…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.
Unipolarity is over, and with it the illusion that other nations would simply take their assigned place in a U.S.-led international order. For the United States, that will require accepting the reality that there are spheres of influence in the world today—and that not all of them are American spheres.
The Great Game, a prolonged 19th century confrontation between the British and Russian empires in Central Asia, is often invoked as a prime example of the struggle for influence between major powers. But another Great Game was played out at that time in the Balkans between Russia and several European powers when the Ottoman empire began to retreat. We are now witnessing the 21st century version of the Balkan Great Game, but where Moscow relies on subversion and deception as it cannot compete militarily or economically with the West.
It is tautological or at best trivial to say that all states try to act in their national interest. The important question is how leaders choose to define and pursue that national interest under different circumstances.
Neruda’s saga marks one of the 20th century’s greatest literary chase scenes, and the Cold War’s first global manhunt. It wasn’t a hunt for a nuclear engineer, a spy, or even a dissident journalist but for a poet—a poet!—whose love poetry had won him acclaim and book sales around the world, and later earned the 1971 Nobel Prize.
