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Biden would probably continue course toward conflict with China
By Rachel Esplin Odell, Research Fellow
RealClear World, 10/23/20
After initially accusing President Trump of being insufficiently tough on China for its handling of the pandemic, the Biden-Harris campaign recently changed tack, signaling it would pursue more constructive relations with China in the spheres of public health and trade relations. The party platform adopted at the Democratic National Convention also explicitly disavowed a “new Cold War” with China.
READ HERE
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Debate: If this is the future of foreign policy, we’re all in trouble
By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, Contributing Editor
Responsible Statecraft, 10/23/20
Oh, the naiveté of the Quincy Institute, with their “Top 10 foreign policy questions.” Sure they predicted that their queries “probably” wouldn’t get asked back during the first presidential debate, but still, there was some hope that the event last night — which was billed with at least one national security segment — would throw us at least one bone.
READ HERE
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Why we can’t be friends with our allies
By Non-Resident Fellows Patrick Porter & Josh Shifrinson
Politico, 10/22/20
The 2020 contest between Donald Trump and Joe Biden has thrown into stark relief two distinct understandings of the United States’ relationship with its allies. Trump is famously said to view allies in transactional terms as partners of convenience that may need to be coerced or even cast aside. Biden and his team, in contrast, have been at pains to present the United States’ allies in personal terms—as what Biden calls the nation’s “friends.”
READ HERE
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What ever happened to democracy promotion?
By Paul Pillar, Non-Resident Fellow
Responsible Statecraft, 10/22/20
Democracy in the world is not doing well, and hasn’t been for the last several years. The watchdog organization Freedom House has recorded a 14-year decline in the political rights associated with democracy as well as other liberties that define a free, pluralistic society. Similarly, the Economist Intelligence Unit registered last year the worst score in its “Democracy Index” since it began compiling the figure in 2006.
READ HERE
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America has no duty to rule the world
By Daniel Bessner, Non-Resident Fellow
The New Republic, 10/21/20
The United States is the world’s overwhelming military power, and it’s not even close. The country controls about 750 overseas bases (China, by comparison, has only one foreign base, in Djibouti). It spends around $730 billion on its military, which is more than China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, and Brazil combined. It has over 190,000 soldiers deployed in approximately 140 foreign countries—around 70 percent of the world’s total. To many Americans and foreigners alike, this power appears as a natural fact of international relations. Very few people alive today can remember a time when the United States did not have the ability to destroy much of the globe.
READ HERE
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Learning from Trump in the Middle East
By Annelle Sheline, Research Fellow
RealClear World, 10/21/20
If Joe Biden becomes the next US president, many anticipate that his administration will offer a “return to normalcy,” for better or for worse. Despite the ways in which the Trump administration’s foreign policy has overpromised and underdelivered, there are certain aspects where Biden’s foreign policy team could learn from Trump’s approach, especially in the Middle East.
READ HERE
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McMaster ‘cheapens the sacrifice’ of troops by comparing Taliban talks to Nazi appeasement
By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, Contributing Editor
Responsible Statecraft, 10/21/20
When retired Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster was appointed National Security Advisor by newly-inaugurated President Donald Trump in 2017, hopeful observers called him one of the “adults in the room.”
READ HERE
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Why it’s a bad idea to ‘debate’ FDD CEO Mark Dubowitz
By Benjamin Armbruster, Managing Editor
Responsible Statecraft, 10/20/20
An obscure but important controversy erupted recently within the foreign policy community in the nation’s capital about whether a former Obama administration official should have participated in a “debate” with the leader of a DC think tank that has been engaged in lying and online harassment of critics while pushing for war and regime change in Tehran for more than a decade.
READ HERE
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How the US became the world’s police
By Sarah Souli/ Interviewed: Deputy Director for Policy and Research Stephen Wertheim
Teen Vogue, 10/19/20
The United States’ cultural identity is so interwoven with military and cultural dominance that we don’t necessarily stop to think of how, why, and when that happened. We spent much of the 20th and 21st centuries entangled in wars abroad, and we maintain military bases around the world. Mainstream thinking tends to assume that this has always been the case.
READ HERE
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Reframing America’s role in the world: The specter of isolationism
By Andrew Bacevich, President
TomDispatch, 10/19/20
The so-called Age of Trump is also an age of instantly forgotten bestselling books, especially ones purporting to provide the inside scoop on what goes on within Donald Trump’s haphazard and continuously shifting orbit. With metronomic regularity, such gossipy volumes appear, make a splash, and almost as quickly vanish, leaving a mark no more lasting than a trout breaking the surface in a pond.
READ HERE
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Anti-Semitism envoy appears to accuse Jason Rezaian of being an apologist for Iran
By Matthew Petti, Middle East Intern
Responsible Statecraft, 10/19/20
A State Department official accused two prominent Iranian-American figures of serving the Iranian regime, including one Iranian-American journalist who had been taken hostage by the Iranian government for nearly two years.
READ HERE
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Not to be left out of the China action, Marines roll out subversive new strategy
By Mark Perry, Senior Analyst
Responsible Statecraft, 10/19/20
US Marine officers are notoriously dismissive of those who talk about strategy. “Strategy?” a Marine who served in Vietnam says. “Here was our strategy: hey-diddle-diddle, straight-up-the-middle.” The description rings true: the Marine Corps’ most famous fights were straight-ahead affairs that gave the Corps its most celebrated moments: at Belleau Wood (in World War I), at Tarawa, Iwo Jima and Okinawa (in World War II), at Inchon (during Korea), at Hue (in Vietnam) and, most recently during the battles for Fallujah, back in 2004. Now, it seems, all of that is changing.
READ HERE
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Trump’s foreign policy chaos might work out
By Andrew Bacevich, President
Albuquerque Journal, 10/19/20
In the first year of Trump’s presidency, references to norms proliferated. Noted foreign policy analysts trumpeted respect for norms as a hitherto rarely noted signature of US policy. Disregarding norms offered evidence of defective statecraft. Trump was a norm-buster par excellence.
READ HERE
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FDD's online harassment against critics of Trump’s State Department
By Khody Akhavi, Multimedia Producer/ Featuring: Eli Clifton, Investigative Journalist at Large
Responsible Statecraft, 10/22/20
In May 2019, the State Department terminated the $1.5 million Iran Disinformation Project, purportedly intended to combat misinformation emanating from Iranian officials, in the wake of a scandal generated by the project’s attacks on domestic critics of the Trump administration’s policy. But the role Foundation for the Defense of Democracies served as a messaging hub for the controversial taxpayer-funded project has never been revealed until now.
WATCH HERE
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WEBCAST: US-Pakistan Counterterrorism cooperation beyond Afghanistan
With Shamila Chaudhary, Zoha Waseem, Asfandyar Mir, & Adam Weinstein
Quincy Institute, 10/20/20
WATCH HERE
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- Biden and Trump debate everything except foreign policy by Daniel DePetris/ Quoted: Deputy Director for Policy and Research Stephen Wertheim, Washington Examiner, 10/23/20
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The world order that Donald Trump revealed by Tom McTague and Peter Nicholas/ Quoted: Non-Resident Fellow Patrick Porter, The Atlantic, 10/22/20
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North Korea poised to test next US president with growing nuclear missile threat by Kim Gamel/ Quoted: Senior Research Fellow Jessica Lee, Stars and Stripes, 10/22/20
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PODCAST: The truth about the UN and US power, Interview with Deputy Director for Policy and Research Stephen Wertheim, The Majority Report, 10/20/20
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Why is America the world’s police? by Sam Lebovic/ Quoted: Deputy Director for Policy and Research Stephen Wertheim, Boston Review, 10/19/20
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