What Is the Purpose of American Foreign Policy?

by Jacob Heilbrunn

Many have asked what are American interests and what is the goal of U.S. foreign policy? The Center for the National Interest recently hosted a panel of experts to discuss these important and difficult questions. The transcript of the event can found below.

As President-elect Joe Biden prepares to take office, American foreign policy is at a crossroads. Biden has promised America’s allies in Europe and Asia that Washington will be “back” after the Trump era. But can he successfully fulfill his vow at a moment when Russia and China are becoming increasingly assertive? Has the world changed fundamentally over the past four years as to render it difficult if not impossible to return to the approach of past administrations? John Mearsheimer, Graham Allison, Melinda Haring, and Dimitri K. Simes weigh-in in a discussion moderated by Jacob Heilbrunn.

Jacob Heilbrunn: It is my great pleasure today to introduce our all-star cast of speakers who will be addressing the question, “What Now?” This session s based on a symposium in our upcoming issue of The National Interest. It seeks to address a fundamental question: Where is America headed now that Donald Trump will no longer be president, and Joe Biden will be taking the reins?” Our first speaker will be Graham Allison of Harvard University, followed by John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, Dimitri K. Simes, President and CEO of the Center for the National Interest, and last, but not least, Melinda Haring, Deputy Director of the Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council. I kicked off our symposium by writing an essay on the nature of American Exceptionalism, which has been a constituent element of American foreign policy since the inception of the republic. Americans have often thought of themselves as a chosen people, a nation that has a mission to civilize the rest of the world.

In many cases, this took the form that America should be a model for the world. Then the contrasting vision was that America should, in fact, actively intervene abroad. And this occurred, for example, in the 1820s when Americans were fixated by the prospect of Greek liberation, and wanted to support it by any means possible, which led to John Quincy Adams in his famous July 4 address saying that America should not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. This debate, in one form or another, has percolated over the decades. Today, Joe Biden has announced that America is back, and that we will lead as much by our power as by our example.

Can America, in fact, go back to the future, as it were? What does this imply for the nature of our alliances, for the nature of our relations with multilateral institutions, and for the vision of America at home? What kind of democracy are we? Are we, in fact, a model for the world, or do we need to focus on our domestic problems? To examine these questions, our relations with multilateral institutions, our alliances, and our rivalries in competition with Russia and China, I will first turn to Graham Allison.

Graham Allison: Thank you very much, Jacob. And thank you and The National Interest for inviting me to contribute to this volume and to participate with such a distinguished panel. You said we have two and a half minutes, five points. First, what is America’s purpose? Answer, captured best in the Cold War mantra: To ensure the survival of the US as a free nation with our fundamental institutions and values intact. Right. That was good for the Cold War, that’s good for now. Second question, is the US an exceptional nation? Answer, yes. From our beginning, as you have pointed out, America has conceived of itself as an exceptional nation. Its founding creed declares all human beings are endowed with unalienable rights. And it attempted to create, or began a project that attempts to create, a new form of government to ensure that citizens can realize these rights.

From the beginning, we’ve thought of this as a city on a hill that should serve as a beacon for others to follow. So as a red-blooded American, I subscribe to the American creed. Third, what is the priority for the Biden Administration on January 20th and as far beyond that as anyone can see? There, I think as Biden understands better than anybody I’ve read in the commentariat, the overwhelming primary objective will be to reunite a deeply divided country. Biden appreciates the profundity of a truth that Lincoln captured when he said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Point four, what will be the defining international challenge for the Biden Administration, and again, for as far beyond that as any eye can see?

It will, I believe, be China’s impact on the US and the international order, of which the US has been the principal architect and guardian. Washington is now woke, in fact, to a rising China. The response to it has been to declare that we now live in a new era of great power competition. Now, this gets it about half-right. The effort to see China and Russia as twins or as essential equivalents, I think, misunderstands more than it appreciates. China is the most complex international challenge any US president has ever seen. It’s not just another great power competitor, which is a good way to characterize Russia, but a Thucydidean rival, a genuine Thucydidean rival.

What’s distinctive about a Thucydidean rival is that its rapid rise tilts the balance of power between it and the ruling power. That this shift in the balance of power or the see-saw of power, in fact, not only erodes the influence of the ruling power, but challenges its identity and threatens to upend the international order that it has led, or at least its conception of the international order. And five, and finally, this Thucydidean rivalry will have to play out in what we learned to understand in the Cold War is a mad world, but a mad world both nuclear-mad and climate-mad, in which the US and China are condemned to coexist because the only feasible alternative is to co-destruct.

Jacob Heilbrunn: Thank you, Graham. We’ll now turn to John J. Mearsheimer.

John Mearsheimer: Thank you, Jacob, for inviting me to be here today and also to participate in the forum in the journal. For me, the principal purpose of American foreign policy is to maximize our prospects for both security and prosperity. And, in my opinion, the best way to do that is to, number one, be a regional hegemon, i.e. to dominate your area of the world, and two, to make sure that you don’t have a peer competitor. In other words, make sure there is no other regional hegemon on the planet. The problem that the United States faces today, and in particular, the incoming Biden administration, is that we have a potential peer competitor. And that potential peer competitor is China.

And given that realist logic dominates the thinking of all great powers, what the Chinese are going to try to do is imitate us. They’re going to try to dominate Asia the way we dominate the Western Hemisphere. They’re going to build a blue-water navy, significant power projection capability, and they’re going to challenge us on the high seas and in the Persian Gulf. We have a deep-seated interest in making sure that they do not become a regional hegemon. As you well know, in the 20th century, we confronted four potential regional hegemons: imperial Germany, imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union. The United States played a key role in putting all four of those countries on the scrap heap of history. And for very good reason. We do not tolerate peer competitors. And that is, in my opinion, a very smart policy.

Now, on the question of whether the United States is exceptional or not, this is a very difficult question to answer because all countries are exceptional in the sense that all of them have different histories. And they can be exceptional in all sorts of different ways. I think when we talk about the Americans or the United States as an exceptional country, what we’re really getting at is whether it is exceptional in terms of how it behaves on the international stage, how it behaves in terms of great power politics. Now, I know Americans like to tell themselves all these stories about how wonderful we are, and how exceptional we are, and how we behave differently than everybody else, and, “Oh my God, if just every country on the planet looked like us, we’d all live happily ever after,” but this is nonsense. The United States is one of the most ruthless great powers in modern history. I could go on for two hours about this. We’re not exceptional in terms of how we behave in international politics when it comes to great power politics, and I can tell you, the Chinese fully understand that point. They fully understand that we have our gun sights on them, and that we’re coming after them. Because they understand that the United States is not an exceptional great power, it’s a traditional great power.

However, if I had to make the argument that the United States is exceptional, at least exceptional in its behavior over the past 30 years, I’d make three quick points. And they all have to do with the fact that we have been exceptionally foolish. First is that the United States, and this is hard to believe, went to great lengths to help China grow, and, in effect, turned China into a potential peer competitor. The fact that the elites in this country didn’t foresee this problem is really shocking. And it shows you, in large part, how bankrupt the foreign policy elites in the United States are, and that includes both Democrats and Republicans. I’m not just talking about Joe Biden’s foolish views on growing China into a superstate. I’m talking about the fact that Republicans as well as Democrats did this. Secondly, we were exceptional in that we’ve pursued this foolish policy of trying to spread democracy all over the planet, sometimes at the end of a rifle barrel. It was a fool’s errand, it failed at almost every turn, and if you look at what we did in the Middle East, the amount of murder and mayhem that we created is truly stunning.

And then third, the elites have been exceptionally foolish in that they’ve not paid attention to nurturing the American nation-state. They’ve not paid attention to nationalism. And the end result is that the United States is a mess on the home front today. And one of the principal consequences of that is that because we are a mess on the home front today, because American nationalism has been badly damaged, we’re not well-positioned to compete with the Chinese in the years ahead. And that subverts what is the principal purpose of American foreign policy, which is to maximize our prospects for security and prosperity.

Jacob Heilbrunn: Thank you, John, for that lucid exposition of your views. Now, we’ll turn to Dimitri K. Simes.

Dimitri K. Simes: I agree with John Mearsheimer that the principal objective of US foreign policy should be to enhance security and prosperity of the United States. However, in order to do so, with a minimum chance to exceed, we first need to survive. And we increasingly forgot that we live in a nuclear age, that we are still dealing with a Russian superpower. A superpower not economically, not overall a superpower, but certainly s superpower in particular as far as strategic nuclear weapons are concerned. I think that President-elect Joe Biden is right, that the United States is fully capable of world leadership. I also think that in many, if not most, parts of the world, American leadership is needed and would be welcome. But we also need to understand we need to be honest with our help, that there are limits to what we can accomplish without very, very serious risks.

The United States was a principal international architect of a historic victory in the Cold War. It was primarily because of domestic internal factors in the Soviet Union, but the United States clearly made a major contribution to the Soviet collapse. Having said that, it would be a tragedy of historic proportions if we would manage to turn that victory into a calamity for the United States by entering into a nuclear confrontation with Russia, which is neither inevitable nor can be in the American interest unless very fundamental interests of this republic are at stake. And where is this danger coming from? The danger is coming from what I would call overextension. And more specifically from what is happening with American alliances, and even more specifically, NATO. George Washington, in his farewell address, very strongly advised Americans against permanent alliances and becoming involved in European squabbles–squabbles that do not necessarily affect vital American interests.

George F. Kennan, in the 1990s, was very strongly opposed to an extension of NATO to borders of Russia. That, however, has happened. Let me be clear. I think we would be obviously foolish to erect the alliance and not to use very important advantages or being associated with so many important nations, which to some extent, or a large extent, some would say, share American interests and values. However, if we allow this alliance to become an end in itself, if we allow the extension of the alliance to, as Bob Gates used to put it, the suburbs of St. Petersburg, and increasingly to the suburbs of Moscow, if we were allowed to make it a major objective, a practical objective of American foreign policy, there may be a very serious risk of nuclear confrontation.

If you would listen to people in Washington carefully, it seems that they’re talking about a major interference in Russian domestic politics. It’s not some time far away, but actually only several months from now on the eve of Russian parliamentary elections in September 2021, with a real desire to create problems for Putin’s authoritarian regime. Now, Putin’s authoritarian regime, to put it mildly, is not a model of democracy. And there are a lot of issues with Russian law, with Russian compliance with international norms, and, of course, with Russian attitude to the United States. But Russia is what it is. And what I hear from some of Biden’s advisors–how they are planning to chew their gum and still be able to walk—makes me think that they are deluding themselves.

Here’s why. They are in fact talking not just about chewing gum and walking. They’re talking more about planning to walk with another nuclear power and simultaneously, if you wish, to try to seduce their wife and take away their house. Now, the fellow we’re competing with, the fellow in the Kremlin, we may say is pretty nasty. The wife is beautiful. And it will be much better if that wife, the Russian people, would belong to somebody else. But, we are told, it is the law of history, and the United States is an exceptional nation that does not accept he laws of history. The rule of history is that if you want to remove the whole elite from power, then this very elite is bound to resist its removal. As it happens, this elite can in the Russian case resist its foes quite fiercely. And if you put together the focus on further NATO expansion and the desire to change Russian domestic rules, and even the very structure of Russian power, you may get a pretty explosive combination. I very much hope that this talk about accommodating the allies–and this talk about trying to change Russian domestic condition–I very much hope that this is a part of domestic politics and campaign sloganeering. Because if it would become a practical guide for American policy, we may be in very serious trouble….