah, there's that cultural similarity with the Anglosphere, like we talked about, that helps, but it's interests that are really driving this. I think where it becomes more difficult is, in our hemisphere, in Latin America, then it's much more about economic issues. And there are so many domestic political disagreements over economics and trade that it may be difficult to have a coherent policy there.
I know what my preference would be, but I don't think that's where public policy is headed. And we face, I think, a lot of problems. We're going to have to learn to be much more flexible in the Middle East. We've really tried, over the last several administrations, to lock in this, kind of, Sunni Gulf-Israel access against Iran. And I think what we've seen is that many of the states even involved in that effort didn't want to be involved in that effort.
And now, there's, you know, détente between the Sunni Arabs and the Iranians. So, we need to find more partners on both sides of that divide in the Middle East. I mean, look, this is going to require, again, a difference between myself and this current administration. It's going to require more diplomats. I don't think that's what this administration has in mind, but that's a muscle we lost during the unipolar moment. And we really need to rebuild.
[01:08:45] Peter Slezkine: Well, one Witkoff at a time, we will reinvent diplomacy. On that note, thank you very much.
[01:08:52] Emma Ashford: Thanks for having me.
[01:08:57] Peter Slezkine: Thanks for listening to the Trialogue Podcast. Make sure to subscribe to the show, so you don’t miss out on any episodes.
The Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.