Because we face real budget constraints, we have to make tough choices about how best to defend our interests.
Recognizing their traditional imperial “spheres of interest” will only embolden them to expand farther while betraying the sovereign nations that fall under their dominion. Words alone will not dissuade the Vladimir Putins and Xi Jinpings of this world. diplomacy can save trillions of dollars and many thousands of lives that would otherwise be spent responding to crises that explode because we ignored problems while they were still manageable.Īs geopolitical competition intensifies, we must supplement diplomacy with deterrence. The United States led others to begin addressing climate change, to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons, to fight the Ebola epidemic, to confront the Islamic State and to level economic playing fields. diplomacy helped end the Cold War, reunify Germany and build peace in the Balkans. Most Americans do not know the role our diplomats have played over the decades in preventing wars between nuclear-armed nations such as India and Pakistan between Israel and the Arab states and between China and Japan in the East China Sea.
leadership at a nadir, we are depleting one of our greatest assets: the ability to defuse conflicts and mobilize others in collective action. With a depleted senior diplomatic corps and key posts still unfilled, with cuts to foreign aid, with tariffs targeted at our closest allies and with confidence in U.S. Successive administrations have underfunded and undervalued our diplomacy, none more dangerously than the present one. That requires a combination of active diplomacy and military deterrence. So here is the challenge: Can we find a foreign policy of responsible global engagement that most Americans support, that draws the right lessons from our past mistakes, that steers between the equally dangerous shoals of confrontation and abdication, and that understands the difference between self-interest and selfishness? Such a policy would rest on four pillars:Ī responsible foreign policy seeks to prevent crises or contain them before they spiral out of control. It wasn’t a perfect world, but it was far better than the alternative.
But after World War II, when Americans stayed engaged, built strong alliances with fellow democracies, and shaped the rules, norms and institutions for relations among nations, we produced unprecedented global prosperity, democracy and security from which Americans benefited more than anyone. But so would embracing the alternative offered by thinkers across the ideological spectrum who, concerned that our reach exceeds our means, advise us to pull back without considering the likely consequences, as we did in the 1930s.īack then, the result was an even greater global conflagration. Then there are the new challenges of our own century-from cyberwarfare to mass migration to a warming planet-that no one nation can meet alone and no wall can contain.ĭoubling down on “America First,” with its mix of nationalism, unilateralism and xenophobia, would only exacerbate these problems.
Yet that president is going to face an increasingly dangerous world that looks more like the 1930s than the end of history-with populists, nationalists and demagogues on the rise autocratic powers growing in strength and increasingly aggressive Europe mired in division and self-doubt and democracy under siege and vulnerable to foreign manipulation. Whoever wins office in 2020 will have a hard time bucking a trend that preceded Trump and will likely survive him. The fact is, whatever tolerance most Americans had for the global role the United States embraced after World War II began to fade with the collapse of the Soviet Union and was shattered by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the 2008 financial crisis.
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