Gates and Mattis understood that the weight of the military’s mission and capabilities can erode a focus on diplomacy, or distort its central tasks. In Iraq and Afghanistan, diplomats found themselves slipping into supporting roles in the military’s counterinsurgency strategy, preoccupied with local social engineering and the kind of nation-building activities that were beyond the capacity of Americans to accomplish. It sometimes seemed as if we were trying to replicate the role of the nineteenth-century British Colonial Service, not play the distinctive role of the American Foreign Service. We were being challenged to pour increasingly limited civilian resources into long-term efforts to build governance and economic structures that could only be constructed by Iraqis and Afghans themselves. The more immediate and consequential function of diplomats on the ground was the persistent, head-banging work of persuading senior national leaders to bridge sectarian divides, minimize corruption, and slowly create some sense of equitable political order. In wider terms, it was the job of diplomats to try to build regional support for fragile national governments in conflict zones, and to limit external meddling.
If the militarization of diplomacy was one post–9/11 trap, overcentralization and micromanagement by a swollen NSC staff was another. There was no way that the five dozen or so professionals on the NSC staff of Colin Powell in the late 1980s, or the similarly sized staff of Brent Scowcroft under Bush 41, would suffice in the post–9/11 era. The tempo of counterterrorism activities and the demands of a global economy meant that the White House had to expand its coordinating capacity. But the fivefold growth over a quarter century was a classic case of overreach. The NSC staff continued to attract the most seasoned political appointees and many of the very best career officers from cabinet agencies. Their natural temptation was to take on more operational roles. Their proximity to the Oval Office deepened their sense of mission, and their energy and talent fueled their enthusiasm for not only coordinating but also shaping and executing policy.
The problem was that this made a self-fulfilling prophecy of complaints about lack of initiative and drive from other agencies, particularly State. On the rugged playing fields of Washington bureaucratic politics, State has often found itself elbowed to the sidelines. Assistant secretaries responsible for critical regions would be squeezed out of meetings in the Situation Room, where back benches were filled with NSC staff. With a dwindling sense of being in on the takeoff of policy deliberations or decisions, it was in some ways natural for even fairly senior State personnel to feel disconnected from responsibility for the landing, for policy execution. None of that is an excuse for the failure of the department to show more drive and ingenuity, get out of our own way bureaucratically, streamline our structure, and energize our culture. But overcentralization and overmilitarization made it a lot harder than it needed to be.
In the midst of too many aborted takeoffs and crash landings, as the international arena grew more threatening, and as the blood, treasure, and opportunity costs of America’s misadventures grew more obvious, a yawning gap emerged between a Washington establishment deeply committed to American global leadership and a less convinced American public. Making the case for American leadership in an emerging global order was becoming harder by the day.
The Clinton administration faced an early version of this challenge after the Cold War. As we wrote to incoming secretary Christopher, the post–Cold War transition “leaves you and the President with a very tough task. It was relatively easy during the Cold War to justify national security expenditures and build support for sustained American engagement overseas. It is infinitely harder now.” By 2016, ritual incantations of terms like “liberal international order” failed to resonate beyond the Beltway “blob,” and the disconnect between our easy conceits about American indispensability and a citizenry’s doubts that we had our priorities in the right order continued to grow.
The legacy of the first decade of this century, of two massively expensive and debilitating wars and a global financial crisis, reinforced a sense not only of fatigue about foreign entanglements, but also genuine resentment. Much of the American public had a visceral understanding of the widening gaps in wealth and opportunity across our society, and of the failure of successive administrations to address serious infrastructure problems. And much of the public understood instinctively that we had made some poor choices about overseas commitments, at a time when we were probably less exposed to anything resembling an existential foreign danger than at any point in recent decades. Their mistrust and doubts were aggravated by the perceived success of rivals and adversaries on the back of America’s sacrifices and missteps. Bureaucratic reforms and legislative fixes wouldn’t matter unless this fundamental rift was healed.
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THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION took these inherited challenges, accumulated over three post–Cold War decades, and made them much worse. It diminished American influence on a shifting international landscape, hollowed out American diplomacy, and only deepened the divisions among Americans about our global role.
Like Barack Obama, Donald Trump recognized that America’s approach to the world needed to change significantly. Like Obama, Trump focused on the right question: How should the United States reshape its strategy at a moment when the unipolar dominance of the post–Cold War era was passing, and popular support for active American leadership was fraying? Both saw the need for rebalancing security relationships with allies who had long borne too small a share of the burden, and economic relationships with rivals like China, who had enjoyed protectionist trade advantage long after their “developing country” rationale had faded. Both were willing to break with convention in dealing directly with adversaries, and both were innately skeptical of foreign policy orthodoxy. Their answers to the core question of reshaping American strategy, however, were vastly different.
President Obama sought to adapt American leadership and the international order that we had largely shaped and preserved for seven decades. He sought to apply the sense of enlightened self-interest that had animated American foreign policy, at its best, since the days of the Marshall Plan in Europe—a commitment to enlarge the circle of people and countries around the world with a shared stake in rules and institutions that enhanced our security and prosperity. His attitude was grounded in realism about the limits of American influence. Obama’s concern for avoiding overreach and commitment to playing the long game in the face of short-game crises could sometimes come across as diffidence. But he had a fundamental optimism about where the arc of history would carry a United States that carefully cultivated a model of political and economic openness and updated the alliances and partnerships that set us apart from lonelier powers like China and Russia.
There was nothing diffident about President Trump. His aim was not to adapt, but to disrupt. He came into office with a powerful conviction, untethered to history, that the United States had been held hostage by the very order it created; we were Gulliver, and it was past time to break the bonds of the Lilliputians. Alliances were millstones, multilateral arrangements were constraints rather than sources of leverage, and the United Nations and other international bodies were distractions, if not irrelevant.
Instead of the enlightened self-interest that drove Obama and most of post–World War II American foreign policy, the Trump administration took office more focused on the “self” part than the “enlightened.” Trump’s “America First” sloganeering stirred a nasty brew of belligerent unilateralism, mercantilism, and unreconstructed nationalism. On the international stage, the new administration often used muscular posturing and fact-free assertions to mask a pattern of retreat—abandoning in rapid succession the Paris climate accords, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Iranian nuclear agreement, and a slew of other international commitments. Disruption seemed to be its own end, with little apparent thought given to “plan B” or “what comes next.” Trump’s approach was more than an imp
ulse; it was a distinct and Hobbesian worldview, but far less than anything resembling a strategy. Not surprisingly, adversaries took advantage, allies hedged, and already strained institutions teetered.
The image of possibility and respect for human dignity that attracted so many around the world, despite all our flaws, grew more and more tattered. Many years of representing the United States abroad had taught me that the power of our example mattered more than that of our preaching. Now our example was increasingly one of incivility, division, and dysfunction, and our preaching had less to do with highlighting human rights abuses wherever we saw them and more to do with insulting allies and indulging autocrats.
The Trump administration’s hollowing out of the State Department embodied its ideological convictions and temperamental instincts. To be fair, American diplomacy was unsettled before Trump. Decades of unbalanced investment in defense and intelligence had taken its toll. The department’s failure to rein in its counterproductive bureaucratic and cultural habits did not help. But the new president’s dismissiveness toward professional diplomats, like his wider approach to America’s role in the world, took a complicated situation and made it a crisis.
In July 2018, President Trump asserted at a press conference in Finland with President Putin that he was an advocate of “the powerful tradition of American diplomacy,” but his behavior bore no resemblance to thoughtful, well-prepared exemplars of that tradition like Jim Baker.3 Trump’s view of diplomacy was narcissistic, not institutional. Dialogue was unconnected to strategy; the president seemed oblivious to the reality that “getting along” with rivals like Putin was not the aim of diplomacy, which was all about advancing tangible interests. And “winging it” in crucial high-level encounters was a prescription for embarrassment—especially when dealing with experienced autocrats like Putin, who rarely winged anything.
For the Trump White House, the Department of State was a realm of “deep state” heresy, of closet Obama and Clinton supporters bent upon resisting the new administration. That was a major, if convenient, misapprehension. If anything, career foreign and civil service officers at State are almost loyal to a fault, eager for the opportunity to deliver for a new administration, and hopeful that their expertise will be valued, if not always heeded. What they got from the White House was an attitude of open hostility, reflecting the distrust of convention and professional expertise that fueled the Trump political phenomenon and energized the new president.
Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, just dug the hole deeper. An accomplished former head of Exxon, Tillerson had an insular and imperious style, a CEO’s skeptical view of the public sector, and an engineer’s linear view of how to remold diplomacy. He embraced the biggest budget cuts in the modern history of the department; launched a terminally flawed “redesign process”; cut himself off from most of the building; drove out many of the most capable senior and mid-level officers; cut intake into the Foreign Service by well over 50 percent; and reversed what were already painfully slow trendlines toward better gender and ethnic diversity. Most pernicious of all was the practice of blacklisting individual officers simply because they had worked on controversial issues in the previous administration, like the Iran nuclear deal.
The savaging of American diplomacy as the Trump administration consolidated its grip was not the first such assault in our history, but it was in many ways the worst. There is never a good time for diplomatic malpractice. This just happened to be a particularly dangerous moment.
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ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE once wrote, “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”4 The Trump era poses a test of our capacity for self-repair beyond even Tocqueville’s imagination. It would be foolish to underestimate the damage to our standing and influence, and to the prospects for shaping a stable international order for a challenging new age. Nevertheless, our recuperative powers and underlying strengths are still formidable.
No longer the dominant player that we were after the end of the Cold War, no longer able to dictate events as we may sometimes have believed we could, we nevertheless remain the world’s pivotal power—able to update international order in a way that reflects new realities but sustains our interests and values. Over the next several decades, assuming we don’t keep digging the hole deeper for ourselves, no other nation is in a better position to play that pivotal role, or to navigate the complicated currents of twenty-first-century geopolitics.
Our assets are substantial. We still spend more every year on defense than the next seven countries combined. Our economy, despite risks of overheating and persistent inequalities, remains the biggest, most adaptable, and most innovative in the world. Energy, once a vulnerability, now offers considerable advantages, with technology unlocking vast natural gas resources, and advances in clean and renewable energy accelerating. Demography is another strength. Compared to our peer competitors, our population is younger and more mobile, and if we could stop doing so much practical and moral damage to ourselves on immigration issues we could lock in that strategic edge for generations. Geography sets us apart, with our two liquid assets—the Pacific and Atlantic oceans—insulating us to some extent from the kinds of security threats that expose other major powers. Diplomacy ought to be another advantage. We have more allies and potential partners than any of our peers or rivals, with greater capacity for coalition-building and problem-solving.
Our advantages are not permanent or automatic. To maintain them, we have to do a far better job of husbanding them wisely and applying them with care and purpose. It is a truism that effective foreign policy begins at home, with sustained attention to the domestic foundations of American power. And yet for all the injuries we’ve inflicted on ourselves in recent years—for all the unforced errors, for all the hollowing out of both diplomacy as a tool of policy and of the American idea as a source of global influence—we still have a window before us in which we can help shape a new and more durable international order before it gets shaped for us.
Fashioning a strategy for America in a post-primacy world is no easy task. The most famous American strategy of the postwar era, Kennan’s containment doctrine, went through a number of significant variations during the decades before the end of the Cold War.5 At its core was a commitment to invest in the resilience of the community of democratic, market-based states that the United States led, and a cold-eyed recognition of the weaknesses that would eventually unravel the Soviet Union and its unwieldy Communist bloc. A balance of military strength, economic vigor, and careful diplomacy helped avoid direct conflict, avert nuclear war, and manage competition in the post-colonial world.
In the post–Cold War era, none of us had the intellectual dexterity to fashion a simple slogan to match Kennan’s concept. As we tried to suggest in the January 1993 memo to Christopher, a strategy premised on the “enlargement” of the coalition and ideas that had won the Cold War was enticing, but had inherent limits in a world in which challenges to regional order were bound to emerge, globalization would produce its own contradictions and collisions, and America’s temporary dominance would inevitably be contested by the rise of others. As enlargement encountered constraints, and as we compounded them in Iraq in 2003 and in the financial crisis several years later, we struggled to shape a post-primacy alternative.
A successful American strategy beyond Trump will likely have to return to Obama’s central propositions about rebalancing our portfolio of global investments and tools, sharpening our attention on managing competition with great power rivals, and using our leverage and our capacity to mobilize other players to address twenty-first-century challenges. That ought to be infused with a bold and unapologetic vision for free people and free and fair markets, with the United States as a more attractive exemplar than it is today.
Asia continues to loom as our first priori
ty, with China’s rise the most consequential geopolitical trend of our time. President Trump’s unpredictability and detachment have opened the playing field for China, offering an unexpectedly early path to dominance in Asia. That China and its neighbors, as well as the United States, are entangled economically, their future prosperity wrapped up in one another’s success, is a brake on conflict, but not a guarantee against it. The unease among other players across Asia about Chinese hegemony creates a natural opportunity for Washington to knit together relationships with traditional allies like Japan and emerging partners like India. That was the origin of the Bush 43 administration’s long-range bet on India, which meant bending the rules on nonproliferation for an even wider strategic gain.
A deeper American focus on Asia makes transatlantic partnership more, not less, significant. It implies a new strategic division of labor with our European allies, where they take on even more responsibility for order on their continent, and do even more to contribute to possibilities for longer-term order in the Middle East, while the United States devotes relatively more resources and attention to Asia. It also demands a sustained effort at a trade and investment partnership that addresses new economic realities, expectations, and imperatives. That argues for a renewed Atlanticism, built on shared interests and values, in a world in which a rising China, a resurgent Russia, and persistent troubles in the Middle East ought to cement a common approach. Our main security challenge now is to consolidate, not expand, NATO—bolstering the sovereignty and political and economic health of Ukraine outside anyone’s formal military structures, and deterring Russian aggression. We have a deep interest in encouraging a vibrant, post-Brexit European Union.6
The Back Channel Page 43