This week, our guest is Stephen Wertheim, Senior Fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. We discuss the origins of “isolationism,” historical hypotheticals, the United States’ relative interests in the Middle East, Europe and Asia, Ukraine and Taiwan, and an “America first” policy for the Democratic party, among other subjects.
This week, our guest is Stephen Wertheim, Senior Fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. We discuss the origins of “isolationism,” historical hypotheticals, the United States’ relative interests in the Middle East, Europe and Asia, Ukraine and Taiwan, and an “America first” policy for the Democratic party, among other subjects.
*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.)
Peter: [00:00:00] 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.
Today, my guest is Stephen Wertheim, senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy, and one of Washington's principal proponents of a foreign policy of restraint. Is that a fair description?
Stephen: I guess so. I just read some comments on my latest piece and I was told that I'm an over-educated bloviator who wants America to fail. But I prefer the term restraint that will make America prosperous and strong.
Peter: Well, let's begin with over-educated bloviator. So, we first met a little over 10 years ago when I was visiting the Columbia History Department to decide whether or not to do a Ph.D. there. You were already in the program a couple years ahead. I'm sure you gave me great advice, asked me what I wanted to do with my life.
Stephen: I'm not responsible for any feelings you may have about whether that was the right decision.
Peter: Well, let's turn the tables on you. All these years later, why did you make that decision? What prompted you to try to get a Ph.D. and ultimately get a doctorate in history? What did you imagine you would do with such a degree?
Stephen: I mean, I was always interested in American politics, became more interested in foreign policy in part because I grew up on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., and when I was in high school, 9/11 happened and then there was this big debate over whether the United States should invade Iraq. And I paid a lot of attention to that. And I felt something was off about the whole discourse but I didn't really know why that was. That sent me to study history as an undergrad in U.S. foreign policy, and I basically continued that when I went to grad school to do a Ph.D. in history.
Why did I make that decision? I guess I couldn't figure out anything better to do. But I really did enjoy doing history. I thought it was the discipline, especially as compared to the other obvious option, political science, where I really was learning something and getting a handle on our current moment by understanding how it fit into a much wider context.
And I love to write as well. So, I think all that came together and I thought, why not do this history thing? And now, I discovered that there are many problems with being a professional historian, [crosstalk 00:03:04] not detain us.
Peter: Wait, let's, let's [crosstalk 00:03:04] in, in a moment. But so, you went into history to answer questions about the present, which is, I suppose, an unusual initial move. In history, there is a term of opprobrium called presentism.
Stephen: Correct.
Peter: Everyone is supposed to study the past on its own terms and not seek to look at it through the prism of the present. But you were interested in history, primarily, as a way to explain our current condition.
Stephen: Absolutely. Yes. I think most people are. I think there's a good kind of presentism and a bad kind of presentism. The bad kind of presentism is, looking at the past in a blinkered way by importing assumptions, purposes that we have based on our own time and place onto the past and distorting our understanding of what happened.
The good kind of presentism, which, of course, I naturally associate myself with, is investigating the past out of a desire to better understand our present and do something constructive with our present while understanding that the past is a very different place and that the whole point of the exercise is to respect the integrity of a different time and place. But I think the vast majority of scholars in any discipline, including history, are ultimately motivated by present day concerns. How could they not be? And they might as well just own what those are. And that's basically what the study of historical scholarship shows you, that, lo and behold, in basically every subfield, historians’ interpretations of the past are heavily conditioned by the present circumstances that motivated their inquiry.
Peter: In every period, the fashions of the moment [00:04:50] were what then determined how they looked at the past. But so, you mean that we should never look at the past through the prism of the present, but always look at the present through the prism of the past.
Stephen: Depends what you mean by that.
Peter: Well, we should never impose present day frameworks on our analysis of the past, but we should always seek to use the larger historical context in an attempt to understand the present.
Stephen: Yeah, I can endorse that.
Peter: That might be a banality, but it sounded nicely symmetrical. Okay. So, now, let's get back to the problems of academia. At what point did you realize that you had extracted as much knowledge as you could from the discipline and decided to deviate from the professional pathway that most people in graduate school assume to be natural?
Stephen: I don't think I ever reached a point where I have extracted all the knowledge I was going to get from the discipline. There's always new insights to be gained by studying history. [00:05:47] But, for me, you know, I went through a seven-year Ph.D. program, did a few years of postdocs, and a whole bunch of things converged for me. Number one, the academic job market, particularly in the history of U.S. foreign policy, is, I hate to break it to you, not good. There are no jobs in the field and the field is heading toward death, effectively. And that's a big problem, I think, for the whole country, because pretty soon there are going to be hardly anybody who has been credentialed in the history of U.S. foreign policy and will be teaching it to new generations.
Peter: Well, and that new generation is, perhaps, more important, because the number of people who make a living off of this profession is small but the number of students who are supposed to learn something about U.S. history in college is great. And if they no longer have that on the syllabus, or if it's taught only marginally, then I imagine that will have consequences.
Stephen: [00:06:43] Absolutely and something will fill the vacuum. And so, other people will be transmitting conceptions of history that may have some value but wouldn't be what historians would do with it. So, I think, generally, there will be a heavy bad kind of presentism that you see from journalists doing history or sometimes social scientists doing history. And so, I do, in fact, believe in the historical discipline and what it has to offer. I think, it is going to be a real problem when there are basically no trained historians transmitting the history of U.S. foreign policy to future generations.
Peter: What other factors converge to push you away from the ivory tower toward the beltway?
Stephen: So, it was around 2016, 2017 that I started to think, maybe, I don't want to be in conversations with [00:07:39] historians for the rest of my life. And one reason for that is that the 2016 election happened. I had just finished my dissertation, and I found that I had something to offer, I thought, in interpreting why Donald Trump had managed to pass muster with the electorate on foreign policy. A whole lot of people were calling Trump an isolationist, some kind of figure out of the 1930s. And that just seemed to be inaccurate and set people up for not only a poor analysis of what Trump would do as president but also no good way to oppose him, criticize him, or be constructive in bringing out, you know, the best possible options that he could have opened up. So, in short…
Peter: But so, the construction of the ideology of anti-isolationism in the 1930s just so happened to have been the subject of your dissertation. And then you see it coming back in the establishment's defense against the phenomenon of Trump.
Stephen: That's right. So, in the Obama years, I had put together this dissertation, which became the book Tomorrow, the World, that, among other things, showed that the term, “isolationism,” had been essentially invented. It came into [00:09:06] widespread usage in the 1930s because a set of Americans were looking to make the United States more involved politically and militarily in international affairs beyond the traditional U.S. realm of the Western Hemisphere. And they created this conceptual dualism, this contrast between isolationism, which is to be avoided, and internationalism, which was a long standing term in American political discourse and had largely positive connotations, but in the 19th century had often been used by pacifists. And most of all, it meant trying to find some way to overcome the system of power politics [00:09:58] that Americans always wanted to avoid participating in. And that was centered in, in Europe, the, the old world.
But as World War II approached, and as the United States got into the war, internationalism came to be redefined to mean that the United States should be number one, that it conceived its vital interests on a global scale, and that the alternative to internationalism was this outmoded thing called isolationism that the country needed to discard. And since then, this has been the basic conceptual universe in which American foreign policy discourse takes place. Anybody who's in favor of any kind of reduction in the U.S. role in the world, especially in a military sense, or is just opposed to the next war, if you will, is liable to be called an isolationist.
And every American president, from FDR through Barack Obama, has warned the country that it might slip into the old temptations of so-called isolationism, but it better not do that. Trump actually broke that mold, not because he was an isolationist. There really are no isolationists. But because he did not subscribe to that kind of conceptualization, that ideology of anti-isolationist internationalism, which made him interesting and different. I had a certain handle on that. And so, that was kind of what brought me to op-ed writing and other forms of public discourse.
Peter: But so, at the stage when you were still writing, finishing your dissertation, you were, in some sense, attempting to slay the boogeyman of isolationism in order to recover old forms of internationalism. [00:11:51] Trump's arrival changes the dynamic a bit. You start writing op-eds focused more on restraint rather than the recovery of old forms of internationalism. So, when did you start thinking of yourself as a member of the restraint group. Do you remember when that word even first appeared in your consciousness?
Stephen: I remember Patrick Porter's paper for the Cato Institute that criticized the idea of the liberal international order. That must have been around 2018. Probably introduced the term, “primacist,” to me. And then I also remember around that time being in conversation with somebody who referred to people as restrainers. Oh, what's that? So, I [00:12:39] didn't think of myself in those terms. But it was pretty obvious, once I did hear those terms, where I fit in, because the purpose of my dissertation-turned-book was not only to examine these concepts of internationalism and isolationism, but primarily, to understand how and why the United States came to think that global military dominance was the obviously correct approach to international affairs.
If you look at the debates between interventionists and non-interventionists in the lead up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, there was pretty coherent strategic argument being put forward by people on both sides. But that includes the non-interventionists who argued that the United States could be safe from attack and remain prosperous for the foreseeable future if it made sure that outside powers didn't come into the Western Hemisphere. And I thought that it was worth, at least, taking them seriously, not necessarily agreeing with them, but taking them seriously so that people don't assume that every event in the world is Munich again and we get caught up [crosstalk 00:13:57].
Peter: Or Pearl Harbor again.
Stephen: or Pearl Harbor again. And draw on reflexes from World War II that were more appropriate to the circumstances of World War II than they are to our circumstances today, and indeed, I would [00:14:11] argue, since the end of the Cold War.
Peter: But you're saying that even during World War II, not everything is as clear as it seems in hindsight. So, the subsequent crises don't amount to the scale of challenge of World War II, and even World War II was a much more complicated problem at the time than it seems in hindsight.
Stephen: That's right. I mean, in World War II, what caused the United States to recalculate its role in the world and abandon its hostility to so-called entanglements, beyond the Western Hemisphere was the actual material reality of the Axis powers coming to a preeminent position in Europe and Asia, in part, as a result of the physical territorial conquest of large parts of [00:15:05] Europe and Asia, particularly, the Nazis’ rapid defeat of France, dramatically changed the balance of power in the world. And that is what triggered this recalculation among the American elite, as well as the crystallization of two distinct paths that had, each had a lot of logic for them about where the United States could go. So, I thought it was…
Peter: What are these two paths?
Stephen: Guard the Western hemisphere, on the one hand, or make sure that the Axis powers are defeated and that nothing like this can happen again, to nip the problem in the bud. And that's the prime assist alternative.
Peter: So, you don't like the lessons that were taken from those who ultimately followed the second path and their successors. But is there anything [00:15:58] that you would have done differently in practice? Like, Lend Lease without troops in Europe, or no oil embargo on Japan in order to Avoid a conflict in the Pacific. Were there alternative policies that were substantially different that could have worked at the time?
Stephen: It's impossible for me to look back and not want the Axis powers to ultimately be completely defeated as they were, right? I think that some people at the time extrapolated from their current circumstances into the essentially limitless [00:16:36] future and said, well we can't ever have a situation in which powers like the Axis powers verge on dominance in Eurasia again. And therefore, the United States should almost regardless of geopolitical circumstances, be the preeminent power with troops stationed abroad, et cetera. Now, that viewpoint crystallized in 1940 and ‘41, but doesn't fully mature until the early 1950s with the onset of the Cold War and the formation of U.S. alliances with forward military deployments.
Peter: Well, so let me continue with my annoying series of historical hypotheticals. So, with World War II, who knows? The policy direction that it set the United States on, you disapprove of, but [00:17:27] the Nazis, you continue to dislike.
Stephen: Not a fan of the Nazis. I'm willing to go on record on that.
Peter: What about the communists? So, early 1950s, when this crystallizes, as you say, the U.S. embarked on a particular kind of Cold War project. Were there readily available alternatives at the time that the U.S. missed that, perhaps, would have set the country on a more restrained path going forward?
Stephen: I think it's possible that the United States turned to containment too quickly and too completely, and that there might have been a way of conducting diplomacy to resolve the major differences, especially the disposition of Germany. I'm not sure about that.
But let me, let me say two, two things that I think are important about this. So, number one, even if there had been a way to head off the Cold War, as an extremely intense zero sum rivalry between the two so called worlds, the free world and the communist world, the United States came out of World War II defining its interests and military responsibilities in global terms.
So, even if there had been a way to head off the Cold War and make it more like, if you will, a typical geopolitical rivalry in 1946 or 47 the United States had still imbibed this lesson that [00:18:53] isolationism made no sense. Nobody should be heard again who didn't see U.S. vital interests in global terms.
Second point I would make is that can grant you World War II, and I can grant you the Cold War. What I mean is there was, I think, a concrete logic to the United States trying to avoid a Eurasian hegemon whether that be the Axis powers or a communist regime. What I think is the really dramatic strategic departure for the United States lies in the post Cold War period when the Soviet Union completely collapses, Cold War's over, and there was an opportunity for establishment [00:19:47] members of the country to say we did the right thing in World War II, we did the right thing in the Cold War.
Peter: So, we'll do the right thing again, and expand even further and farther.
Stephen: No, so we'll do the right thing again. And this time, because there is no more threat of a peer rival that could achieve dominance of Eurasia, the best thing is to take a step back. And that's exactly what no less a cold warrior than Jeane Kirkpatrick put forward as the Cold War was ending. She said it's time for America to be a normal country in a normal time. And then you could say if another threat on the order of magnitude of the Axis powers of the Soviet Union arises again, then we can mobilize again. And if we really believe we were successful the first two times, we'll be successful the third time.
And that's what [00:20:45] American leaders explicitly rejected. If you look at the defense planning guidance at the end of the first Bush administration that came out of Dick Cheney's Pentagon it says that the United States was too restrained In World War II and the Cold War, it was way too late in mobilizing against those threats. And now, and I guess for the foreseeable future or the end of time, the United States would police the world essentially.
It would maintain all of its Cold War alliances, perhaps expand them, and be the hegemon, both globally and, in particular, in the three significant regions outside the Western Hemisphere, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. And that did not straightforwardly follow from the “primacist” grand [00:21:43] strategy that came before, even if a lot of people thought that it did.
Peter: Well, it does in some ways, in the sense that if you determine that the world is interdependent, that a threat anywhere is a threat everywhere, that the consolidation of Eurasia under a different or threatening regime cannot be countenanced, then controlling as much space as possible, pre empting the emergence of any power on that continent is one clear lesson to draw. Not to mention that, if you're granting me World War II and the Cold War then why on earth wouldn't you grant me the unipolar moment?
Stephen: So, I agree. You could certainly make a coherent case along the lines that you just made, and many did. And that's the case that prevailed, the view that U.S. dominance was a kind of end in itself, that the United States could secure perpetual peace in this way, suppress security competition and keep costs low. It's very clear, for example, that George H.W. Bush viewed the continuation of NATO as the kind of fruit of Cold War victory.
I just don't think it's so straightforward and it's the only argument that one can make. And I think it's notable that the Pentagon planners early on actually felt that U.S. strategy in World War II and the early Cold War was too mild. And they needed to make that argument in a sense to justify what they were proposing, which was a much more forward U.S. military role in a context in [00:23:19] which there were no more great power Rivals, let alone totalitarian great powers, let alone totalitarian powers practicing mass conquest or subversion to try to make their realm a universal one. So, I do think it's fair to say that When the U.S. re-upped primacy in the post Cold War world, it was actually a more radical project than what came before.
Peter: But if the perpetuation or extension of primacy after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the absence of an enemy, does not necessarily make sense, why wouldn't it be natural now that we have a plethora of enemies, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, the list can be long or short, but nonetheless the enemies seem scary, at least if you read the news.[00:24:10] So, okay, you were a good restrainer after 1991 or 2001, but now you should be flexing your muscles and readopting the Cold War, World War II posture. Why not? Why are you still a restrainer nonetheless?
Stephen: I do think that today there is a better case for the United States to have alliances and a significant forward military presence in the Asia Pacific. And that case is different from the unipolar moment. I think we are now in a post unipolar period. And it's precisely because of the rise of China.
But with respect to Europe and the Middle East I'd say two things. First of all, it just doesn't bring the United States profit to divide the Middle East into friends and [00:25:02] enemies and try to police the region. We have built up a whole set of relationships that create an enormous amount of inertia. And so, it's proved very difficult even for presidents who didn't really think it made sense for the United States to be so militarily engaged in the region to bring about a change. But fundamentally, I think the region is not on the cusp of being dominated by one hostile power. And the United States has a lot of options to secure its truly vital interests. We try to prevent attacks against the United States, in this case it would be terrorist attacks against the U.S. homeland and to secure freedom of the seas. If those are the goals the United States is pursuing, and I don't really think they are.
Peter: And [00:25:56] oil, one might imagine.
Stephen: Oil would be included in the freedom of the seas. But most of the oil isn't going to the United States or even going to many U.S. allies. A lot of it's going to China, the United States should actually take a page from the playbook of other great powers, including the United States, prior to the post Cold War era, and seriously back away from the Middle East.
When it comes to Europe, the main argument that I'd have that applies to the entire post Cold War period is that Europeans clearly had the material resources to balance against Russia. And the United States chose to effectively suppress the initiative of European states who were quasi federating in the European Union to handle their own affairs.
And that [00:26:52] explains a lot of the demobilization and division that one sees when it comes to European foreign and defense policy. And we're never going to get a better time to pull back in Europe, I think, than we got in the 1990s. But I think that right now is not a bad time either for the United States to embark on a gradual process in which it may remain in NATO, but it will transfer the lion's share of the defense burden onto European countries. the major concern would be that if the United States started this process, Russia would exploit a window of opportunity to make mischief along the eastern front of NATO. But with Russian forces concentrated in Ukraine, that seems to be a very low probability indeed.
Stephen: So, [00:27:50] right now, seems to be a pretty good window of opportunity to effectuate that kind of a transition. I think it will take leadership from Washington to forge a new transatlantic bargain to sit down and say, okay you cannot depend on us to be there in the long term and save your skins. It's not fair. It's not working in our domestic politics. We need to work [00:28:17] out a way for the transatlantic alliance to more equitably survive for the decades to come. I think a lot of Europeans are seeing this problem but it's going to be hard for them to make that kind of a big change without Washington actually orchestrating its own Retrenchment from the continent.
Now, I think, as part of that bargain, the United States can use its financial power and rather than trying to sell more American weapons to Europeans it can encourage Europe to cooperate on defense production and build its own defense industrial base, which is important to making the politics of European security work within Europe. And that would have to be part of that transatlantic bargain. And that will be a big shift for the United States. You know, despite all the talk that Donald Trump might [00:29:15] want to leave NATO or draw down the U.S. role in the continent, I don't see sign, from him that he would want to hold back U.S. arms deals to Europe and really fix that problem, which is European cooperation on defense so that Europe can handle the job against Russia in the future.
Peter: So, Americans, many times before, definitely through the ‘50s and ‘60s, have tried to withdraw from Europe and have failed to do so, in large part because the Europeans themselves didn't seem to be interested in coming together to create a collective army or defense system. So, why do you think they would do it now if they hadn't done it then when in some sense the American threat seemed more real? Because they still remembered a United States that had been a hemispheric power. So, the idea of it retreating to [00:30:12] hemispheric limits must have seemed more probable in European eyes then than it does now, even despite the appearance of a figure like Trump.
Stephen: I think the crucial thing that has to change is that the United States has to actually engage in the drawdown rather than just talk about it, but actually require first that the Europeans do everything Washington would want it to do before the United States starts the drawdown. So, that's the big difference.
And the United States has not tried this, I think at all, since World War II. But it definitely hasn't tried anything like this in the recent past. The pattern of presidents including Obama and Trump have been to ask for burden sharing, to complain with varying degrees of loudness [00:31:09] that Europe should spend more on defense, but to keep the United States as the militarily dominant element in the NATO alliance and just get the Europeans to bear more of the cost under the American aegis. I don't think that that gets us to where we, we need to be.
Now, it is true that Europe is spending more on defense, and that's a very, very good start. And I'm actually not sure that Europe, in the aggregate, ultimately needs to spend more on defense than it is spending. It needs to improve what it's doing, cooperate more, and be able to take responsibility in the event of contingency. So, there's a whole lot that needs to change, but it's not necessarily just about levels of defense spending and that idea of a metric, 2%, 3% has way too much currency in the transatlantic debate.
Peter: Well, so that's [00:32:08] precisely the problem. Europe has the money, so that's not in question. What is in question is the capacity to coordinate and cooperate under the American aegis and outside of it. So, let's say the U.S. announces that it will pull back. And then European squabbles, resurface, and the political divisions within European countries are exacerbated, is that not, in some ways, a more acute threat to the United States position in the world than even Russia and Ukraine? I mean, this seems to be closer to the core of the American order. And there are many more bonds tying us to Europe than to Ukraine. So, Ukraine is important in its own right and as a signal of what might happen elsewhere. But if Europe begins to fragment and fall apart, then the many bonds — economic, political, institutional, and otherwise — that cross the Atlantic will begin snapping. And that seems like it will have serious material consequences.
Stephen: So, I think to avoid that scenario the United States should not pack up and leave Europe willy-nilly. I would envision a plan to transition to European leadership of European defense over, let's say, eight years, two terms of an American president or a decade. And the destination of that would be the U.S. not leaving NATO, but moving to a supporting role such that Europe would be capable of handling the crisis, even if it turned out that the United States Was unable or unwilling to join.
So, the United States would not be the [00:33:59] orchestrator and primarily provider of security in Europe.
Peter: Whenever there was an attempt for the United States to coordinate the various European members in order to leave that position, the Europeans have not been able to do it.
Stephen: This is simply the reality of where we are. Right now, we have the illusion that the United States can handle European security. That is an illusion, okay? I can see why people want to pretend like the illusion is the real thing, but it isn't. None of us should have any confidence about how the United States would actually function if a NATO member on the eastern flank was actually [00:34:42] attacked, even under Joe Biden, let alone what might follow Joe Biden.
Moreover, the United States is, on paper, committed to defend more countries around the world than ever before in its history. As many people in Washington are arguing, the United States would need to massively increase military spending to meet the on paper requirements of its current strategy, but I see no political will to do that. And so, the United States is overstretched.
So, what I'm saying is if the political trends in the United States aren't enough to convince people, you know, look at the material capabilities that the United States can bear. And I think it would be better and certainly more sustainable for the transatlantic alliance to, yet, do something that it hasn't done in its history. Totally agree with you, which is transition to European leadership of European defense. And [00:35:41] again, doesn't mean the United States needs to leave the alliance. But I think we have to face the fact that it is not clear at all that the United States would actually be available and willing to defend NATO territory if it came down to it in the foreseeable future. And therefore, if Europeans think that that's something that they have a stake in, and I think most of them do, they should take the steps needed to put themselves in a position to handle those crises if they occur.
Peter: Would you say the same thing about Asia? So, the U.S. is overstretched, has too many commitments, not enough power. Why not let the Asians also handle themselves? They have a larger stake in the situation. They are closer to China. They can defend themselves, find a modus vivendi. So, should the U.S. pull back in both areas, or all three? We talked about the Middle East. Or do you think that the U.S. should redirect resources from Europe to Asia, and why?
Stephen: I think the U.S. should pull back from European security and from the Middle East. I wouldn't say that about Asia though I do think there are changes that the United States should make to its current approach, and I do think it should encourage more initiative among its allies and partners in the region.
But I think the crucial difference is that, at this point, China stands alone as a peer rival to the United States, in a country that, you know, potentially, if we look out into the distant future, could be able to dominate its region. And then we have to ask ourselves what might happen afterwards. And I think the United States has a [00:37:37] real interest in trying to constrain China over the long term so that it doesn't get in a position where it could seriously cut off commerce to a large part of the Earth, but maybe more importantly, project military power on a global scale, including into the Western Hemisphere.
Do I think that, if China attained that scale of power, that would necessarily mean a disaster for American national security? No, I don't, but I think there are steps the United States can take to maybe make it harder for China and point it in the right direction. So, I think it's worth a look maintaining a significant onshore military presence in the Asia Pacific for reasons that I think clearly distinguish that region from the others.
Peter: [00:38:36] But if the problem with China is that it is powerful now as an economy, first and foremost, it has a military that is large, but untested. And then you say there is a possibility at some point in the future that it will expand its sphere of influence, come to dominate the region, and perhaps even go further, but that is entirely speculative. And you say that, even if that were to occur, it's not necessarily a mortal threat to the United States. The United States is currently engaged in, it has to be called escalation, in the region. The tensions are rising, the likelihood of military conflict is increasing. Why is it necessary to undertake these steps, which have clearly visible downside in the name of avoiding some speculative challenge in the future. Isn't this precisely what the primacists were doing that you disapproved of? They were invoking the specter of a future threat and trying to get ahead of it.
Stephen: So, I share your concern about what current U.S. policy may be doing in the region. I do worry that we could get into a U.S.-China conflict that would actually impose greater costs on the United States than the thing that we would be trying to prevent. So, that's a serious concern. I do want to push back, though, on the idea that a speculative threat maybe isn't a real threat. I mean, we have no choice but to speculate about how a country may develop in the future. The empirical data that we [00:40:22] have takes us only so far. It's a real challenge. I don't want to worst-case things and assume that the very worst that China might do and become is 100% likely, but I think we do have to take seriously the possibility that some bad scenarios could occur, and that the United States has an interest in warding off the worst.
Peter: Can you be more specific? Some bad scenarios. What are scenarios bad enough that the level of mobilization currently visible in Washington against China is warranted?
Stephen: Now, you’re assuming that I’m defending the status quo policy in Washington, which I'm not. So, let's talk about Taiwan, right? Because here I share your concern that the United States is, in a sense, doing too [00:41:18] much to attach its credibility to the defense of Taiwan, when I think gaining control of Taiwan would be neither necessary nor sufficient for China to become something like the hegemon of Northeast Asia, let alone the Indo-Pacific.
So, I'm very concerned about a potential conflict breaking out over Taiwan in which the United States and China would fight directly. And I think the United States ought to be maintaining the One China policy with a great deal of consistency so that it's clear who is responsible for tensions around Taiwan increasing. It's also important that it be clear to other actors in the region in case there is a conflict because their decisions would either enable or prevent the United States [00:42:20] from taking action to assist Taiwan. And I think the United States should be trying to develop an option to allow Taiwan to mound a robust defense if it comes to it. And perhaps, the United States would also be able to resupply Taiwan in a conflict without going to war directly with China itself.
But I think the bottom line, what you're asking is, does it make any sense from the perspective of fundamental U.S. interests for the United States to be expecting to defend Taiwan in an actual conflict? And I think very likely that would not make sense. I think the United States would, in that scenario, be paying enormous upfront costs of a cataclysmic war with China, World War III, in order to avoid some future scenario in which China becomes a global hegemon. And I think the upfront price would exceed the price of the thing that we're trying to avoid, in the first place.
Peter: Okay. Well, let's then get away from the specific scenarios to the question of vital interest and how to define it. So, we've talked about various parts of the world. Europe, the Middle East, Asia, where the U.S. could expend more or fewer resources. And the idea in each case is that there may or may not be adversaries there. And the greater the potential threat, the more resources the United States needs to spend or allocate in that region to match it. But what makes an adversary? So, list them. You may have mentioned Russia and China, but why is Russia an [00:44:03] American adversary? Why is China an American adversary, specifically?
Because the liberal internationalists will tell you, they are seeking to revise the liberal order. The liberal order is made up of certain institutions, practices, and values, should extend globally. The existence of Russia and China is inherently destructive of this order. There are ideological arguments about democracy and autocracy. I may not agree with them, you certainly don't seem to, but one can understand within this construction why Russia, Iran, and China are labeled as enemies. So, for you, from your more geopolitical, realist perspective, what makes an American adversary?
Stephen: I think the United States has a serious interest in preventing a hostile power from gaining control of Eurasia or a very large portion of the Earth, [00:45:01] from which it might either exclude the United States from interacting, including trading, with that portion of the Earth, or it might be able to project power globally, including into the Western Hemisphere and at the United States. So, on the most fundamental level, I think the United States does have a serious interest in trying to prevent that state of affairs, which is a World War II Axis-like state of affairs.
With respect to the present day, the United States obviously has a whole set of adversaries that can't be just undone by me in a classroom or even a single president who were to come in and try to take a different tack with one or more of those countries. But I do think the United States has too many adversaries as a result of the strategic decisions made over decades. And there's a lot of talk right now in this town about the so-called axis of autocracies or whatever term it is, but they mean the four powers of Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. And the U.S. should be thinking seriously about how to lose some of those adversaries and not face a group of countries that are pushed together and share an interest in resisting what they see [00:46:27] as American hegemony.
Peter: Well, so, it seems the less the U.S. treats them as adversaries, the less likely perhaps it might be for these very different actors to come together.
Stephen: There's no question to my mind that a lot of what has brought those countries together has been a shared sense of insecurity when it comes to the United States. I think they're pretty clear about that. And if you look historically, Russia and China have not always gotten along. Likewise, Iran, North Korea. Frankly, even the war in Ukraine in our own moment has done a lot to bring those powers together.
So, I do think that settling the war in Ukraine would be something that would remove some of those pressures and that the United States should be taking a cold, hard look at a strategy to, at least, limit the alignment of the countries that are most adversarial to the United States, if not open up some fissures among them.
Peter: Let's say Russia swallows all of Ukraine and China takes Taiwan. Let's give that one 10 years so that the U.S. has time to learn how to produce semiconductors in Arizona or wherever. Would either of those occurrences actually be a problem for U.S. interests as you define them?
Stephen: I think I would have to distinguish between vital interests for which the United States should go [00:47:55] to war and more discretionary interests. Would Russia taking over all of Ukraine or China seizing Taiwan be a very negative outcome for the United States? Absolutely, yes. Would it be something for which the United States should fight a great power war? I doubt it. With respect to Ukraine, I would say certainly not. The United States was, in fact, prepared to see Russia take over Ukraine at the beginning of 2022. And the planning was really about how to deal with the situation of Russia succeeding in its military aims and, and toppling the Zelensky government, et cetera.
When Joe Biden took the use of force off the table prior to the full scale Russian invasion, I think there was pretty clearly agreement in the United States that it did not make sense for the United [00:48:53] States to fight Russia directly over Ukraine, and that has remained the foremost objective of the White House throughout this conflict, despite all that's, that's happened. And I agree with that. I don't think anybody really makes the argument that there's something about Ukraine in and of itself on which American security or prosperity depends.
On a practical level, however, precisely because NATO's lines are where they are and the United States has made this repeated political commitment to come to the defense of NATO territories, Russian full success in Ukraine would probably cause even greater concern among states in that area and would cause the United States to have to decide what to do to increase its military presence in [00:49:53] the eastern flank, which I think was the plan prior to Ukraine's resistance against the Russian invasion or try to find a way for Europeans to handle the problem with the United States not further exposed to that kind of cost and and risk.
Taiwan is another question. I do think Taiwan has more importance to the U.S. economy and the global economy than Ukraine does. And United States has a deeper commitment to Taiwan over the decades than it has had to Ukraine's security. That said, on a basic level, if China were to gain control of Taiwan it would not somehow be easy for China to take over the Philippines, take over Japan. Water is a significant barrier. And there are some claims about how [00:50:48] having control of Taiwan would enable China to launch submarines into deeper waters and that would really change the military balance. But I think the military advantages that the PRC would gain from controlling Taiwan are more evolutionary than revolutionary. China's submarine technology is going to continue to advance and enable it to evade detection with or without Taiwan. So, I don't really think that gaining control of Taiwan would be a game changer even on a regional level, let alone sort of one that immediately implicates, you know, U.S. security and prosperity at home.
Compare that, of course, to the implications of the United States choosing to fight China over Taiwan. And there, we get into some very plausible scenarios in which there are [00:51:45] major cyber attacks on the American homeland. God forbid we have a nuclear exchange, etc.
Peter: You recently published a New York Times article in which you advise a potential Harris administration to adopt an America first policy, but for real, what do you mean by that?
Stephen: I mean that a Paris administration or any administration ought to be unapologetic about putting the interests of the United States front and center in all the decisions that they make. In fact, I think that that is what they already try to do. I think that Democrats, though, have been caught on the back foot [00:52:31] by Trump's America first appeal. Trump is essentially saying to the country, what are we getting for all this activity in the world? We seem to be doing a lot of losing military conflicts, and it seems like the United States is not on the right trajectory. And that pitch has resonated.
Go back to 2016. People were shocked that someone like Donald Trump could actually find political profit in his America first pitch. Fast-forward to 2024, and it's almost taken for granted that Donald Trump has the advantage on foreign policy in this election. And that was true, as polls showed, whether he was running against Joe Biden with all of his decades of foreign policy experience or against Kamala Harris.
So, I do think that Democrats need to make changes, both to the way they present foreign policy and to the actual policies they pursue, so that Americans can see that the United States has a rational approach that is, at the end of the day, not about keeping some abstract global order going, but about directly defending American interests in the world.
Peter: So, then why did you aim this message specifically to the Harris administration? In other words, what would be the particularly democratic quality of this brand of America first? How would it distinguish it from what Trump has already promised to bring to the table?
Stephen: So, some of the things I write about it's possible Trump could do, and I don't want to just exclude that possibility, there were certain things that I recommended, especially at the end when I talked about global [00:54:20] challenges like climate change and pandemic disease. I don't see Trump doing those things. I do not see Donald Trump taking action to try to arrest carbon emissions. And I think that should be at the fore of the U.S. foreign policy agenda. And I think what would be really fresh would be Harris or another administration that cares about climate change to make the case, not in these, like, namby-pamby cooperative terms, we got to all join hands to try to stop climate change, but in really hard nosed terms where the approach is sometimes cooperative, but also sometimes competitive.
Peter: Isn't that exactly the same thing that the current…
Stephen: Yeah, no, I get it.
Peter: The current administration is creating an industrial policy that is aimed at climate in China equally, in some way. So, isn't that what you are proposing? This hard nosed version of democratic [00:55:19] policy that is both realist and progressive, that it tackles climate change through the problem of China?
Stephen: I think that there are some ways in which my approach, yes, would mark an evolution from what the Biden administration has attempted to do. I don't think that it has Put climate change at the center of U.S. foreign policy and its national security strategy. It sort of claims to do that rhetorically in its national security strategy. I don't think that that is anywhere near the top of the agenda when it comes to China.
And one of the things that's so important to make the room to elevate global challenges like this is to lower the salience of military competition. And so, that's where I think my proposals are most different from what the current administration has done. I'm proposing [00:56:18] that the United States should shift military burdens onto allies and draw down in the Middle East and in Europe. That's very different from what the administration has done by trying to maintain U.S. military primacy everywhere that it found it with the, I would say, non structural exception of withdrawing from Afghanistan in the first year.
And then, on the politics, this administration has ended up making an overtly orthodox pitch to the electorate. In Joe Biden's most notable foreign policy address in the wake of Hamas's October 7th attack last year, the president called for new emergency spending for Ukraine, Israel, and to a lesser extent, Taiwan, on the grounds that the United States is the indispensable nation. It was complete, this speech, [00:57:18] with an explicit shout out to Madeleine Albright, the Secretary of State from the 1990s.
Ironically, the National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, wrote in The Atlantic in 2019 that the indispensable nation was not an appealing way to talk about U.S. foreign policy at all. He said it sounded wearying, it allows for no limits. He seemed to recognize that, if the choice is between America first or the indispensable nation, America first was going to win. Well, that's actually the choice that the Biden administration has decided to present the American electorate with. And I think that's really unfortunate. Even though, I think, in their own minds, they are pursuing American interests first, they have decided to pitch the United States as managing this [00:58:14] general somewhat undefinable rules-based international order, or to pitch it as the indispensable nation just because that's the United States identity or that's what we've done before and so we have to do it again. And I think the results are not favorable.
Peter: So, finally, if the America first but for real policy that you're proposing for the potentially new democratic administration is composed on the one hand of this realist calculation of national interest and on the other hand a pursuit of cooperative policies to avoid the disasters of pandemics and climate change, how does that second part work in practice? So, we've talked a lot about the measurement of national interest, balance of military forces, prioritizing of adversaries, but climate change and pandemics are a sort of nebulous force [00:59:14] not easily met through a united front of competing global actors. So, what would you put into a national security strategy that identifies these two problems?
Stephen: So, first of all, I think actually what's really abstract and nebulous is the threat that many foreign adversaries pose. If you think about it from the perspective of the American public, the things that touch them where they live and work they're seeing weather and climate disasters piling up more and more. It's becoming harder to get housing insurance in a lot of coastal communities, and I think that could very well touch off a real economic crisis in the near future. So, I think they grasp that challenge. I think they grasp the challenge of pandemics. I think people want to forget about the pandemic that we just lived through, but they can [01:00:12] easily be reminded that it was horrible and another one should be avoided. But I think it is going to take leadership from the next president in order to elevate the situation those issues.
I also don't think that the next president should just pursue cooperative approaches on those issues, particularly on, on climate change. I think that one of the main criticisms coming from the right on climate policy is that, well, if the U.S. takes action, it will just hurt the U.S. economy and it will advantage China, India, other countries that won't necessarily follow suit. And so, I think the United States president should, should challenge China, for example, which is the largest emitting country at this point — though, the U.S. emits more per capita — to stop building coal plants and, in fact, mothball those plants, shut them down. Inject that kind [01:01:11] of concern into the U.S.-China relationship and into global relations more generally.
And you could say, you know, the U.S. is hypocritical because it's contributed more historical emissions, but that's the kind of hypocrisy that, frankly, I think could be productive. If each side is pressuring the other a bit on, what are you doing to speed along the green transition, that's something that could actually work out well. So, I think, through a mix of cooperative and competitive approaches, we could potentially succeed. And I think, though, it is going to take a serious effort to make geopolitical tensions less intense and bring about a more kind of stable arrangement in those respects among, among the major powers.
Peter: Well, productive competition is a very American idea. We like sports.
Stephen: We like sports. As some of [01:02:08] our key national leaders have said, we love sports.
Peter: Fantastic. Thank you very much.
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.