With the announcement on Sunday night … President-elect Joe Biden, who will be the first president since Bush Senior to arrive with deep foreign policy experience, may have built precisely the kind of team that Obama had in mind.
Read Here | Foreign Policy
Also Read | The Fraught Politics Facing Biden’s Foreign Policy
President-elect Joe Biden plans to nominate longtime adviser and veteran foreign policy hand Antony Blinken to serve as his secretary of State, while picking another confidant, Jake Sullivan, for the role of national security adviser, according to three people familiar with the issue.
Read Here | Politico
Repair should define the opening initial six to nine months of a Biden administration’s foreign policy, and only after that will there come the opportunity, and in some areas the necessity, to build.
Read Here | Foreign Affairs
Tensions persist among today’s great powers—above all the United States and China—and any number of flash points could trigger a conflict between them. These two countries are on a collision course fuelled by the dynamics of a power transition and their competition for status and prestige, and without a change in direction, war between them in the coming decades is not only possible but probable.
Read Here | Foreign Affairs
After initially dismissing the strategic partnership between the US, Japan, India and Australia – known as the Quad – analysts say Beijing is growing more cautious about the informal, implicitly anti-China alliance.
Read Here | South China Morning Post
Considering soft power’s relatively low-risk and low-cost nature, in combination with the castrated successes of military campaigns since 2000, we’re left asking the obvious question: Why hasn’t the United States shifted to a foreign policy approach that incorporates more soft power approaches in lieu of continued bloated hard power initiatives?
Read Here | Foreign Policy Research Institute
There is little question that the future of US-China relations will depend heavily on who leads each country in the years ahead. But in thinking about that future, it would be a mistake simply to assume that the US is heading for a changing of the guard, or that China is fated to have continuity at the top.
The history of a number of major powers suggests that domestic policies were far more critical to their international standing than any of the clever stratagems, initiatives, ploys, schemes, or interventions they undertook abroad. Indeed, in some cases doing the right thing at home made it possible for the country to survive and recover after completely and disastrously mishandling its relations with others.
…The traditional focus on strategic stability may no longer be sufficient to manage today’s risks. Even with the resurrection of arms control agreements now being abrogated or dismantled, there is reason to doubt that strategic stability, at least as understood in the old paradigm, could be reestablished or preserved.
To read Nicholas J Spykman today is to find that rarest of things: a foreign policy theory bolstered and derived from real events of the past, even as they make sense of the present and light the way into the future. In our age of hyperbole, plaudits are thrown around with abandon; but it is not too much to say that Spykman is a genius who should be read far and wide if we are to make sense of our world.
