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.
When future historians think of the moment that marked the end of the liberal world order, they may point to the spring of 2020—the moment when the United States and its allies, facing the gravest public health threat and economic catastrophe of the postwar era, could not even agree on a simple communiqué of common cause. But the chaos of the coronavirus pandemic engulfing the world these days is only exposing and accelerating what was already happening for years.
World politics is complicated, ever changing, and uncertain. Boiled down to its simplest elements, however, the basic goal of each actor within the international system — once empires and kingdoms, now largely nation-states — often centers upon getting others to do what you’d like and preventing those same actors from forcing you to do things you don’t want to do.
In 2014, Margot Wallström, then serving as the foreign minister of Sweden, proclaimed that the Swedish government would adopt a so-called feminist foreign policy, becoming the first nation ever to do so. Since then, Canada, France, and Mexico have followed suit, and a handful of other nations—most recently, Luxembourg, Malaysia, and Spain—have pledged to develop similar policies.
A foreign policy should be judged not only by specific actions, but also by how a pattern of actions shapes the environment of world politics. Leadership in supplying global public goods, for example, is consistent with “America First,” but it rests on a broader historical and institutional understanding than Donald Trump has shown.
