A Return to Great Power Diplomacy?
Diplomacy is vital. Balance of Power Diplomacy is dangerous.
In his Foreign Affairs piece , “The Return of Great Power Diplomacy: How Strategic Dealmaking Can Fortify American Power,” A. Wess Mitchell argues that:
“… the fact is that Washington was in dire need of a new kind of diplomacy. After the end of the Cold War, the United States moved away from using negotiations to promote the national interest. Convinced that history had ended and that they could remake the world in America’s image, successive U.S. presidents came to rely on military and economic force as the primary tools of foreign policy. When they did use diplomacy, it was usually not to enhance U.S. power but to try to build a global paradise in which multilateral institutions would supplant countries and banish war entirely.”
He and I agree on one thing: the United States needs to make better use of diplomacy. Since World War II, we have relied disproportionately on military force to assert our will and achieve our objectives in the international arena. This is especially true since the end of the Cold War. The first Gulf War, with the international coalition George H. W. Bush put together and the resultant limited war aims (push the aggressor nation out of the country it illegally occupied), offered a glimmer of what might have been. But the collapse of the Soviet Union left the United States believing it stood alone as the sole super power capable of (and responsible for) addressing emerging global conflicts (like in the Balkans). All too often, military power was the tool successive administrations turned to first. Thus, U.S. diplomats were pulled along almost as an afterthought as the United States entered the era of the “Long Wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. military began to play an ever greater role in the conduct of U.S. diplomacy.
…the United States needs to make better use of diplomacy.
But that is really where Mitchell and I part ways. I have significant differences with many of his other assertions.
As a historian, I appreciate the way that Mitchell laid out the historic case for the return of Great Power diplomacy. Austrian Foreign Minister Klemens von Metternich and German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck were masters of diplomacy and created an impressive balance of power system that allowed their countries to play an outsized role in international relations. It worked brilliantly…if you ignore what it led to in 1914. The events of the summer of 1914 and the slaughter of the ensuing four years revealed starkly what happens when balances of power start to tip. The resulting cataclysm, extended to 1945 and the end of World War II, is what led U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt to look for some other way of organizing international relations.
The Cold War that followed World War II also played a significant role in shaping the way the United States approached international relations. Spreading American “values” was really nothing new in U.S. diplomatic history. After Manifest Destiny and the United States’ march across the continent, the United States turned its attention overseas in 1898 with the Spanish American War and the purported desire to “liberate” Cuba from Spanish control. American values-based diplomacy received another impetus during World War I from President Woodrow Wilson and his 14-points plan for ending the war. The Cold War amplified this by turning the conflict between two superpowers into a conflict between two ideologies: “communism” and “freedom.” Those who made U.S. foreign policy decided that spreading democracy and U.S. values was the U.S. national interest, not despite U.S. interests.
In his article, Mitchell argues the United States should abandon these efforts to create what he calls a “liberal utopia” and return to some mythical era of hard-nosed practical interest-based diplomacy. In doing so, he pushes the old saw that the U.S. goal should be splitting Russia and China. To be sure, he acknowledges that complicating Russia’s relationship with China “will prove tricky” and that “It is unlikely that Russia can be cleaved entirely from China…” But despite acknowledging the real shared interests between the two powers, he misunderstands the real depth and breadth of their relationship. Theirs is a serious, strategic partnership with roots in the late-Soviet era. Since then, the two have moved steadily closer. The Russian war against Ukraine (starting in 2014) and the western reaction to that war have served as a catalyst for growth of their bilateral relationship, but the key ingredients and foundations were already there. Russia and China share not only strategic interests, but a worldview---the very ideological approach to foreign policy that Mitchell urges the United States to abandon.
In addition, Mitchell advises the administration to create conditions to turn Russia’s attention eastward—toward Asia—rather than westward—against NATO. That reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of Russia and its foreign policy. Russian President Vladimir Putin began a pivot to Asia in 2012, to align his policies and economy in that direction two years before the annexation of Crimea. Of course, his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 dramatically accelerated the growth of trade with China, but it was growing fairly steadily well before then. It was a conscious Russian policy choice, not something forced upon the Kremlin by western hostility.
Russia and China share not only strategic interests, but a worldview.
Splitting these two countries will be much more than tricky—it would require a long-term, fully believable abandonment by the United States of centuries-old foreign policy beliefs. The United States would have to abandon its long-standing role as an evangelical democracy. Convincing other powers that we have abandoned the “Empire for Liberty” would take years. Convincing all of the stakeholders in U.S. foreign policy to do the same would likely be even more difficult.
In that regard, Mitchell commits the classic realist error of assuming that foreign policy can be divorced from domestic factors. The United States is a democratic system, which means it’s messy. So is its foreign policy, which reflects the varied interests of different administrations, Congresses, and other groups that lobby those policymakers.
Accusing U.S. diplomats of advancing their own agendas, progressive or otherwise, is just patently unfair. I will confess that over my twenty years in the Foreign Service I became increasingly flustered by the quadrennial proliferation of “special envoys” and the bureaucracy that comes with them. And any Foreign Service Officer who has ever had to draft one of the increasing multitudes of Congressionally-mandated reports no doubt shares my view. But the offices and Congressional reports and everything else we did as representatives of the American people were mandated by the representatives of the American people. U.S. diplomats advance the agenda of the American people as expressed through their elected representatives.
Finally, a reality check on the recommendations in the article: first, training America’s diplomats requires a training float, not a massive cut of State Department and Foreign Service personnel. If the Trump administration really were committed to any kind of diplomacy, much less strategic diplomacy, dramatically slashing the State Department budget would not be the approach to take. Trump is tilting the balance of foreign policy power even more strongly in the direction of the Pentagon.
Second, other countries have agency. They choose who they want to align with based upon their interests, and, for many countries, whether or not their values and worldviews align with those of other countries. Abandoning principles in the interest of gaining only power is unlikely to win us the kind of allies we can trust.
Third, the assumption that the United States did not pursue its own interests is flawed. Trade with China may not match Mitchell’s perception of U.S. interests, but for many Americans, affordable goods were their priority. And bringing countries into organizations like the World Trade Organization (WTO) is intended to have them in a system of trade rules that are enforceable.
History has shown that balance-of-power politics is not the only or even the best way to advance national interests. Values-based diplomacy including within a framework of international organizations can be extremely effective too. But it requires real investment in diplomacy. In other words, the opposite of what the Trump administration has done since coming into office.