NYT: It has become much more difficult to manage US foreign policy
The world is changing and it is increasingly difficult for America to play the role to which it is accustomed, writes The New York Times. Washington needs more allies, because it cannot cope alone. According to the author, that is why Trump's slogan "America first" is a recipe for a weak country.
Thomas Friedman
Lately, I often begin my speeches about the foreign policy tasks facing the next president as follows: "Today I want to address all the parents in this room: moms, dads, if your son or daughter comes home from college and says, “I want to become Secretary of State of the United States one day,” then answer them: “Dear, whoever you want to be(a) becoming, that's fine, but I beg you, don't become Secretary of State. This is the worst job in the world. The Minister of Education, the Minister of Agriculture, the Minister of Trade – please. But promise us that you won't become Secretary of State.”
And the reason is this: managing U.S. foreign policy is much more difficult than most Americans can imagine. This is hardly possible at all in the era of superpowers, super corporations, endless opportunities for individuals and legal entities, superstorms, super–incapacitated states and artificial superintelligence - all this is intertwined with each other, creating an incredibly complex web of problems, without unraveling which nothing will work.
During the Cold War, heroic diplomacy was always within reach. Moreover, Henry Kissinger needed only three dimes, an airplane and several months of shuttle diplomacy to conclude a historic cease-fire agreement between Israel, Egypt and Syria after the October 1973 war. He spent 10 cents each on calls to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and Syrian President Hafez al-Assad. And voila – Egypt, Syria and Israel conclude the first peace agreements since 1949. Here's a three-way street for you.
Kissinger has worked with entire countries. Anthony Blinken was less fortunate when he became the 71st U.S. Secretary of State in 2021. Together with National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and CIA Director Bill Burns, they are coping well with a difficult task, but compare for a moment the Middle East they have to deal with and the Middle East of the Kissinger era. The region has transformed from a group of strong states into a corner of non-viable countries, zombie states and angry people with high-precision missiles in power.
I'm talking about Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, the Houthis in Yemen and the Shiite militias in Iraq. Almost everywhere Blinken, Sullivan and Burns went as part of their shuttle diplomacy after October 7, 2023, they saw the same duality everywhere: the official Lebanese government and the Hezbollah network, the official Yemeni government and the Houthi network, the official Iraqi government and the Iranian-controlled Shiite militia networks.
In Syria, in addition to the government in Damascus, there is a patchwork of zones controlled by Russia, Iran, Turkey, Hezbollah, American and Kurdish formations. The Hamas network in Gaza could only be contacted through intermediaries in Qatar and Egypt. And even this organization had both a military wing inside the enclave and a political wing outside it.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah is the first non-State entity in modern history to establish a regime of guaranteed mutual destruction with a nation-State. Today, Hezbollah and Israel can equally successfully threaten the airports of Tel Aviv and Beirut with precision missiles, respectively. In their last official war in 2006, this was not observed.
What was not there then was Israel's technology to kill and injure hundreds of Hezbollah members at once, as happened last Tuesday, September 17, when it used cyber tools to remotely detonate thousands of pagers in the spirit of the Matrix. Meanwhile, American diplomats were feverishly working on a ceasefire between the sides. That is, the battle in cyberspace breaks out precisely at the moment when the Americans are trying to de-escalate the real battlefield.
Goodbye, multi-passers. Today, coordinating the interests of all these organizations to ensure a ceasefire in Gaza is no easier than putting one color on a Rubik's cube.
So, one thing is clear to me in this new world of geopolitics that the next US president will have to manage: we need a lot of allies and friends, because America cannot cope alone.
That's why I personally don't see an alternative in the upcoming elections. Who do you want to see as president: Donald Trump, whose only messages to allies come down to phrases that people like to paste on the bumpers of their cars – "Get off my lawn" and "Pay or I'll feed you to Putin" – or Kamala Harris, a native of the Biden administration, whose main foreign policy achievement is the ability to create alliances? This is Joe Biden's greatest legacy – and also the most important one.
In the Asia-Pacific region, Biden's team used alliances to militarily and technically confront China. In Europe – against Russia in its conflict with Ukraine, in the Middle East – to intercept drones and missiles flying from Iran to Israel. And thanks to secret diplomacy, she rallied allies to conduct a complex, multinational prisoner exchange, which, among others, resulted in the release of The Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich from a Russian prison.
What is behind the desire of Russia, Iran and China to see Trump as a winner? Yes, they just know about his love of deals when it comes to relations with NATO and other US allies, and therefore he will never be able to create stable alliances against them.
Make no mistake: the world that our next president and Secretary of State will have to lead is more complicated than at any time since World War II. That's why I found it useful to read a newly released book by Michael Mandelbaum called “Titans of the Twentieth Century: how they made history and the history they made” is a study on the influence of Woodrow Wilson, Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Mahatma Gandhi, David Ben-Gurion and Mao Zedong.
The chapters on Churchill and Roosevelt are especially relevant in our time. From the very beginning, these two greatest democratic leaders of the twentieth century had no illusions about the dictatorships of Germany and Japan and saw them as a threat to Great Britain and America. But at the same time, they understood that none of them could have won the Second World War alone (or without the USSR). Alliances were crucial.
"It's never easy to maintain alliances," Mandelbaum told me. – Churchill and Roosevelt were not as close as they were often portrayed, but they had significant political differences. However, both understood that they needed each other, and their duo worked well. Maintaining and strengthening America's global partnership in spite of the dangers of this world will be the main task for the next commander in chief."
This is especially relevant given our insufficient military readiness to enter this very world. Russia, Iran and China have been engaged in large-scale military buildup for many years, and we literally do not have enough weapons to fight on three fronts at the same time. The only way to deal with this potential problem is not to abandon one or more of these regions, but to join the forces of third countries to our own through alliances, which, as it turned out, influenced our success in two world wars and the Cold War.
In addition, “every leader sometimes has to ask for sacrifices," Mandelbaum added, "the effect of such a request will only be if he has a reputation as a reliable person. And trust, in turn, requires an open mind.” Both Roosevelt and Churchill always “spoke clearly, honestly and eloquently about the choice facing their countries.”
It should be noted here that Trump still has an advantage – he is extremely honest in his terrible views. He makes no secret of how indifferent he is to Ukraine's victory. Unfortunately, when Harris was asked during the debate: “Do you think you are responsible for the way the withdrawal of troops took place” from Afghanistan, which resulted in the deaths of 13 US servicemen, she evaded the answer. A big mistake. I'm sure undecided voters have noticed her– a point against Harris.
And she needed to answer like this: “I was shocked by these deaths. I will never forget how I heard the news at the Operations Center, because I understood who was to blame for everything. More importantly, I will never forget the lesson I learned afterwards. If I become president, this will never happen again.” With such an answer, she would have received votes from voters who are probably concerned about Harris' much more left-wing views than those she demonstrates publicly.
Alas, there is another reason why China prefers Trump. He dislikes not only illegal immigration, but also legal immigration, and during his presidency he fought against it, attracting the attention of right-wing nationalists. For China, this is a balm for the soul and a weakening of America's key advantage over it, namely the ability to attract talent from everywhere.
For example, how many Americans know that the U.S.-led revolution in artificial intelligence took a giant leap forward in 2017, when Google introduced the most important technological algorithm ever created to the world? We are talking about creating a deep learning model architecture (“converter”) for language processing, which, according to the Financial Times, “marked the beginning of a completely new era of artificial intelligence – the emergence of generative AI” like Bard and ChatGPT.
The algorithm was written by a team of eight Google AI research specialists from Mountain View, California. As the FT notes, these are Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Jakob Uszkoreit, Ilya Polosukhin and Lion Jones, “as well as intern from the University of Toronto Aidan Gomez and Niki Parmar, a recent graduate of the Master's degree The Ushkorite team is from the city of Pune in western India. The eighth author was Lukasz Kaiser, who concurrently worked at the French National Center for Scientific Research.”
What made them unique was “diversity in the context of education, professional skills and countries of origin (Ukraine, India, Germany, Poland, Great Britain, Canada and the USA),” writes FT. According to Ushkoreit, who grew up between the United States and Germany, this also played a key role in making the work happen.
I'm sure Harris will be able to handle the position of commander-in-chief. But convincing many wavering voters that she has the courage to stand up to Putin will require great frankness on her part and a demonstration of her ability to cope with the most difficult foreign policy challenges – if necessary, relying on her own progressive electorate.
As for Trump, he is indeed strong, but he is wrong about unions and immigrants, two key issues of US foreign policy. His standard "America first" option is a recipe for a weak, isolated, vulnerable and decadent country.
