“Indeed, although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges, the region is quieter than it has been for decades”

– Jake Sullivan, Foreign Affairs, November/December 2023

“What is he saying?”

– A friend, upon reading Sullivan’s essay

In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan weighs in on the challenges facing his country in the year ahead. He dwells on China and Russia and reflects on the Biden administration’s industrial policy, framing the latter as both necessary and pragmatic. Strong international power, he argues by way of justification, depends on a strong economy. 

Given that US foreign policy is still the most influential in the world, this is something of a no-brainer. Yet its implications are radical. It would mean moving away from the culture of deregulation that became mainstreamed in the 1990s, but “placed insufficient focus on both American workers and the planet”.

It is unclear how the alternatives to the old policies, proposed by Sullivan and the Biden administration, will help the planet, whatever their impact on American workers may be and regardless of the rhetoric of clean energy undergirding them. But they represent a rupture with and radical departure from the past. Almost like a mantra, Sullivan has been repeating them since 2016. 

This is, at one level, a frank admission of the inadequacies of the model of globalisation and liberalisation which Democratic administrations have been pursuing since Bill Clinton. At another level, it is also an acknowledgement of how Donald Trump mobilised the backlash against that model to get himself elected.

Trump’s spectre

Trump may be gone, but his spectre has not. The US will face elections next year. Biden may not contest again – he is the oldest serving president in US history – but he has a cohort of loyalists who will more or less continue his policies. Robert F. Kennedy, Jnr, has established himself as a maverick populist, whose rhetoric and policies invoke William Jennings Bryan, against Biden, while the Republican Party has put out one fringe candidate after another, all agreed on discontinuing Biden’s policies. Sullivan may be concerned about the challenges facing the US, but he is also probably concerned about the challenges facing the President, since his vision for American power aligns with the latter’s.

But if the Biden administration thinks this vision will win it votes next year, it faces an uphill task in the months ahead. True, the Government has implemented policies that, on the face of it, go beyond anything Trump did in safeguarding the domestic economy. It may have been a Republican president who dismantled the economy, but it is now Republicans who are calling for greater protection for domestic producers, and it is the party that paved the way for China’s admission to the World Trade Organisation that is giving the protectionists a good run for their money. Indeed, Biden is now talking about wind turbine blades being manufactured in Pittsburgh rather than Beijing.

However, this does not mean that Republicans and Democrats see eye to eye. If at all, the level of polarisation has worsened over the last three years. Partly, this may be because of recent State rulings on Trump’s eligibility to run for office. Some have been in his favour, others not so. When it comes to these rulings, however, it’s not the red states or the blue states that will matter; it’s the swing states. And if recent polls are anything to go by, Biden’s popularity is slipping among these demographics.

Biden’s world

Biden has achieved the worst of all possible worlds. His opponents on the right think he is not being strong enough on China, and needlessly aggressive on Russia. His opponents on the left think he is being too supportive of Israel, and too dismissive of Palestine. One can disagree or agree with these opinions, but one can also make a case for them. 

All in all, his stance or non-stance on Palestine shows the US’s rank hypocrisy on international law and human rights: it is willing to see Ukraine as a small state besieged by an aggressive power but is not ready to share the same opinion regarding Palestine. On the other hand, it talks about a rules-based order, even the importance of tech cooperation with Beijing, but is still pursuing tech-isolationism, contradicting even Sullivan’s remarks:

“… the United States and China are engaged in a rapid and high-stakes technological competition, but the two sides need to be able to work together on the risks that arise from artificial intelligence. Doing so is not a sign of going wobbly. It reflects a cleareyed assessment that AI could pose unique challenges to humanity and that great powers have a collective responsibility to deal with them.”

The biggest flaw in Sullivan’s reasoning, however, is that he does not even touch on how the US can reinforce its credibility in places where it has lost the little credibility it once had. The Global South does figure in his essay, but only briefly: “Washington should be realistic about its expectations when dealing with these countries, respecting their sovereignty and their right to make decisions that advance their own interests. But it also needs to be clear about what is most important to the United States. That is how we will seek to shape relations with them: so that on balance they have incentives to act in ways consistent with US interests.”

US foreign policy

This isn’t just contradictory, it’s also depressingly predictable: Washington will be realistic when dealing with countries like us, but it will put its interests ahead and ensure we get enough carrot to stick to its script. This is the sort of hegemonical arrogance that is losing Washington what little support it has. 

The way things are going, the US does not seem to have got the message yet. If it had, it would have course-corrected on Palestine a month ago. That it still hasn’t, that it still sticks to Israel’s right to defend itself, even as one bloc after another abandons its line, and US allies like Australia call for a ceasefire while others like Ukraine abstain, thus speaks volumes about the extent of ‘US power’.

Speaking at the convocation of the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies last November, President Ranil Wickremesinghe caustically remarked that US foreign policy has now become the foreign policy of the US middle-class. 

It is this middle-class, and sections of the working class, that the Biden administration is targeting through its industrial policies. In focusing on them, however, Biden has neglected other demographics. Seeing the rising tide of rage and discontent against Israeli occupation of Gaza everywhere – in New York, in Congress, and in Hollywood – one wonders for how long a country that sees itself as a global leader can ignore these groups. My guess is, not too long.

(The writer is the Chief International Relations Analyst at Factum, an Asia-Pacific focused foreign policy think tank based in Colombo and accessible via www.factum.lk. He can be reached at uditha@factum.lk.)