In our recent forays into international relations, the United States seems to have followed one consistent policy with the GOP Trump administration and the Democratic Biden leadership: isolate, punish and draw clear lines in the sand with our international foes. We do not have remotely the communications with a litany of global antagonists, a marked contrast to the red phone era of the Cold War with the Soviet Union with, to name the more obvious: Russia, China, Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Syria. The last administration that attempted to keep lines of communication open was under Barak Obama.
In earlier eras, out ability to communicate with countries that were autocratic and far from any notion of personal freedom, had distinct benefits. We could mediate behind the scenes with regional antagonists. Iran and Saudi Arabia. Israel and most of the Arab world. Even for a significant period, China and Russia. We could protect American interests and shortcut defusing dangerous situations. Instead, we have sanctions and ominous threats back and forth. We have shackled our diplomatic tools and limited our options to solve problems.
We have also ceded much of our mediation power to other countries willing to speak to nations where we should have the ultimate diplomatic sway. China easily stepped into the Middle Eastern void by bringing Shiite extremist Iran to the diplomatic table with Sunni extremist Saudi Arabia. To our embarrassment. We do not communicate with Iran, which we have heavily sanctioned and which is supplying arms to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. China saw and opportunity, the first of many, I am sure.
As the China escalates her diplomatic presence globally, even as she covets Taiwan and desires to dominate the sea lanes off her eastern coastline, China’s massive economic power has profound reach all over the world. Coupled with her regional military strength (our navy is spread all over the world), now with the largest navy on earth modernizing rapidly, her ability to invest and lend massive sums to nations everywhere, just as the United States cuts back foreign aid, portends for a nuclear-powered adversary the likes of which we have never seen before. Xi’s recent meeting with Putin underscores that direct challenge to Western powers by an autocratic combination of staggering power.
Indeed, any American political party willing to open negotiating channels with unpopular autocratic regimes faces a new and open domestic hostility that encompasses both sides of the aisle. Our overt antagonism has led the Chinese foreign minister to predict an inevitable military conflict between the US and China… but there is no evidence of a possible dialog with China to forestall that “inevitability.” Democrats and Republicans in Congress seem united against even a détente with China, even as our trade with the People’s Republic has never been greater.
But the GOP itself seems of two minds about isolationism versus global engagement. The Trump administration pulled the nation out of international treaties, from nuclear accords to international trade agreements, and has always held Vladimir Putin in high regard. Both Trump and DeSantis, the GOP frontrunners, are isolationists. Even in world that is overconnected and deeply dependent on international trade. The notion of a completely economically and politically independent United States, which is dramatically unrealistic, seems to be the underlying vector.
The Republican Party is split between Reagan internationalists – which include Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, John Cornyn of Texas and DeSantis’ home-state Sen. Marco Rubio – and the uber rightwing that champions the isolationist vision of both Trump and DeSantis. Keep those sanctions in place, cut off lines of communication, avoid compromises against hardline believers and cut off support for Ukrainian resistance against Russia. It’s not our war, they say. “Becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not” one of America’s “vital national interests,” DeSantis told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. And we know Trump both admires Putin and harbors ill will to Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, who failed to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden when Trump requested that “favor.”
Writing for the March 20th Los Angeles Times, David Lauter describes the shifting sands of public opinion on these issues: “Foreign policy doesn’t usually determine the outcome of American elections. Some elections, though, have a long-term effect on U.S. policy… The 2024 contest is shaping up to be one of those, especially on the Republican side, where the election could solidify the party’s move from the assertive internationalism of the Ronald Reagan era toward the more isolationist views associated with former President Trump.
“Such a move won’t come without a struggle: Reagan-era policies still draw strong support from many of the party’s most powerful senators and their allies in the party’s foreign policy establishment… An early round of that fight burst into public view [in mid-March] after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis released a statement in which he downplayed the importance of the war in Ukraine and appeared to side with Trump in opposing strong U.S. support for Kyiv… But the debate within the GOP goes well beyond DeSantis and his effort to gain support among conservative primary voters who back Trump.
“Nor are the Democrats immune. In both parties, changes are coming on major foreign policy issues, driven in part by big differences between the views of the millennial generation and older groups. The unfolding presidential campaign will test how far public sentiment has shifted.” Some of youngest Democratic members of Congress are questioning the use of federal funds for Ukraine when so many issues in the United States are crying for money. If Russia is unchecked, however, how long can the United States avoid Putin’s expansionist lust? Xi and Taiwan?
But the split within the GOP is more dramatic: “[Lindsey] Graham accused DeSantis of trying to appease Russian President Vladimir Putin, likening him to Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister of the 1930s who sought to placate the Nazis by forcing neighboring Czechoslovakia to give up territory… Two Republican presidential hopefuls, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and former Vice President Mike Pence, also criticized DeSantis (and Trump, by implication) on Ukraine, setting up the war as one of the early dividing lines in the GOP field.
“‘The Russian government is a powerful dictatorship that makes no secret of its hatred of America,’ Haley said in a statement, adding that Putin is ‘attempting to brutally expand by force into a neighboring pro-American country’ and that the U.S. has a strong national interest in Ukraine’s success.” Lauter. Whatever the result, the pragmatic approach (“realpolitik”) of administrations past, on both sides of the aisle, has shifted to purely ideological lines riveted into the sand. And that approach just might be most dangerous choice of all.
I’m Peter Dekom, and I long for those olden days when “what’s best for America” was driving our diplomatic policy.
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