B (4:06)

So, Steve, how does your view of the world differ from, say, John Eikenberry, who I've had on the show, who would describe himself as a liberal internationalist?

C (4:16)

I think liberal internationalists, like John, who's an old friend, believe in several other principles. First of all, that domestic politics really matters a lot, that being a democracy fundamentally alters your foreign policy, fundamentally alters your relations with others, and that if the whole world were democratic, it would be essentially a peaceful world. It's the implication of democratic peace theory. Liberals also tend to believe in the pacifying effects of international commerce, trade and investment. Ties will discourage states from fighting each other. And if you can bind states together in these bands of interdependence or ties of interdependence, that will also create a more peaceful and prosperous world. And finally, most liberal internationalists, and I think John is clearly one of them here, believe that global institutions are very important, very powerful, and can put real constraints on what even powerful states will do. So the combination of sort of spreading liberal values, spreading democracy, promoting commerce, and building strong international institutions, in their view, will create a very peaceful and prosperous world. And I wish that were the case.

B (5:29)

So is it the case here, Steve, that you don't believe any of those propositions to be true, or that you don't think they are as important or as powerful as someone like John would argue?

C (5:42)

I think they are partially true, but not nearly as powerful as John does. And some of them, I think, are actually wrong. I mean, the evidence for democratic peace theory is at best, mixed. It seems to me the idea that just by making states democratic, you'll cause Them to be peaceful, I think is not well borne out, not all that well supported. Certainly the idea that economic interdependence can create powerful barriers to conflict has been refuted by any number of cases as well. And I think international institutions, and we'll probably talk more about this, although I think institutions are very important as tools that powerful states use to advance their interests. They can't stop powerful states from doing what they want. They couldn't stop Putin from going into Ukraine. They couldn't stop the United States from going into Iraq. I could multiply other examples as well. And finally, I think the claim that democracies behave very differently than autocracies is overstated. I think there are some differences in how democracies conduct their foreign policy. But you know, if you go back and look at the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union could not have been more different in terms of their economic structures, their political ideologies, the way in which they were governed. But we did a lot of the same things. We both built tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. We intervened in the developing world all over the place. We created alliance networks to advance our interests to. The actual behavior of the two countries was remarkably similar, even though they were very, very different polities and very different societies.

B (7:18)

Now, Steve, as I understand it, realism tells people what they should look at, particularly hard power and the relative distribution of power. To what extent does realism give advice in terms of specific foreign policy choices? I remember that Henry Kissinger and Hans Morgenthau, both titans of realism, staked out opposite sides on the debate on Vietnam. So to what extent does looking at hard power provide a guidance to foreign policy decision makers?

C (7:55)

Well, I think it provides a lot of guidance, but it doesn't provide an exact blueprint on what to do on any given moment, you know, any given Tuesday afternoon. It does, I think, pulling point us to a lot of very important tendencies. And I will say just as a footnote, you know, Henry Kissinger was a very unusual realist. He's often considered a realist, but there was a very powerful idealist streak in him. And he was really the only prominent so called realist who favored, for example, American involvement in Vietnam, even though he knew the United States wasn't going to win the war. He figured that out in the early 1970s, 60s. Kissinger believed unlike most realists, unlike Walter Lippmann, George Kennan, Kenneth waltz, Hans Morgenthau, etc. Kissinger really believed that credibility mattered enormously and that Vietnam mattered because of its symbolic value, not its Hard power, not its resources, anything like that. That if the United States lost in Vietnam, you know, our alliances around the world would be imperiled and the whole world would shift towards the communist bloc. Most realists, of course, thought that was nonsense and completely contrary to what balance of power theory tells you. And it's worth noting, of course, the United States did lose in Vietnam and none of those things that Kissinger worried about happened. In fact, quite the opposite happened as well. So Kissinger, yes, is realist, but he didn't understand realist theory as well as he might have. And he had a lot of other ideas floating around in his head as well. I do think that said, realism does point you to a number of things. First of all, as I said earlier, the world is a competitive place. Trust is scarce. You have to be mindful of what the balance of power is at any given time. And if at all possible, you want to try and improve your position relative to your rivals. You'd like them to be weaker and you'd like to be stronger. Not because that guarantees success in every endeavor, because it gives you more options, it gives you a greater latitude as well. I think also realists would tell you that you want to have more friends than enemies. You want to try and have positive, constructive relations with as many countries as possible, and you want to try and keep your enemies isolated and divided. Again, it suggests a competitive picture, but one where having powerful friends is a good thing, not a bad thing. Realism, as I said before, also warns that military force is unpredictable and you therefore should use it only when necessary to defend vital interests and not for idealistic crusades, I might add, particularly in places that aren't vital interests and that you don't understand very well. That's one of the reasons why I think almost all realists opposed the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.

B (10:44)

And you were one of the leading opponents of the war.

C (10:46)

Yes, and I'm sorry to say again that we turned out to be right about that as well. And then finally, realism says that for major powers you want to try and maintain a favorable balance of power. And for the United States, that mostly means retaining as much hard power as we can, including, you know, powerful economy, scientific and technological, cutting edge capabilities, things like that, and prevent the emergence of hostile configurations of power in key parts of the world. This goes back to arguments that George Kennan made at the beginning of the Cold War that the United States main goal should be to be the dominant power in its own region, the Western Hemisphere, and prevent any other country from dominating Eurasia either, dominating all of Europe, dominating Asia in various ways. I think that's what drove American involvement in both world wars, certainly was the driving logic behind the strategy of containment during the Cold War. And it's why most realists now think the United States should be focusing most of its attention on preventing China from achieving a dominant position in Asia.

B (11:58)

Before we talk about looking forward, I want to do a little bit of looking backward. You have been a longstanding critic of the practice of US Foreign policy, regardless of who has been president and whether he has championed neoconservative or liberal internationalist policies. Why do you think US Foreign policy has been off base?

C (12:21)

Well, I and some others have criticized the sort of post Cold War policies of what we called liberal hegemony. The idea of using American power to try and take what had been the successful liberal order of the Cold War, the United States, its NATO allies, its allies in Asia, and trying to make that a global order through promoting globalization, through spreading democracy, through trying to build up international institutions in a variety of ways. And the vision here, and it was a very seductive vision, was that, you know, we'd won the Cold War, we've reached the end of history. Liberal democratic capitalism is the only game in town. And what we want to do is nudge that forward as much as possible. Bring China into these institutions because that will transform it into a democracy over time. Bring Russia in, if at all possible, spread markets, and if necessary, deal with some of those recalcitrant rogue states like Libya or Syria or Iraq, with military force as well. This is a very optimistic vision. History was moving in our direction, or so we thought. And most of us in the realist camp thought this was overly optimistic and naive and we were going to get ourselves in lots of trouble by trying it. First of all, saying that we wanted to make the entire world a bunch of liberal democracies was going to be threatening to any country that wasn't a liberal democracy. So not surprisingly, China, eventually Russia and a lot of others began to push back. Secondly, we ended up occupying and owning countries where we had no idea how to build democracy. And we did that great cost to ourselves and to these countries as well. Promoting hyper globalization so rapidly both hurt the American economy, but also created lots of instabilities, ultimately leading to the financial crisis in 2008. So for all of these reasons, and there are some others as well, I thought this was a bad idea, but it had bipartisan support and continued from the Clinton era to George W. Bush with slightly more nuanced I think, but not abandoned by Barack Obama. And even Donald Trump in his first term maintained many of the elements of that, despite his own, I think, personal wariness or skepticism about it.

B (14:41)

Let's talk about that. Because you emphasize the importance of power, that world politics is an Antarctic system and hence countries have to look out for themselves. That in many ways is what Donald Trump says in his own language about the nature of the world, that it's a competitive place that America has been taken advantage of because it hasn't exercised its power. But you've been very critical of the Trump presidency both in term one and again here in term two. Why?

C (15:17)

Well, I think in fairness to President Trump, there were some instincts he had when he got into politics that weren't completely wrong. He was correct, for example, that American allies in Europe had neglected defenses and had become overly dependent upon American protection. He was, I think, correct that globalization had gone too far. A conclusion, by the way, that was not unique to him, particularly in the wake of the financial crisis. So he had some instincts about this. And he's certainly correct, as he said when he first went to the UN General assembly in 2017, that he was going to put America first the same way that the leaders of other countries would put the interests of their countries first. So again, in that sense, you could argue he had kind of a crude, realist view of the world. The problem is that he doesn't care very much about details. He has no long term vision. That it seems to me looks appealing that in his case it's all about the short term, grasping for advantages, you know, extorting concessions from people, but without any sense of what the long term purpose is. And one result of that is you end up with a approach to foreign policy that's filled with contradictions, one that I think no real realist would actually endorse. I'll just give you a couple of of examples. You know, he wants American allies to spend more on defense and do a lot more so the United States doesn't have to protect them. But if you're doing that, you wouldn't want to then impose punitive tariffs on all of those countries simultaneously, which will damage their economy along with the American economy and make it harder for them to spend the money you'd like them to spend on defense. He's worried about China, thinks that's our biggest long term rival. But if that's the case, you wouldn't be trying to pick fights with most of our allies in Asia on various trade issues. You wouldn't be having a spat with Prime Minister Modi in India, a country that American statesmen have been working to cultivate as a counterweight to China. Perhaps most important of all, if you were a real realist, you would not be going after the American academic world, world and the scientific and technological establishment. You wouldn't be cutting research in science and technology. You wouldn't be attacking universities in a variety of ways, because you understand that in the modern world, hard power is based on being at the cutting edge of science and technology. And it's very important for the United States to retain this. So at a moment where China is pouring lots and lots of money into this, it is now actually spending more on R and D than we are. We're going in exactly the opposite direction. And no serious realist would want to do that. And last but not least, as I said, you know, realists want to have as many friends as possible and as few enemies as possible. And why anyone would want to pick fights with Canada or Denmark or Australia or some of the other countries, some of the most pro American countries in the world, is just beyond me. If your long term goal was to improve America's relative power position in the

B (18:33)

world, so, Steve, what would you want U.S. foreign policy to do going forward after a Trump presidency? What would be your view of the appropriate foreign policy for the United States that is, as I understand it, still one of the most powerful in the world, though it's going to be operating in an environment in which power is distributed and it faces a true peer competitor in China that is not simply strong militarily, but economically and diplomatically.

C (19:07)

Let me put that in sort of it's two or three different boxes, right? So at the level of grand strategy, I still think the United States should be following the broad approach that John Mearsheimer and I laid out in the pages of Foreign Affairs, I think seven or eight years ago. We should be following essentially a strategy of offshore balancing. We should in fact be encouraging Europe to do more for its defense, to take over primary responsibility for European security.

B (19:34)

Can I just stop you there, Steve? Could you just lay out for people who don't read every issue of Foreign affairs what exactly offshore balancing means?

C (19:43)

Offshore balancing means the United States focuses primarily, as I was talking about a little while ago, on preserving a favorable balance of power in key parts of the world. The United States doesn't have to physically control Europe or Asia or the Middle east or other key areas of power. It just has to make sure that no hostile power or set of hostile powers does. If There's a balance of power in those regions already, then the United States doesn't have to do very much, although it has to be ready to get involved if the balance of power starts to shift. This is the policy the United States has followed for much of its history, and it's worked remarkably well for us. If the balance of power starts to break down in a fundamental way, there's a danger of a regional hegemon dominating one of these key regions. Then the United States has to get involved, and it might have to get involved directly with its own forces on the ground forming alliances, as we did, for example, during the Cold War. And I think offshore balancing is a sort of template. And then you ask, what does the world look like today right now? There's no potential hegemon in Europe. Right. Russia, for all of the problems we are having with Russia today, is not going to dominate all of Europe. They're not going to go from Ukraine and march through Poland and march through Germany, head for the English Channel the way that Nazi Germany did.

B (21:03)

But can't they threaten Europe without doing all of that? I mean, I continually hear talk of concern that if the United States does not back up Europe, what'll happen is European countries, some of them, will begin to hedge and that Europe will end up being less than the sum of its parts because some countries will look to cut deals for themselves because they are risk averse.

C (21:26)

That might be true of a few of them, but I don't think very many. And already, with doubts about the American commitment rising, what we see instead is, of course, Europe getting very serious about trying to mobilize its own defense capabilities in a serious way, which is long overdue. I just might add that, you know, Europe has, what, three to four times more people than Russia does. It has 10 times Russia's GDP. Europe has been spending two to four times as much on the military every year than Russia did until very, very recently. So Europe has the wherewithal to deal with potential threat from Russia. It just doesn't spend that money very efficiently. And my view is, by the way, the United States should have been encouraging our European allies to do more, making it clear we were going to be doing less over time, but do that gradually and do it in a very cooperative spirit, not because we're angry, but because the United States has to focus its energies elsewhere.

B (22:22)

Well, that was supposed to be the pivot or the rebalance to Asia.

C (22:25)

Right. Which we never really did. All right. We still kept getting bogged down solving Europe's security problems for it so the United States should be focusing its primary attention on Asia, where China's rise has created a potential regional hegemon. Fortunately, it has also triggered the formation of a balancing coalition, which the United States needs to play a critical role in bolstering and managing. I also think the United States should be doing much less in the Middle east, which has been nothing but trouble for us for a long, long time. And again, where there is no potential regional hegemon, no country there is going

B (23:01)

to dominate the entire so you're not worried about Iran?

C (23:04)

I'm not worried about Iran dominating the region. I'm worried about some of the things Iran does, but I'm not worried about Iran taking over the Persian Gulf, controlling the oil, anything like that. So the United States can return to the policy that it followed from roughly 1945 to roughly 1991. Where we had partners in the region. We shifted sides as balances shifted one way or the other. But we weren't permanently deployed there. We weren't permanently engaged. We certainly weren't intervening, trying to run the local politics of that region. So an offshore balancer today would be focusing most of our efforts on Asia, have a cooperative but increasingly distant relations with Europe, not adverse. We'd stay in NATO, but perhaps with a greatly reduced military role over time, and we would be disengaging substantially from much of the Middle East.

B (23:59)

And what would that mean, Steve, for Taiwan? Is the policy of one China, something United States should sustain this idea of strategic ambiguity, should the United States move to a position of strategic clarity? Should the United States simply say Taiwan is off on its own? How does the offshore balancing approach handle that issue?

C (24:25)

My own view and realists will disagree on this because this is one of these places where it really does hinge on details and some things that I think no theory of international politics actually answers for us. I personally think the United States should maintain the position of strategic ambiguity we've had really since 1970, where we accept that Taiwan and mainland China are part of a one China and that any political unification should be voluntary on both parties, that it shouldn't be coerced by one side or the other, that if Taiwan wants to reunify with China, then we have no objection to that. But if it is going to be compelled either militarily or through other means by Beijing, then we would oppose that. And that means we should be helping Taiwan be in a position that it doesn't have to be or isn't able to be coerced by China. And I think de facto that means continuing to back it in a variety of different ways.

B (25:21)

So how do you distinguish a policy of offshore balancing from what might be called non interventionism or neo isolationism, or is there a difference?

C (25:34)

I think there's a huge difference. Offshore balancing is not isolationism at all. And first of all, the United States would remain economically engaged around the world. We ought to be even more diplomatically engaged than we are today. One of the things that worries me about, you know, Trump in his second term is the effort to gut the State Department and reduce America's involvement in a variety of global institutions, which is where a lot of important rules do get made. And if we're not in the room when those rules get written, we're going to find ourselves navigating a world where 190 countries are following one set of blueprints, and maybe it's not the blueprint we would have wanted, so we'd still be actively engaged there. And offshore balancers believe that the United States has to a maintain a very strong military and the capacity to intervene when necessary in places that matter, especially in Asia. So, you know, if you were an offshore balancer today, you would not be reducing American military presence in Asia at all. You'd probably be increasing it. You might be reducing it in other parts of the world, world like Europe, but you wouldn't be doing that precipitously. It's not like we suddenly say, all right, we're out of NATO by next Tuesday. We might reduce our role to being a largely political member of NATO over a decade or so, as Europeans built up their own capabilities and became more capable of defending themselves. But offshore balancing is not isolationism in any way.

B (27:01)

And I also take it that offshore balancing is not going to lead to major savings on the defense front.

C (27:09)

I actually think it probably would. I think it's very posing at mit, whose book Restraint lays some of this out. I think you could have less defense spending than we currently have because we wouldn't be trying to essentially be the dominant power in Europe, in parts of the Middle east and in Asia at the same time. But it certainly wouldn't allow you to, you know, cut it to nothing or, or cut it in half. But you could save a lot of money on defense, in my view.

B (27:35)

Ballpark figure. What do you mean by save a lot of money?

C (27:38)

I wouldn't want to quote a number without having done the math in advance.

B (27:42)

Okay, Are we talking more than 100 million? Less than 100 million?

C (27:46)

Yeah. I think. I would say probably more than 100 million. I mean, it is worth noting, right, that the United States is still spending vastly more than China, vastly more than Russia, and yet somehow we feel like we can't meet our defense obligations. My feeling, if we had somewhat fewer defense obligations and some of our allies were doing more, then we ought to be able to maintain those favorable balances of power while spending less money as well.

B (28:15)

And there's always a question, of course, of what you're getting for your money as opposed to how much you pay. There's a long history of overpaying or investing in the wrong sorts of military material. I'm sort of curious on that front, Steve, to what extent has your thinking changed or not changed at all, given the revolution in technology, particularly the advance of artificial intelligence? Do you see this as a game changer that's going to create challenges for the realist view of foreign policy, or is it simply just another development of, of many scientific developments over the millennia?

C (28:53)

I don't think artificial intelligence is going to, you know, make realism obsolete. Realism is perspective on world politics that goes back a couple of millennia. And, you know, not just in the West. You can find realist thinkers in ancient China. You can find it in ancient India as well. So this is a pretty robust and enduring way of thinking about relations among countries or among any political units where there's no central authority to keep order and enforce the peace. And I don't think artificial intelligence is going to change any of that. Now, that said, a whole variety of rapid technological developments are in fact changing the nature of strategies, the nature of military competition, and raises some really challenging and vexing problems that I don't have compelling answers for. But just, you know, one that I think the United States really has to wrestle with is the relationship between new technologies like drones, particularly as they become aided with artificial intelligence, and enhanced surveillance capabilities and things like that. What's the relationship between those capabilities and the very expensive legacy systems that the United States is really good at operating, has lots of experience with, and has invested billions of dollars in the large deck aircraft carrier being just the most visible example. And how you think about managing a transition away from some of those legacies systems towards the things that now appear to be extremely important, extremely lethal, I think is a very tricky technical problem. And one of the advantages the United States has, gets back to my point about science and technology, is that we have historically had very sophisticated defense analysts, defense industries, et cetera, who were good at figuring out what those things meant, figuring out what the old revolution in military affairs might mean, mean at integrating those things. We were much better at that than the old Soviet Union was, in part because we just put a lot more money into thinking through these problems. And I hope that continues to be the case as we have to deal with a rising China, which to me looks like a much more formidable competitor than the old Soviet Union ever was, much more advanced technologically, seems to be much more serious about developing capabilities, and doesn't have to spend the money maintaining as many old legacy systems as the United States. So I think this is actually a really big challenge for people who are defense planners.

B (31:24)

I think it's the biggest challenge out there. And by all accounts, the military is struggling with it, and it risks being in a position in which its traditional advantage in the quality of its weapons could simply be overwhelmed by numbers produce at a much lower price point. I think that's going to be a big challenge.

C (31:43)

And I might add, by the way, that's something to remember that when we see the United States getting involved in, I think, sort of pointless quarrels in a variety of places. You know, whether it's bombing the Houthis in Yemen or the long forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was an enormous opportunity cost there. In addition to the four to six trillion dollars we spent, which could have been spent in a whole variety of other ways. It meant that large chunks of the defense establishment were figuring out how to try and beat Afghan insurgents instead of focusing on long term competition with a peer competitor that was rising very rapidly. That's something always to bear in mind that, you know, when you get involved doing one thing, it means there's some other things you aren't going to be able to do quite as well or quite as effective.

B (32:32)

Steve, I want to close with a question on a topic we've touched on briefly, but really haven't delved into, not surprising given that we spent time talking about power politics. But as you look at America's grand strategy, does realism or offshore balancing say anything to us or tell us anything about what America's foreign economic policy should be? Does it talk to us about supply chains? Does it talk to us about tariff levels or anything like that?

C (33:00)

Yeah, I think at a broad level, I mean, realism is not a theory of trade policy or anything like that, But I think it does tell you a few things. One is, you know, in an uncertain world, you do not want to be overly dependent on any single source of supply. It does suggest that robust supply chains are a good thing, and we sort of learned that through Covid, but it's not Just Covid, that's not the only thing that can disrupt a supply chain. And the kinds of tightly integrated supply chains that developed, you know, in the heyday of globalization were, I think, you know, premised on the idea that great power conflict was really kind of a thing of the past. And there would be little things in various places, maybe sometimes oil disruptions in the Persian Gulf or price spikes because of instability in various places, but we really didn't have to worry about critical things being cut off by conflict. You know, we're now starting to see, in the wake of COVID in the wake of China's weaponization of rare earths, in the wake of the United States weaponizing the financial system to go after countries we're annoyed with for one reason or another. You know, countries are beginning to realize that geopolitics can have very real effects on the bottom line. And of course, companies are realizing that. So I think what we're seeing now is consistent with realism, people friend shoring to some degree, you know, relying on supply chains with friendly countries as much as possible, diversifying their suppliers, even if it's a little bit more expensive. So you're not really blindsided by a geopolitical disruption as well. And I might add, that gets back to why Trump is not really a realist, because the way he's approached foreign economic policy, which is basically sort of a protection route, you know, threatening people, nice economy you've got there, be pretty horrible if something were to happen to it, like 50% tariffs, you better cut a deal with me. And oh, by the way, if you cut a deal with me, I might change my mind three months later. All of that is quite counterproductive because of course, it encourages other countries to diversify away from the United States, which is not what we want. We want as many countries as possible wanting to have close economic ties with us as opposed to seeing it as something dangerous, risky, or that might leave them vulnerable.

B (35:20)

On that note, I'll close up this episode of the President's Inbox. My guest has been Stephen Walt, the Robert and Renee Belfort professor in International affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Steve, thank you very much for joining me.

C (35:33)

My pleasure.

B (35:34)

Please subscribe to the President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen and leave us a review. We love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for the President's Inbox on CFR.org as always, opinions expressed on the President's inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of cfr, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. Today's episode was produced by Justin Schuster with recording engineer Antonio Antonelli and director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.

C (36:11)

SA.