Debate can be even worse online. While the Internet makes these discussions far more democratic, the dramatic headlines and language necessary to get attention—and the ease with which debates become highly personal—discourage deliberate exchanges or nuance and privilege extravagant claims and nasty attacks. And while fashionable as a measure of impact, Twitter is an inherently poor vehicle for any serious conversation. What truly important issue can be distilled into 140 characters or fewer? Or, for that matter, into a fifteen-second sound bite?

 

IT IS disturbing that our ability to think and talk seriously about international affairs is deteriorating as the world is becoming more complex. With relations with China and Russia becoming more difficult and with other regional powers emerging, what could matter more? The shared assumption among neoconservatives and liberal interventionists about American unipolarity—that all it takes for U.S. power to reshape the world is the exercise of the necessary will—is ever more in conflict with the main forces at work in the international system today.

Seemingly oblivious to these forces, the interventionists continue to promote a collection of policies—regime change, top-down democratization, militarized nation building and counterinsurgency warfare—that have repeatedly failed. The result (in the Middle East in particular) is a generation of American intervention that has done more harm than good. But, ignoring Einstein’s well-worn doctrine that the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again with the expectation of getting a different result, some in and out of the administration are now suggesting that U.S. warplanes should target not only Islamic State forces in Iraq and Syria, but also the Assad regime if this becomes necessary to protect the “moderate” rebels. Few in the West are considering where this escalation could lead either in Syria or, if Moscow should view it as a precedent, in Ukraine.

Ironically, public reluctance to support a significant intervention is Syria is a direct consequence of the Iraq War and illustrates the extent to which prolonged, open-ended military commitments, absent victory, are inherently unsustainable in a democratic society. The “long, hard slog” in Iraq led directly to the Obama administration’s eagerness to withdraw prematurely and to its failure to enforce its own feckless red lines.

Anyone who claims that U.S. policy in the Middle East has been a success over the last fifteen years should define what a disaster would look like. Yet the very warrior intellectuals who were directly responsible for today’s state of affairs dominate the foreign-policy advisory groups of nearly all the Republican candidates. On the Democratic side, a key architect of President Obama’s foreign policy, Hillary Clinton, is, of course, her party’s presumed presidential candidate.

Most striking is that the triumphalists continue to dominate America’s foreign-policy discourse even as the United States faces a growing number of challenges. Though Islamist terrorism, particularly as manifested by the Islamic State, is attracting the greatest attention because of its graphic brutality and the memories of September 11, China’s rise likely represents the bigger long-term problem for the United States. Of course, China has its own weaknesses, and some even argue that in the absence of fundamental political reform, it may suffer the fate of the Soviet Union. But don’t count on it. Notwithstanding its ethnic and religious divisions, China is less prone to disintegration than the USSR. Its economy is far stronger than the Soviet Union’s was in the 1980s. And in Xi Jinping, it has a hard-nosed realist at the helm, not an inept, romantic Gorbachev-type.

As Henry Kissinger adroitly argues in his most recent book, the only safe assumption for U.S. foreign policy is that China will be a unique challenge in American history—a full-scale economic and military superpower with great nationalist pride and centuries of experience as the regional hegemon. Despite China’s limited ambitions for global leadership, at least for now, the last thing the United States can afford is to contribute to a geopolitical realignment in which Moscow plays second fiddle to Beijing and uses its strategic nuclear arsenal to compensate for China’s still-inferior nuclear capabilities.

Many in the United States and Europe are skeptical about the likelihood of a Chinese-Russian alliance. Indeed, vast differences in economic power, a long record of mutual animosity and divergent political cultures create strong barriers to a lasting alliance between Moscow and Beijing. However, all this is relevant only up to a certain point. If the Russian government perceives a threat to its very existence, it may accept a subordinate role to China, likely believing it to be short term.

As Kissinger observes in his interview in this issue, Russia is already moving in this direction “partly because we’ve given them no choice.” Moreover, in a striking departure from Nixon and Kissinger’s efforts to maintain better relations with Moscow and Beijing than either had with the other, the Obama administration is openly confronting each simultaneously. President Obama stated this unusually directly in making the case for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, saying that “if we don’t write the rules, China will write the rules out in that region.”

Unlike Washington, and each for its own reasons, Moscow and Beijing staunchly deny that their rapprochement is directed against anyone else. However, as Yan Xuetong, a well-connected Chinese expert, acknowledged to the Financial Times’ Kathrin Hille, it is “impossible” for the growing Chinese-Russian cooperation to “not influence the outside world.” China and Russia, acting as a magnet for forces of “the rest,” are already beginning to build a new economic infrastructure as a complement and eventually an alternative to the Western-controlled international financial system. Alternative security arrangements are in the embryonic stage, but history teaches us that if one alliance is not just predominant, but also assertively acting to expand its influence—as the Euro-Atlantic community is seen as doing today—someone somewhere is quite likely to build a balancing coalition.

The big question facing the United States at this critical junction, then, is whether we can pursue a mix of policies with China, with Russia or in the Middle East that amount to a coherent overall strategic approach. Put differently, if the United States is able to find a way to induce Moscow to collaborate in finding a settlement in Ukraine and then can establish an unappealing but strategically useful modus vivendi with Russia, and if it can also resist the temptation to become embroiled in sectarian wars in the Middle East and instead positions itself as an offshore balancer, then Washington may have the necessary focus and wherewithal to meet the challenges of a rising China.

There is a wide gap between the complex challenges America confronts in the world arena today and our wholly inadequate conversation about international affairs, which is in itself a profound challenge to U.S. national security. With the outcome of the 2016 election potentially turning on issues of American stewardship of global affairs, this gap has to be understood and addressed with both a sense of urgency and responsibility. As realists, we at The National Interest fully understand that no one publication or nongovernmental organization can single-handedly reverse the decline in the sophistication of the foreign-policy debate. In fact, even many working together are unlikely to do so. Yet as realists we also know that America is always at its best when faced with a true crisis; the pragmatic electorate then tunes in and develops a sense of personal stake in America’s conduct of foreign affairs.

The aspiration of The National Interest is to provide a platform for diverse, well-argued and well-informed points of view in order to keep the ship of sanity sailing through a turbulent sea of superficial, politicized and ideological rhetoric. By doing so, we hope both to inform and to build political support—among those with open minds and a sense of responsibility—for decision making based on the enlightened national interest. That was the mission of The National Interest when it was founded three decades ago; that is its purpose now.

Richard Burt is chairman of The National Interest’s Advisory Council and a former assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs and U.S. ambassador to Germany.

Dimitri K. Simes, publisher and CEO of The National Interest, is president of the Center for the National Interest.

Image: Flickr/kremlin.ru