18 minute read
Rebecca Lissner and Mira Rapp-Hooper
A NEW WAY TO LOOK AT THE WORLD
CAN AMERICA REINVENT ITS FOREIGN POLICY IN
these post-post Cold War times? From the October 6, 2020, online program “Rebecca Lissner and Mira Rapp-Hooper: Re-Imagining U.S. Foreign Policy.” Dr. REBECCA LISSNER Ph.D., Assistant Professor, U.S. Naval War College; Co-Author, An Open World: How America Can Win the Contest for Twenty‑First‑Century Order Dr. MIRA RAPP-HOOPER Ph.D., Senior Fellow, Yale Law School; Co-Author, An Open World: How America Can Win the Contest for Twenty‑First‑Century Order In conversation with Dr. GLORIA DUFFY, President and CEO, The Commonwealth Club of California
Photo by stokpic.
A NEW WAY TO LOOK AT THE WORLD
GLORIA DUFFY: It’s my great pleasure to introduce today’s program and guests— Rebecca Lissner, assistant professor at the U.S. Naval War College, and Mira RappHooper, senior fellow at Yale Law School. They are coauthors of the new book An Open World: How America Can Win the Contest for Twenty‑First‑Century Order. I’m also pleased to say that Rebecca was an intern at The Commonwealth Club about six years ago, and I want to congratulate her on her successful journey since then.
Let’s start by asking both of you a broad question: What do you mean by the title of your book, An Open World? “Open” in what sense? MIRA RAPP-HOOPER: The short answer is that Rebecca and I see there as being an international battle underway between forces of openness and forces of closure. We believe that the United States can only stay safe and secure and prosperous if it defends an open world.
Well before the COVID crisis, which of course has upended [everyone’s] last few months, the U.S.-led international system was already under considerable strain. America’s geopolitical edge was eroding as China continued to rise. U.S. tech companies were rejecting cooperation with Washington, while authoritarians like China and Russia used digital surveillance to tighten their grips. And the domestic political polarization in the United States eroded our power further from within. These trends all raised the specter of the fact that we could have a 21st century that was closed, in which authoritarian states ended American access to important waterways or trading hubs, cut off our
access to friends and allies around the world, and ended our leadership atop important international institutions.
And of course the pandemic has only accelerated and deepened many of these forces, making it all the more likely that countries, including the United States, will increasingly seek safety by turning inwards, closing their borders and limiting travel, cutting themselves [off] from the outside world. But this would be a world that would be more dangerous for the United States, and the measures that we’ve had to put in place these last few months should not be our destiny. Rather, to lead the 21st century, the United States must pursue a strategy of openness that pioneers new forms of international cooperation in an open world, REBECCA LISSNER: Why don’t I take this opportunity to just share what we exactly mean by an open world and what an openness strategy is? An openness strategy is the new foreign policy vision that sets out to defend the United States’ most vital interests and values, even though it is no longer the world’s unrivaled superpower. It recognizes exactly that the U.S. can only stay safe, secure and prosperous in an open world. So what does that mean? An open world means that, first, all states should be able to make free and independent political choices without foreign interference in their domestic decisionmaking processes and without outright domination by more powerful nations. Second, international waterways, airspace and outer space must all remain open and accessible for commercial and military transit, which means that countries like China should not be able to restrict international transit through vital waterways like the South China Sea. And third, global cooperation and trade should proceed through international institutions that are governed transparently and modernized for 21st century challenges.
It’s important to recognize that to realize these three pillars of an open world, the U.S. does not need to dominate the world militarily. It just needs to prevent other countries from doing so, while joining with likeminded allies and partners to build a powerful coalition for international openness. DUFFY: What are the benefits that you see the U.S. has had as a result of policies of openness of the past? RAPP-HOOPER: It’s such an important question. Openness in many ways has always been the center of America’s strategy in the world. But what we’re calling for here is a
Documentary filmmaker Ramona S. Diaz.
REBECCA LISSNER .
new foreign policy that places that at a core focus for the United States, particularly as American power in the world is increasingly constrained.
At least since the end of World War II, U.S. policy makers have always sought to keep the world open in some form. In the final days of World War II, FDR conceived of an open world as a way to end the Second World War and potentially continue cooperation with the Soviet Union. An aspiration which unfortunately was dashed when Stalin made it clear that he did not intend to cooperate with the West. But the reason that FDR sought openness was because only if continents like Eurasia stayed open could the United States access the vital markets it would need to keep itself prosperous, could it have the security ties it would need to allies to keep both the United States and those allies safe, and only under those conditions could it access the waterways and skies that would allow it to navigate freely the world in ways that would allow for trade and for military access around the world. But although Roosevelt’s vision for openness during the Cold War did not come to be, the United States remained committed to a version of openness within its democratic sphere of influence throughout the Cold War.
After the Cold War, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it saw almost no constraint on the idea of openness in the world. Sitting atop a newly powerful geopolitical position with no rival to contest its power, the United States faced almost no constraint to any action it might take on the global stage. Sometimes that led to excess, things such as the invasion of Iraq. But in that world, the United States was able to trade freely, was able to connect with its security partners freely, and saw no challenges to navigating the seas or skies that are so vital to its security.
But now that China is not only rising but largely has risen, the United States can no longer take openness as a guarantee. Rather, if it is to be able to continue to access the world in these ways that have been so beneficial to its safety and its prosperity, it’s going to need to place openness at the center of its strategy in ways that acknowledge there are these newfound constraints on its power, and yet place this at the centerpiece of its alliances and its approach to international institutions if the country is to stay safe and secure. DUFFY: Is part of your premise that because of our advantages as a society—our education, our resources, our prowess in business and commerce—that the U.S. does
—REBECCA LISSNER
Journalist Maria Ressa.
MIRA RAPP-HOOPER .
better in an open environment, especially economically, because we tend to be more competitive? LISSNER: That is absolutely true, and it’s a really important point. When you think about the fact that 95 percent of global consumers are actually beyond American borders, it becomes very clear that if the U.S. is to be prosperous, we need to be engaged in an open and interdependent international system and international economic system. But it’s not just dollar-and-cents. It’s also our security that is at stake here, because if a hostile adversary were to come to dominate crucial regions of the world, that would mean that the United States would find itself threatened. And we saw in World War I and World War II what happened when the United States tried to retreat behind its own oceans and behind its own borders and had to intervene late in two world wars, because at the end of the day, American security and our prosperity are inextricably linked with that of the world.
Now it’s also the case that openness, as we define it, as it relates to international cooperation, is also vital. This speaks to the health and safety of everyday Americans.
We are living through right now a pandemic that illustrates how many threats Americans face in a very immediate way, emanating from overseas, but they also can only be addressed through international cooperation that transcends borders. The problem is that the architecture of international cooperation that was built in the 1940s is simply not suited to the challenges and the opportunities of the 2040s—challenges like pandemics, climate change, cyber security and internet governance. We have a structure that’s becoming rapidly outmoded and irrelevant to the most important challenges that we face.
So a critical pillar of an openness strategy is the renovation of those legacy institutions and the construction of new ones, so the United States can keep itself, its allies and its partners safe, secure and prosperous in an open world. DUFFY: Can you say a little bit about how the structures need to be updated or new structures need to be built to deal with the increasingly globalized challenges like climate change, pandemics, etc.? RAPP-HOOPER: Absolutely. As Rebecca already alluded to, when we talk about international organizations, experts sometimes use the shorthand international order, and that refers to the international norms, institutions, and rules that generally govern international politics. In the current day, the institutions that we’re usually referring to—the United Nations, for example—were largely set up in the immediate years following the Second World War with the United States at their helm.
But of course much has changed in the world since these institutions were first architected, and power in this international system has changed along with them. And because institutions like the United Nations are ultimately propped up by the power of their leaders, it shouldn’t surprise us that some of these changes mean that these institutions are no longer fit to the world that we’re facing.
I’ll give you just a few examples. One is the world trade organization. Of course this is the main international institution that governs global trade, that has been incredibly important in facilitating international cooperation and lowering barriers to beneficial trade over the course of decades. But after China acceded to the World Trade Organization in the early 2000s, only then did we come to understand that the organization was not properly equipped to
deal with some real challenges that China presented to the international economy, such as its use of intellectual property and the fact that the World Trade Organization doesn’t govern digital services. But there’s no way to change the World Trade Organization except by mutual consent of all of its members. Now that China’s inside, it’s not eager to alter the rules that are working in its favor in many ways, allowing China to exploit the economic openness of other societies, even though it keeps its economy partially closed. So part of the challenge here is to figure out how to renovate international institutions like the World Trade Organization to bring them up to speed.
But there are other areas such as the Internet and cyberspace, where there are almost no rules at all that govern these new technologies that we care about so much. Many of the regimes that do exist are only piecemeal; they’re in their earliest stages, and they’re not binding on the most relevant countries involved. So there is a charge for the United States and its allies not only to renovate institutions like the WTO, but to create new forms of governance in these allimportant areas like technology and climate change, because if it fails to do so, it can bank on the fact that China and other countries that support China’s closed preferences will write those rules instead. LISSNER: I just want to underline one point that I think we’ve alluded to repeatedly, but ought to be stated explicitly, which is that the reason why the United States can no longer pursue the same post-Cold War foreign policy that it has been pursuing for so long is because its position in the world has changed irreparably. The reason that it’s position in the world has changed so much is because of the rise of China. China has experienced meteoric economic growth over the past several decades. It is now the world’s largest economy by some measures and its military has expanded in parallel. While China itself rose within a U.S.-dominated international environment, it now seeks to change that environment and to write new rules of the road for 21st century international politics that better reflect China’s own power and preferences. So when we lay out this openness strategy, both the necessity for it and the content of it, it’s important to recognize that the chief antagonist of openness that we identify is China.
That is because China is the only country in the world that both has preferences for closure and the means to bring that closure about. That closure could come about in a number of different ways. It might take a 19th century kind of form, whereby China actually uses military force to annex its contiguous neighbors or even Taiwan. But it also might take a subtler 21st century form, in which China uses digital infrastructure, physical infrastructure, or new technologies, as a means to assert its dominance over other states, whether in Asia or overseas, to coerce the political leaders of those states, to suborn local officials, to spy upon them.
So we need to be attuned to both of these kinds of threats that are emanating from China. It requires a different set of American responses, because it’s no longer going to be sufficient to just rely on American military power to deter Chinese aggression. We also need to match China in these new spaces—whether technological, economic, commercial, or ideological. So an openness strategy is responsive to the full-spectrum threat that China does pose and this new condition of international politics that is frequently referred to as great power competition. That is the resurgence of rivalry between very powerful states in the international system where the U.S. is no longer far and away the dominant and uncontested superpower. DUFFY: Underlying what you’re saying, it seems as though to prevent any country from being a hegemon, China or otherwise, and constraining this environment of openness
—MIRA RAPP-HOOPER
and threatening the U.S. role in an open world, we must maintain a strong defense. We must maintain our defense spending. What does our security policy look like to keep the openness open so that we can and compete well in it? RAPP-HOOPER: It certainly is true that keeping the world open requires defense spending and thinking about the prospect of military competition. But competition in the 21st century is not just occurring in military form.
In many ways it’s occurring in other forms, primarily such as economic and technological forms. If the United States is to keep the world open and maintain a leadership role, it’s going to need to focus there as well. First things first, however, is that for the United States to keep the world open, it will not just need to think about its own defense budget or even its foreign policy budget. It will need to reinvest in itself. The primary determinant of the U.S. role in the world, and the question of whether or not the United States can stay strong enough to support a strategy of openness, will be whether or not the United States reinvests in itself.
There we’re thinking about policies that support education, that certainly prioritize our recovery from COVID, that transition the United States to a sustainable and green economy, that support immigration and that foster our base of innovation so that we can continue to be the powerful country we should be in the 21st century, because only then do we have the capability to start enacting this strategy. But alongside that, we not only want to see us prioritize a robust defense, as you suggest Gloria, let’s think about how our national security budget and priorities should be positioned more broadly. If China were to close off parts of the international system, it almost certainly would not prioritize doing so with the military instrument first and foremost, rather it would do so using economic coercion or even new technologies like 5G telecommunications technology to siphon off data and spy on foreign countries by building their digital infrastructure.
So if the United States is going to compete in that world and keep it open, it’s going to need to prioritize its State Department, its Treasury Department, its development funding, all of these tools of foreign policy that have been deprioritized in recent years, but are so essential to the United States role in the world outside of the military domain. Only if we remake those aspects of our foreign policy and reinvest in diplomacy as the primary instrument of American foreign policy will we have the chance to make good on an opennes strategy like this one LISSNER: That’s a critical point. If I could just embroider upon it for a moment, I think it’s important to recognize that all of these domestic investments are absolutely crucial and they show that the traditional distinction that we’ve made between foreign policy and domestic policy is simply no longer operative in the 21st century, where so much of America’s international strength depends fundamentally on our domestic strength.
But there’s another piece of this, too, which is even if the U.S. makes all the right choices at home, it nevertheless cannot keep the world open on its own. We need to work with allies and partners. Allies, especially in Europe and in Asia, are tremendous assets for the United States. Together with our allies, we have something on the order of 28 times the GDP that China has. So that’s something that will be really hard for China to overcome if we all stay lashed together and act in defense of openness, both in Asia and in Europe.
Much of the success of this strategy will depend on the decision of our allies to join us in backing institutional reform efforts in places like the WTO, in the UN Security Council, in joining with us to set new rules and norms to govern the Internet and emerging technologies, in upgrading their own defense strategies to protect the global commons. And, in the case of Europe, in joining with the U.S. in seeking to push back against China in Asia, in addition to pushing back against Russia in Europe. So it’s really important to recognize that the domestic piece of this is absolutely vital. It is necessary, but it’s also insufficient, because this is a global battle underway between openness and closure. And our friends are a crucial element of the winning coalition that will be required to succeed in these efforts. DUFFY: Well, speaking of that, one of our audience members would like to know which countries the U.S. should prioritize in rebuilding our relationships. RAPP-HOOPER: It’s a great question. We’re afraid that with the extent of the damage that has been done in recent years, there will be a need for the United States to press forward on multiple fronts at once. We will not have the luxury of simply picking and choosing amongst a few vital relationships, but we’ll have to reprioritize our alliances overall.
A primary source of our strength is our treaty allies in Europe and Asia. That is, our 30 NATO allies—a huge base of support, in economic and military and political terms— as well as our five treaty allies in East Asia, all of whom have really been a sort of geopolitical source of America’s strength in both regions for many decades.
But if the United States is to rebuild its relationships with its allies in the years to come, it’s going to need to do more than simply recommit to them and announce that it’s back on the global stage. It’s going to need to remake these alliances to face down some of the threats and challenges that we’ve been talking about today. It’s going to need to cooperate with its allies to face down climate change, on the global health response to COVID, to cooperate to produce technological alternatives to China’s 5G systems, and to improve defenses in cyberspace and against political interference, like Russia’s disinformation campaigns and election meddling.
So it won’t simply be enough to restore ourselves to the alliance system that the United States left a few years ago. Rather, Washington will have to take up the charge to remake that system for this world of far greater and more diverse challenges if it is to help us on this way forward.
