The world-stage timetable is not the same as the US political timetable

The bad guys are filling the vacuum

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Post-America faces a plethora of challenges. There’s the massive debt that is set to swallow any and all other uses of government revenue sooner rather than later. There are the ongoing culture-war tumors afflicting the body politic: the sexuality-related ones (and the attendant assaults on the English language, such as referring to an individual person as “they”), the back-and-forth between race-hustlers and society’s few remaining bigots, subsidization of recycling and play-like energy forms (and the looks one gets when one says one doesn’t recycle), blatant Jew-hatred going unchecked on prestigious university campuses. There’s the rampant loneliness and deterioration of locally focused civic life. A population that isn’t replacing itself. Stupid economic policy coming from both the Trumpist Right (tariffs) and the Left (student loan forgiveness, a tax vision deliberately designed to stoke class envy). The pourous southern border.

These are all secondary.

I know foreign policy perennially ranks low among voters’ prioritized concerns. That has facilitated the populist Right’s isolationist impulse. Against the litany of pressing issues enumerated above, why should one put much focus on what’s happening in central Europe, the Middle East, or the Pacific rim?

The obvious answer is that the danger level in each of these arenas is particularly acute these days.

If you haven’t had a chance yet to check out the Michael Lucchese piece I included in Saturday’s round-up, I’d encourage you to do so. It’s quite the upside-the-head, but it will leave you with no doubt as to the peril with which the present moment is fraught:

In the first volume of his World War II memoir, The Gathering Storm, Winston Churchill insisted that cataclysmic conflict was in fact entirely preventable. Throughout the 1930s, Western powers, including Britain’s Conservative government, chose to appease totalitarians instead of deterring them — and the world paid the price. “The counsels of prudence and restraint may become the prime agents of mortal danger,” Churchill wrote, and “the middle course adopted from desires for safety and a quiet life may be found to lead direct to the bull’s-eye of disaster.” 

That is why America cannot afford the “false reptile prudence” of isolationism counseled by some in Trump’s orbit. The “restraint” practiced by the Biden administration did not cool down global conflict; it just provided more kindling for the fire sparked by Russian, Chinese, and Iranian ambitions.

At Foreign Affairs today, Daniel W. Drezner flat-out says that the age of American exceptionalism is over. He starts by noting the much-pointed-out fact that this time, 2024, Trump won not only the Electoral College, but the popular vote, and won all the swing states. This means that “[t]o the rest of the world, the picture should be clear: Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement will define U.S. foreign policy for the next four years.”

He’s a known quantity now:

. . . foreign actors will have a much better read of Donald Trump.

Trump will navigate world politics with greater confidence this time around. Whether he will have any better luck bending the world to his “America first” brand is another question entirely. What is certain, however, is that the era of American exceptionalism has ended. Under Trump, U.S. foreign policy will cease promoting long-standing American ideals. That, combined with an expected surge of corrupt foreign policy practices, will leave the United States looking like a garden-variety great power.

Trump’s foreign policy worldview has been clear ever since he entered political life. He believes that the U.S.-created liberal international order has, over time, stacked the deck against the United States. To change that imbalance, Trump wants to restrict inward economic flows such as imports and immigrants (although he likes inward foreign direct investment). He wants allies to shoulder more of the burden for their own defense. And he believes that he can cut deals with autocrats, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putinor North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, that will reduce tensions in global trouble spots and allow the United States to focus inward.

Equally clear are Trump’s preferred means of getting what he wants in world politics. The former and future president is a strong believer in using coercion, such as economic sanctions, to pressure other actors. He also subscribes to the “madman theory,” in which he will threaten massive tariff increases or “fire and fury” against other countries in the firm belief that such threats will compel them into offering greater concessions than they otherwise would. At the same time, however, Trump also practices a transactional view of foreign policy, demonstrating a willingness during his first term to link disparate issues to secure economic concessions. On China, for example, Trump displayed a recurring willingness to give ground on other issues—the crackdown in Hong Kong, the repression in Xinjiang, the arrest of a senior executive of the Chinese tech company Huawei—in return for a better bilateral trade deal.

Here’s one way that the Trump era is changing fault lines. Communist China is now positioning itself to be the champion of free trade to the swath of nation-states that aren’t fully committed to either the bad guys or what remains of the West:

As Donald Trump threatens to impose tariffs on the entire world, Xi Jinping is once again wasting no time in positioning himself as the premier defender of the international trading system. 

China’s leader warned on Friday that the global economy was fracturing as protectionism spreads, leading to “severe challenges.” The world, he declared, had “entered a new period of turbulence and change.” 

“Dividing an interdependent world is going back in history,” Xi said in a speech at the APEC CEO Summit in Peru read on stage by one of his ministers. 

He repeated that theme in a speech on Saturday to leaders of APEC’s 21 member economies, including US President Joe Biden. 

“We should tear down the walls impeding the flow of trade, investment, technology and services, uphold stable and smooth industrial and supply chains, and promote economic circulation in the region and the world,” Xi said.

For Xi, it’s a role he played when Trump first rose to power in 2017. Back then, China’s head of state urged global business elites at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to reject trade wars and protectionism, saying it would cause “injury and loss to both sides.” 

In the eight years since, Trump imposed punitive tariffs on China that were largely kept in place by the Biden administration, which also stepped up efforts to deny Beijing advanced technology. As he prepares to take office again in January, Trump is now threatening to impose 60% tariffs on China — and, just as crucially, 10% to 20% on the rest of the world.

That universal tariff threat is giving Xi a fresh opening to improve ties with a range of governments bracing for tough negotiations with Trump. On Friday, Xi met one-on-one with the leaders of Thailand, Singapore, Chile, South Korea, Japan and New Zealand — all important US allies and security partners in the Asia-Pacific.  

You were no doubt cheered by Qatar’s eviction of Hamas’s leadership last week. You may find your buoyancy tempered by the fact that the Hamas leadership is now being hosted by Turkey. Erdogan has long been arguably the thorniest of NATO nation leaders, holding out until late in the game on inclusion of Sweden and Finland in that alliance, not to mention being most unreliable regarding Syria. What is Israel to do if its intelligence shows that it has a clear shot at some Hamas leaders in some building in Ankara? Would it hesitate due to Article 5 of the NATO charter?

How does North Korea feel about a negotiated settlement in Ukraine? That’s not within the realm of what the Kim regime envisions:

• The North Korean foreign minister, Choe Son Hui, said her country will back Russia until it achieves victory in Ukraine during talks in Moscow on Friday with the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov. She said Pyongyang had no doubt that under Putin’s “wise leadership” Russia will “achieve a great victory in their sacred struggle to protect the sovereign rights and security interests”.

How are they concretely demonstrating this confidence? So far, by sending 10,000 troops to fight in Ukraine with an analysis by G-20 nations concluding that it’s reasonable to anticipate a total of 100,000 before long.

Another development that, at first glance, seems encouraging is the Biden administration’s giving of the go-ahead to Ukraine to use US-suppled missile to strike deep into Russia.

But it comes along pretty late in the game:

"Removing targeting restrictions will allow the Ukrainians to stop fighting with one hand tied behind their back," Alex Plitsas, senior non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council, said.

"However, like everything else, I believe history will say the decision came way too late. Just like the ATACMS, HIMARS, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, Abrams tanks and F-16. They were all needed much sooner," he added.

Despite Zelenskiy's pleas, the White House had been reluctant to allow U.S.-supplied weapons to be used to strike targets deep inside Russia for fear this could ratchet up the conflict.

Republican U.S. Representative Mike Turner, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement that Biden’s decision was long overdue and that there were still too many restrictions on Ukraine.

But he added: “This first step will put pressure on Vladimir Putin as President-elect Trump returns to the White House and works to end this war.”

Kyiv's other allies have been supplying weapons but with restrictions on how and when they can be used inside Russia, out of concern such strikes could prompt retaliation that draws NATO countries into the war or provokes a nuclear conflict.

Our enemies are not stupid. They have to see that the US is at a particularly vulnerable time - the usual flux involved in a transition of administrations and Congressional control, but also a senile current president and - well, the transactionally-oriented incoming president described above. And the utterly unserious team he wants to put in place in various national-security positions. This would be the ideal time to cause some major havoc.

Americans continue to whistle past the graveyard, assuming that somehow things will settle down to some kind of recognizable stability. That’s because everybody from my generation (the Boomers, who were raised during the peak of Western material advancement) to the Z-ers has lived in unprecedented safety, comfort, opportunity and distraction. We have no idea how most of the world lived in their absence, and how much of it still does.

Because we’ve squandered our birthright, we’ll be finding out.