It looks as though Trump’s foreign policy will deviate significantly from the Biden version. In place of a policy devoted to gauzy idealism Trump is more likely to practice RealPolitik, a pursuit of the national interest. It will not be advancing democracy, pretending that liberal democracy will solve all of the world’s troubles, but will assert national interest, while respecting the national interest of other nations.
Joel Kotkin lays out the stakes:
The new realpolitik marks the end of an era in which politics was defined largely by ideology and religion. As in the 19th century, world events now revolve around control of markets, resources, technology, and military aptitude. In this new paradigm, institutions like the United Nations and the International Court of Justice are largely irrelevant, as are climate confabs and the high-minded pronunciamentos of the World Economic Forum.
As for the bad old policy, Kotkin argues that the Biden administration was one of its more inept practitioners. Few administrations have reached the level of Biden-Blinken incompetence:
Rather than firming up the West, Biden’s secretary of state Anthony Blinken—whom Tablet acidly described as “Neville Chamberlain with an iPad”—has been a fevered fireman unable to put out fires.
Blinken’s foreign-policy script has failed to arrest China’s rise, prevent or repel Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, and has seen an equally awful conflict erupt across the Middle East.
America may still be a world-leading military and economic power, but it has been unable to cope with assaults on its economy, its communications, and even its elections by Russia, China, and Iran. Trump can claim, with some justification, that he left the White House in an era of relative peace and has returned to a chaotic world in which the West is in retreat.
While we have been pursuing worldwide democracy China has been pursuing its national interest. It has been investing in nations around the world in its Belt and Road initiative. The point is not to sell Communism, but to sell China, to create trading partners and to do business.
Of course, the problems are far from clear. We seem to be losing out to China in the competition over world trade. And yet, is that because we are being out-competed or because China is cheating.
The Trump foreign policy team holds it as an article of faith that we engaged in disadvantageous trade agreements because we wanted to produce democracy in the Middle Kingdom. That the Chinese government never wanted to have anything to do with democracy did not seem to bother us.
Trump’s re-election was delivered by those who have felt the lash of free trade, notably from China. The left-wing think-tank EPI reports that China’s huge trade surplus destroyed over 3.7 million jobs between 2001 and 2018, and living standards across the de-industrialising West have worsened, particularly for the middle class. Europe has endured a decade of stagnation, while Americans’ life expectancy has fallen for the first time in peace time.
One suspects that there is more to this than bad trade deals. One understands that as we sanction China and try to choke off its trade advantage, it has not been sitting idly by. It just stopped exporting some of the minerals that we need to produce high tech gadgets.
Kotkin believes that we have certain distinct advantages in the current world competition:
Unlike Germany, Japan, Britain, or France, however, America enjoys an enormous resource base and a huge market, making it unnecessary to conquer vast territories to support its economy.
The US remains both the world’s largest food exporter and energy producer. In the world of realpolitik, this gives it leverage against its chief adversary, China, the world’s largest agricultural importer and fossil-fuel market.
This ignores the fact that it is not that easy to onshore manufacturing. And, dare we mention, that we are not producing enough engineers to compete effectively in high technology.
Kotkin makes a point that other writers, like David Goldman, have been making. As much as we would like to think it, that nation is not really a Communist dictatorship. It’s behavior says otherwise.
As was the case in 19th-century Europe, China’s goal is to harvest resources like copper, soybeans, and fish, while providing markets for Chinese exporters and builders of major infrastructure like the ports, roads, trains, and airports.
He adds this point:
Nationalism is the prime motivator today, not Marxist class struggle. In 2018, ministry official Zhao Lijian called efforts to slow China’s dominion “as stupid as Don Quixote versus the windmills.” China’s victory, he tweeted, “is unstoppable.”
While many on the right and left consider China to be an enemy state, one suspects that a Donald Trump might well choose detente-- that is fair competition over belligerence.
One does not like to belabor the obvious, but over the past forty-something years, China has undergone a massive spurt of economic growth. Its per capita GDP has increased by some 3,000%. You will not, I trust, imagine that this was produced by Communism.
It was, however, produced without the benefit of what we gingerly call liberal democracy, without free elections, free speech or transgender rights. Go figure.
As for the next steps, do not be surprised if Donald Trump, China hawk that he is, calls for detente with China. If Nixon could promote detente with Russia and could travel to China to meet with Chairman Mao in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, Trump might well surprise the world by trying to reset relations with China and Russia.
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