The question is no longer whether we should have a “power-based foreign policy,” but rather how we most effectively assert our power.
Over the past eight months, it has become clear that on foreign policy, the biggest contrast between the Trump administration and the Biden administration is their respective attitudes toward American power. Note that the actual power capabilities of the United States did not change with the transition. Rather, it was the willingness to assert American power that increased dramatically—as was sorely needed.
The Biden administration’s liberal internationalist “values-driven foreign policy” saw the United States as playing a global leadership role in creating and preserving a “rules-based international order” with which US national interests need not conflict. The Biden administration’s values emphasized process and the pursuit of agreement about the rules needed to achieve the level of cooperation and multilateral engagement that, according to liberal internationalism, will lead to global stability. American power was at best a backdrop for these aspirational endeavors, and more often than not, it was seen as an inconvenience or even an outright impediment.
Ironically, this aversion to American power resulted in a world far less hospitable to the very rules the Biden administration wanted to see followed. More alarming, it put American interests squarely in jeopardy. The fiasco of the Afghanistan withdrawal was as flagrant a show of powerlessness as the United States has put on since the fall of Saigon, made all the more horrific by the senseless loss of 13 American servicemembers. This impotence undoubtedly emboldened Vladimir Putin in weighing his decision to invade Ukraine, after which the Biden administration’s support for Ukraine was timid, heavy on rhetoric while light on military value, for fear of Russian escalation. Thus, the brutal stalemate continues today.
While happy to convene “summits for democracy” and needlessly castigate allies for failing to embrace progressive policy preferences, the Biden administration appeased and coddled repressive regimes like Iran and Venezuela but spurned the Iranian and Venezuelan people who were desperately fighting for their unalienable rights. And rather than recognizing China as an adversary and taking sufficient actions to deter the threat, the Biden administration clung naively to hopes that it could convince Beijing to be a responsible global actor. Under the Biden administration, the United States, though not actually weak, consistently acted as if it were.
In stark contrast, the Trump administration has little reservation about flexing and deploying American power. Rather than the chaotic images of Kabul, we now saw American B-2 stealth bombers fly untouched into the heart of Iran and deal a devastating blow to its nuclear program. After declaring, quite correctly, that Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro was not only an illegitimate dictator but also the head of a narco-terrorist organization that partnered with China, Russia, and Iran to threaten American interests, the Trump administration deployed a guided missile cruiser, attack submarines, destroyers, and amphibious vessels reportedly containing a Marine expeditionary unit just off the Venezuelan coast. In response to the Trump administration’s threats to take back the Panama Canal in response to growing Chinese influence over this critical choke point for open sea lines of communication, Panama agreed to withdraw from China’s Belt and Road Initiative. President Donald Trump’s insistence that European allies spend more on defense paid off following Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in our allies’ realization that European security must be their primary concern.
While not every flex has necessarily been productive—threatening to annex Greenland and failing to sufficiently distinguish allies from adversaries on things like tariffs come to mind—Trump rightly grasps that national power is the foundation upon which everything rests. Contrary to the wishes of Wilsonians, international “rules” and “norms” are not self-executing but require power to maintain.
Moving forward, the question is no longer whether we should have a “power-based foreign policy,” but rather how we most effectively assert our power. That said, this assessment need not and should not be strictly confined to cold realpolitik calculations. Every great power in history has sought to shape the world to reflect, or at least be compatible with, the values it views as most essential to its own identity—not in lieu of advancing its national interests but as a means to advance its interests.
To be compatible with our national character, American foreign policy should take into consideration how our power can further an enlightened view of our national interests, consistent with our founding principles—the belief in the God-given dignity of every person, a commitment to ordered liberty at home, and a strong preference for free and open spaces abroad. Our foreign policy should be centered on strength and promoting good behavior and deterring bad behavior among international actors, and not be measured against amorphous globalist ideals or progressive policy preferences, but against the standard of what serves American interests as enlightened by those founding principles.
This shift to a power-based foreign policy is made all the more urgent by the reality that the United States has enemies. We do not have to invent them, nor do we seek them out. They announce themselves and their grievances with our way of life and the international order our power currently upholds with some regularity. Though they are free to criticize as they please, when states or non-state actors take action, especially violent action, in opposition to US national interests, the game must change.
The United States should be unsparing in countering such challenges, meeting them in proportion to the danger they pose. We must deter those who identify themselves as our enemies as best we can and defeat their challenges when we must. We should cajole them when possible, threaten them when necessary, and punish them for bad actions that harm us.
In an era when adversaries like China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran are coordinating to undermine our values, interests, and leadership around the world, the World War II and Cold War-era moral distinction between good and evil, or just better and worse, is due for a comeback. This distinction should not serve as a set of handcuffs—America has worked with despots before, and will need to again now, in order to stave off greater threats—but rather as a needed rejection of any moral equivalence between the United States and our chief adversaries. While liberal internationalists will persist in hoping that these repressive regimes will become responsible global citizens if we can just find the right words to persuade them to reform, the people of Xinjiang, Ukraine, and Israel know far too well how naïve this is.
The irony is that a strong United States pursuing its national interest in furtherance of its founding principles is the best way to secure and advance a freer, more open world. But American power must remain the top priority, as there is no order without power to sustain it. This may be less sentimental or moralistic than what we have been used to, but there’s a good chance it will be more successful.
Source:https://nationalinterest.org/feature/a-power-driven-foreign-policy