The turmoil that permeated the Trump administration’s one term in office - the president’s endless psychodramas and the domestic upheavals that it had escalated - have probably made even the most left idealistic thinker breathe a sigh of relief at the victory of Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States. Now, there are many crucial domestic issues to consider under the new administration; most urgently, the coronavirus pandemic. But one important (and often neglected) aspect of being an engaged U.S. citizen concerned about the state of the country and the world is anticipating the Biden administration’s approach to foreign policy. What is the administration’s plan for the United States on its continued position as an economic and military superpower after Trump’s touted “America First” isolationism? In its effort to reverse many of Trump’s policies, would the Biden administration simply resort the country back to its traditional foreign policy of engaging and leading the world or will it exercise more restraint, taking into consideration the positives (if there is any) in Trump’s supposed isolationist foreign policy and adopt them?
Before trying to answer the questions above we should back up and consider that there is a fundamental problem with the above presupposition: that there were significant differences in the foreign policies of past administrations - whether Republican or Democrat. This paper will argue that, thus far, there had been no significant difference in overall U.S. strategy in foreign policy since 1945 and to keep expecting change per party in power may be futile. As two University of London academics Timothy Lynch and Robert Singh wrote in The Wall Street Journal back in 2008: “Administrations bequeath foreign policies to their successors that are then tweaked, but rarely transformed.”[1]
Recalling some of the history of past U.S. administrations since 1945 demonstrates that American foreign policy is consistent in following the trajectory of maintaining world domination no matter which party was in power. As this short historical exploration of the origins of U.S. foreign policy from the Truman to the Biden administrations will show, the U.S. foreign policy approach has been, by and large, bipartisan with minor differences consistent with post-World War II U.S. policy makers’ promotion of “visionary globalism” and has now been labeled “liberal hegemony.” In particular, this paper will examine three countries that represent major geopolitical problematic areas: Russia, Afghanistan, and China
Foreign policy analysts coined the term liberal hegemony to describe U.S. grand strategy for the world after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991: it is hegemonic in that the United States continues to assert its dominant military power in the world (and more so since the Cold War ended); it is liberal in that it continues to lead the world economically through the international financial institutions like The World Bank, The International Monetary Fund, and The World Trade Organization. Those U.S.-led economic institutions have promoted a rules-based world order, prodding all countries to follow a market-oriented political system where they can trade with each other under U.S. auspices – and a world where western corporations, investors, and bankers are able to treat the world as one big industrial unit.
Donald Trump presented his administration’s foreign policy as radically different from his predecessors’ when he invoked the pre-World War II isolationist notion “America First” during his presidential campaign. But a look at the Trump administration’s foreign policy performance at the end of his term suggests that in the end – on virtually every major issue - Trump quickly pivoted back to standard bipartisan U.S. foreign policy, eroding the notion that he was an outsider with a radically new approach. Even during the first year of Trump’s term, we can already find a number of instances where the president switched back to normal beltway policies.
As foreign policy analyst Stephen Walt has extensively argued in his book, The Hell of Good Intentions, the Trump administration’s foreign policy did not deviate from orthodoxy.[2] Initially, President Trump appointed many outsiders in his cabinet showing that he intended to upend the foreign policy status quo. For instance, Trump selected a controversial retired general Michael Flynn as national security advisor, Exxon president Rex Tillerson who lacked any governmental experience, former military official retired Marine Corps General James Mattis as secretary of state (despite that, traditionally, a civilian official is appointed as head of the Pentagon), and retired general John Kelly as head of the Department of Homeland Security.
Trump also appointed some foreign policy posts to people without any governmental and diplomatic experience at all, like his son-in-law Jared Kushner as his chief advisor, Stephen Bannon as his chief strategist, and former Republican governor Nikki Haley as ambassador to the United Nations.
These are just some examples. But as we review the turbulent history of his presidency, by the summer of 2017, many of these appointments were short-lived, and Trump ended up repopulating his staff with traditional foreign policy experts like army lieutenant H.R. McMaster, who followed traditional establishment foreign policy, CIA director Mike Pompeo, and former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, to name a few of the replacements. There were many more instances of administrative shake-up in Trump’s cabinet that had kept repopulating his foreign policy staff; nevertheless, none of it ever led to any significant change in traditional U.S. foreign policy strategy.
And a quick look at a few of Trump’s actual foreign policy in major areas of the world, we can see right away that he ended up following traditional policies. For instance, like his predecessors, his administration regarded Russia as a major military threat and imposed new economic sanctions to it in 2017 despite Trump’s earlier overtures to President Putin. This act prodded Putin to close two American facilities in Russia. In turn, Trump closed down three Russian diplomatic facilities and its consulate in San Francisco. Moreover, at the end of 2017, in agreement with former Obama era policymakers, Trump approved $41.5 million lethal arms sales to Ukraine, which was predictable to anger Moscow. As Walt points out, “Although Trump and Putin sought to mend fences at a summit meeting in July 2018, U.S. policy toward Russia during Trump’s first eighteen months in office was if anything more confrontational than it had been under Obama.”[3]
During his election campaign in 2016, Trump continually criticized NATO (the post-WWII Western military alliance), branding it as obsolete and outdated. He complained that its European member countries were not contributing their fair share in the alliance. But soon thereafter in 2017, he walked back these statements about NATO and approved of it claiming that it had changed. Trump’s initial criticisms of the alliance seemed new, but upon closer analysis similar issues had come up about burden-sharing since NATO’s founding in 1949. At first, Trump refused to endorse Article 5 of the NATO treaty (the mutual defense clause) but then a month later reversed course. And Trump enhanced NATO’s defenses against Russia throughout 2017 including the funding of $1.4 billion – about a 40 percent increase - for the European Reassurance Initiative (ERI) and he bolstered joint military exercise, Operation Atlantic Resolve.[4]
In Asia, the Trump administration viewed China as the United States’ major long-term economic and military rival. His administration, like Bush’s and Obama’s, criticized China for its attempts at expanding its influence in the Asian region through its soft power, taking charge of the South China Sea, and threatening to invade Taiwan. China was declared the major U.S. competitor for world leadership and deterrent of U.S. policies for the Asian region in Trump’s White House National Security Strategy and the Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy. At the outset, Trump made it look as if his administration was seeking overtures with China when he visited President Xi Jinping a couple of times and claimed to have established a good relationship with him. But then he soon lambasted the Chinese leader for being soft on North Korea and was overall troubled by the Sino-American trade relationship, claiming it to be unfair in China’s favor. In 2018, Trump imposed tariffs and investment restrictions against China for violating WTO trade rules and for its alleged theft of U.S intellectual property.[5]
As a backdrop, the first task in anticipating the new Biden administration’s foreign policy approach is to review the pivotal role the United States has played since 1945 in creating the world we live in today. This may give us some indication of whether or not there were significant transformational changes in U.S foreign policy since 1945 or that U.S. foreign policy has remained consistent.
Post-War Planners
When France fell to Nazi Germany in 1940 during the Second World War, alarmed U.S. policymakers saw a great opportunity to step up the country’s military might to eventually fight the Axis powers that they feared would take over the world if the Allied powers lose the war. But these policymakers also added the goal of setting the United States as the preeminent superpower in the world in the aftermath of the war - and they meant it to be permanent. They then made a fateful choice: either keep on to the policy of “America First” isolationism in the Western Hemisphere or help the weakened Allied powers meet the war head on, defeat the Axis powers, and push to be the permanent global power. The choice they made was the latter.[6]
The momentum started earlier at the turn of the twentieth century. Though Britain was still the most powerful industrial empire at the time, the United States started catching up to it. The United States did not fully industrialize until the late nineteenth century, a latecomer relative to its European counterparts. But starting around the 1870s it sped up its industrialization that by 1913, it was producing one-third of the world’s industrial output – more than the combined output of the big industrial powers Britain, France, and Germany.
The outcome of World War II with the Allied powers winning against the Axis powers gave impetus to the U.S. plan for world domination. What gave U.S. planners much confidence in taking over the world was the devastation and weakening of the traditional imperial powers Britain and France and the defeat and devastation of their enemies Germany and Italy. The Soviet Union also suffered wreckage from the war, though it retained much power in Eastern Europe and became a deterrent for the United States in controlling the world. Nevertheless, Europe effectively destroyed itself as a cumulative result of the two world wars while the United States remained unharmed. It can now take up the mantle of power.[7]
At the end of the war, the United States had about 50 percent of the world’s wealth with only 6.3 percent of its population. The country now asserted its power over Western Europe and Asia. It became the first truly global power. Historians Douglas Brinkley and Stephen Ambrose succinctly described the postwar status of the United States and the new world order:
At the conclusion of World War II, America was on a high. In all the world only the United States had a healthy economy, an intact physical plant capable of mass production of goods, and excess capital. American troops occupied Japan, the only important industrial power in the Pacific, while American influence was dominant in France, Britain, and West Germany, the industrial heart of Europe. The Pacific and the Mediterranean had become American lakes. Above all, the United States had a monopoly on the atomic bomb.[8]
Since postwar policy planning documents like the National Security Council Memorandum 68 (NSC 68) and Policy Planning Study 23 (PPS 23) were declassified through the Pentagon Papers, scholars have had the rare opportunity to analyze and give a more truthful picture of what the policy planning staff’s real intentions and goals were for the United States and the world versus those conveyed by politicians to the general public.
Aided by these declassified policy planning documents, China specialist and author James Peck analyzed the group of policy planners in the new agency within the state department called the National Security Council (NSC). He pointed out that these men worked to push on the president of the United States their radical view of the role the country should play in the world. They argued that since the United States had acquired such enormous advantages and power in the world, it was imperative that it use that power to shape it in accordance with American objectives. Moreover, if the United States does not take charge of the world, the planners feared, geopolitical chaos and social upheavals from revolutions and civil wars in underdeveloped and decimated countries would become a major detriment to the national interest. Thus, besides Eastern Europe where the Soviet Union had control, the rest of the world was to be under U.S. subordination and control. Each region was assigned its specific role. For example, Western Europe and Japan were to be reconstructed using natural resources and raw materials from the newly liberated former colonies. All countries in the regions they termed the “Grand Area” will serve as markets to benefit the American economy.
Prior to 1940, there was no real influential foreign policy agency in the United States government. There were at the time just a small, uninfluential group of bureau officials serving under the president in the Foreign Services and the Commerce Departments. Since 1940, a small group of men that would eventually work in the NSC fostered their ideology on the federal government. These men had what Peck called “Visionary globalism.” Visionary globalism not only gave coherence and ideology to American foreign policy, it was now backed by the centralized power of the executive branch and the military, as Peck summarized:
Globalism brought a kaleidoscope of American interests into some order, balancing different regions against one another, assessing priorities, assigning short- and long-term objectives. It offered a vision of the world that demanded ways of integrating ideological, economic, political, and military concerns with overall “strategic thinking.”[9]
All in all, the slightly varying foreign policy characteristics of post-WWII U.S. presidents have been deeply rooted in the ideology of the highly educated elite men of the National Security Council in 1947: Dean Acheson, George Kennan, Paul Nitze, Henry Stimson, James Forrestal, William Clayton, and Averell Harriman, to name a few. These men, unique in American political history, came from the financial industry and law firms in Boston and New York. They knew one another well and shared an ideology about power – they believed they were summoned by history to guide the United States in seizing superpower status and to lead the world. No other group or agency in American government has had a lasting intellectual influence in the foreign policy of the United States as these men have.[10]
As either a Republican or Democratic administration in the United States finishes its first term - whether or not it wins the next election – it will get many academic analysts converging on journals and the major media to assess its foreign policy. One common lament among analysts in the past ten years has been the supposed decline of American power in the world. Valid arguments can be made for either that American power is declining or that the United States remains the most powerful nation in the world. Both are true. If we invoke the foreign policy goals of the NSC of visionary globalism as the standard measure of success, we can conclude that U.S. power has indeed been declining since 1945. A quick look at major political events in world history of the latter twentieth century we can easily find cases where the United States failed in its goal to control and subordinate parts of the grand area like China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Iran. On the other hand, the United States still has the biggest military budget in the world, possesses the most nuclear weapons, and leads the international financial institutions.
U.S. foreign policy has been and continues to be an elite concern. The policies are often opposite of public opinion; and therefore, to have free rein, real elite objectives are often obscured for the general public. Theoretically, assuming a healthy, functioning democratic system in the United States and more economic equality, American voters would be well-informed and more engaged in debates about American involvement in the world. But in reality, there is a disconnect between what voters want and what elites want in foreign policy, as examined by scholars Benjamin Page and Marshall Bouton.[11] For instance, according to NSC standards, the United States should run the world. Yet according to a poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs conducted in September 2020, a majority of Americans preferred the United States to share power rather than be the dominant power in the world. And for 20 years, Gallup polls have shown that Americans prefer the United States to play a major role in world affairs rather than the leading role.[12]
So, along with specialists’ assessments about the Trump administration’s foreign policy approach and the Biden administration’s policy pronouncements comes some reckoning about American power. Writing for The New York Times, Director of grand strategy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft Stephen Wertheim argues, “the United States possesses no widely shared, deeply felt purpose for vast global power…Taken for granted by political elites, that power is nonetheless ripe for challenge beneath the surface.” Wertheim questions the purpose today of the United States’s continued militarism over countries around the world when the publicly stated original intent of U.S. militarism was only to stave off the Axis powers during World War II. He believes that the American elites’ insistence on dominating the world has become outmoded, unjustified, and costly.[13]
Yet, as pointed above, the internal documents show that the original intent of the postwar planners for the United States was to lead the world through its military and economic might permanently, not just to help defeat the Axis powers. Taking a brief sample look at the history of U.S. foreign policy since 1945, we can find major examples of how the United States has been consistent with its original policy intent from 1940. The crucial problem to consider now is the destructiveness of American foreign policy and how much Washington is willing to risk world catastrophe to maintain this absolute power in the world. We can now explore some major U.S. foreign policy cases - particularly in Russia, Afghanistan, and China - that demonstrate how destructive U.S. visionary globalism is to the country and to the world.
Russia
The one major potential military conflict that has emerged within the past two decades is between the United States and Russia. The United States has continually regarded the former Soviet Union as a weak and declining power since its demise in 1991. U.S. political commentators and analysts believe Russia is too weak a country to have much international influence. They assert that Russia’s economy is weak; its military comparatively small; and therefore, is not a major threat in world affairs. They believe that since the end of the Cold War the combination of the United States, the European Union, and NATO can push through U.S.-led liberal hegemony without hindrance or challenge even from a former superpower like Russia.
That Russia is too weak to be taken seriously in international affairs has become conventional wisdom in mainstream political commentary, but the notion is simply based on plain hubris. As scholar Kathryn Stoner has asserted in The Wall Street Journal, Russia is a formidable power and should not be underestimated. Russian intelligence has demonstrated its abilities in cyberspace to infiltrate U.S. data systems, for example. Also, in recent years, Russia has asserted itself in world affairs in Crimea, Syria, sub-Saharan Africa, Venezuela, the Artic, and Europe. Looking solely at Russia’s GDP and modest military spending as a measure of its power is myopic, Stoner warns.[14]
Moreover, Russia is still a major global supplier of oil and gas. The country mines, refines, sells petroleum, and controls much of the global oil pipeline infrastructure. This “gives Mr. Putin the kind of leverage and influence over a host of countries (including most of Europe) that doesn’t show up in measures of relative power such as GDP,” Stoner indicates.[15] Indeed, Russia supplies about 35 percent of Europe’s total gas consumption. Eastern Europe, as analyst Daniel Yergin has pointed out, can be the center of a geopolitical clash.[16]
A geopolitical clash finally occurred when Russian president Vladimir Putin sent special forces to Crimea in February 2014 as a response to the ouster of a pro-Russian leader Viktor Yanukovych. Putin feared that Yanukovych’s successor would move Ukraine, which was a part of the former Soviet Union, closer to the West. On March 2, Russia annexed the peninsula. This act caught the United States, the European Union, and NATO by surprise. Through this annexation, Russia has now boldly started to flex its military power in the area in defiance of the United States and Western Europe. The West quickly branded the act as an attempt at Russian revanchism; they feared it might eventually invade the rest of Ukraine and other countries of Eastern Europe. Officially, the West declared the Russian act illegal as it violated de jure boundaries of Europe and then it imposed sanctions on the country.
On July 16, the United States imposed even harsher sanctions on Russia’s financial, energy, and defense sectors. Initially, Europe did not go along with further U.S. sanctions until a day later, on July 17, when Russian separatists, using a Russian ground-to-air missile, shot down a Malaysian airliner over eastern Ukraine mistakenly thinking it was a Ukrainian troop plane. 298 people, mostly Dutch, were killed in the attack. The United States and Western Europe condemned the attack as Russian aggression justifying the extension of sanctions against Russia. “The war has dragged on ever since,” Daniel Yergin observes, “with at least fourteen thousand deaths, widening the split between Russia and the West.”[17]
Moscow believes Crimea had always been a part of Russia and claiming it back was just a matter of time. It also has strategic incentives in claiming the peninsula: the annexation gives Russia hundreds of miles of coastline by the Black Sea and “a near-stranglehold on commerce in the Sea of Azov and access to vast potential energy riches on the Black Sea shelf,” Yergin asserts.[18] A new cold war has now emerged. The dangers reminiscent of the Cuban Missile Crisis of the 1960s were evident at the time when Putin had said at the fifth anniversary of the annexation that he had put his country’s nuclear forces on combat readiness in defense of Crimea.
As we shall see, the backdrop to this conflict is the United States’s grand strategy of liberal hegemony over the world. The United States continues to take major risks in military conflict by asserting its power disregarding adverse geopolitical effects on countries like Russia. In the case of the Ukraine crisis in Crimea, the one risky policy the United States has taken with Russia was its push for the expansion of NATO - the West’s post-World War II military alliance against the Soviet’s Warsaw Pact - even after the end of the Cold War when it was no longer necessary. From the standpoint of Moscow, Washington disregarded Russia’s vital national interest and underestimated its stance in the region by pressing on with expanding the NATO alliance in Eastern Europe from 1999 to 2004. During that period, the United States admitted Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia to NATO. And in 2008, it was preparing to add Georgia and Ukraine to the alliance.
Even George Kennan, who was the Russia specialist for the State Department in 1948 and one of the authors of key internal policy documents such as PPS 23, warned that expanding NATO eastward was going to increase the chance of military conflict with Russia. Since 1948, Kennan learned his lessons about Russia. We can know from his writing at the time that his policy proposal was to be as aggressively realist as possible when it comes to ruling the world; this meant, in large part, dominating the Soviet Union. But this time much has changed in the world and he knew better: conflict with Russia would be catastrophic and advised against policies that would inflame tensions in the region.[19]
It is true that Russia’s annexation of Crimea was a violation of international law. The act was brazened enough to shock the West. Not since 1945 did the Soviet Union or post-Cold War Russia in the 1990s intervened in the territorial integrity, sovereignty, and independence of its European neighbors as it finally did in annexing Crimea in 2014. Two analysts of the Ukraine crisis Rajan Menon and Eugene Rumer have observed that what Russia did in Ukraine by annexing Crimea was troubling if not unacceptable rendering the country untrustworthy in international affairs. “[H]aving explicitly rejected some of the fundamental principles of European security and stability it had previously accepted,” they wrote, “Russia has embraced a foreign policy doctrine based on ideas of ethnic kinship and asserted its right to continue to violate those basic principles.” Russia, in their evaluation, has done much damage to the stability and security of Europe since the end of the Cold War as well as to key elements of European peace and security arrangements during the Cold War administered by the United States and its allies.[20]
But did Russia’s annexing of Crimea come out of nowhere? Was it an indication of Russian revanchism? Or was there a situation or context that provoked Putin to annex Crimea? As previously pointed out, the situation that provoked Russia’s violation of international borders was the West’s expansion of NATO led by the United States. It is true that prior to the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Soviet leaders and their Russian successors preferred that NATO stay intact and U.S. forces remain in Europe to pacify a reunified Germany.[21] But they held on to mere U.S. verbal pledges that were effectively broken almost a decade later. Prior to German reunification, Secretary of State James Baker and other U.S. officials in February 1990 promised Soviet leaders that NATO forces and jurisdiction would not expand to the east. But by the mid-1990s, believing they can act with impunity because Russia was weak, the Clinton administration started to push for NATO expansion.[22] The main goal of the United States in expanding NATO to the east was to get Ukraine to the West’s side and out of Russia’s sphere of influence. In 2008, NATO looked to add Georgia and Ukraine to the alliance with the support of the Bush administration. Fearing this would provoke Russia, France and Germany opposed the move. NATO then settled on a compromise that would later add these states to the alliance arguing that membership in the alliance was the countries’ aspiration.[23]
The prospect of further NATO enlargement in 2008 with the inclusion of Georgia and Ukraine clearly angered Russia that it finally drew a red line. Upon learning of NATO-U.S. contingency plans to add those countries to the military alliance, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko warned that Georgia’s and Ukraine’s joining NATO would be a major strategic mistake and would confer serious consequences for pan-European security. As reported in a Russian newspaper, Vladimir Putin specifically made clear to George W. Bush at the time that if the West adds Ukraine to the alliance, the country would cease to exist.[24]
The setting was ominous. The West’s policies of NATO enlargement, democracy promotion, and EU expansion was like added fuel igniting a fire, as political science analyst John Mearsheimer described the crisis in Foreign Affairs. The ignition happened when pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted through popular protest and was succeeded by a “pro-Western and anti-Russian to the core” new government of Arseniy Yatsenyuk. It was a coup d’état and was obvious to many analysts and to Putin that the United States backed it. The gun was locked and loaded: on February 22, 2014, Putin ordered his forces in the area to invade Crimea and he immediately incorporated the peninsula to Russia. The act was not difficult to quickly execute for Putin as he already had thousands of troops stationed at a naval base in Crimea and was also aided by the fact that the majority of Crimea’s population – 60 percent – were ethnic Russians and they wanted out of Ukraine.[25]
Russian actions in Ukraine were a direct reaction to the United States’s concrete plans to westernize the region disregarding Russian concerns that this would place them under direct threat. It was also rooted in underestimating Russian military and diplomatic power and its willingness to use some of that power as a reaction to what they correctly saw as threats from the West.[26] Russia knows from its military history that Ukraine’s huge expanse of flat land that had been used by Napoleonic France, Imperial Germany, and Nazi Germany to attack Russian territory needed to be protected from any adversarial encroachments. As Mearsheimer has written:
Ukraine serves as a buffer state of enormous strategic importance to Russia. No Russian leader would tolerate a military alliance that was Moscow’s mortal enemy until recently moving into Ukraine. Nor would any Russian leader stand idly by while the West helped install a government there that was determined to integrate Ukraine into the West…This is Geopolitics 101: great powers are always sensitive to potential threats near their home territory. After all, the United States does not tolerate distant great powers deploying military forces anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, much less on its borders. Imagine the outrage in Washington if China built an impressive military alliance and tried to include Canada and Mexico in it.[27]
The inspiration for U.S. policy of continued NATO expansion in Eastern Europe after the Cold War is the globalism of the post-World War II policymakers. The original postwar foreign policy of globalism has continued unabated and it is now having to contend with new geopolitical realities - Russia being one of the major ones. Russia is the one state that can destroy the United States. “Although the prospect of an all-out war involving Russia and the United States remains unthinkable,” Menon and Rumer warned, “neither party to this conflict should ignore the danger that small incidents could inadvertently set in motion.”[28]
Military tensions in the region continues as a result of Western policies. Recently, Russia has mobilized troops along its border with Ukraine after a skirmish on March 26 along the demarcation line inside Ukraine. The conflict resulted in four Ukrainian soldiers dead and two wounded. The recent fighting and subsequent Russian mobilization of troops in the area has upended the 2020 cease-fire agreement between Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists. A Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Pescov has expressed his worry that the renewed fighting in the area can trigger a wider conflagration.[29]
Afghanistan
Less than a month after the September 11, 2001 attacks by al-Qaeda on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the United States under Republican president George W. Bush wasted no time in asserting its hegemony by unilaterally invading Afghanistan where the source of the attack was believed to be hatched. It had long been known by U.S. intelligence agencies that the Taliban-controlled country was a potential planning base for major terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda against the West. In 1993, the group attacked the World Trade Center detonating a truck bomb killing six people. In 1998, it attacked U.S. embassies in Nairobe, Kenya, and Arusha, Tanzania, killing hundreds of people. In 2000, al-Qaeda bombed the USS Cole killing seventeen U.S. sailors. But at the time just before the 9/11 attacks, Washington had no immediate plans for Afghanistan and policymakers did not consider al-Qaeda and its Taliban supporters as an imminent threat. (Though according to the 9/11 federal commission, in the summer of 2001 U.S. intelligence officials had received warnings about a major attack in the United States but it was brushed aside by the administration.)[30]
The original U.S. intent to invade Afghanistan was to root out al-Qaeda and punish the Taliban for hosting the group. But afterwards Bush policymakers decided to stay and mold the country in its image by imposing on Afghan society a Western-style liberal democratic political system. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan on October 7, 2001- with British support but no United Nations authorization - was a chance for the Bush administration to flex U.S. muscles showing the world how strong America was. But now, 20 years later, it “became the same long, bloody, unpopular slog that forced the British to withdraw from Afghanistan in the 19th century and the Soviet Union to retreat in the 20th,” as the New York Times has put it.[31] The push for “Nation-building” as the stated U.S. goal for the country have proved to be impossible to achieve in a culturally and politically distinct society such as in Afghanistan.
Middle East historian William Polk, who was also a former State Department official, has written extensively about Afghanistan, blending in his writings his travel experiences in the country while he was a member of the Policy Planning Council staff. He points out that Afghanistan’s social structure is so fundamentally different from the West that it is therefore ill-suited to be reconstituted to a Western-style liberal democracy with a highly centralized state. The western concept of nation-state encompassing a bordered geopolitical area is alien to Afghans. “[I]n looking at nations that did not emerge from the societies of Western Europe,” Polk has written, “one must always be cautious in applying the definitions that have been developed from the European experience.” To Afghans, the concept of “nation” encompasses only the whole of their village or tribe, not the whole country. Moreover, Afghanistan was another area of Asia and Africa that European empires were unable to incorporate into their colonies. Its society is far from monolithic: it is a conglomeration of villages and tribes.[32]
Polk enumerates Afghan society in four parts: first, villages or tribes; second, joint ventures of villages and tribes working together to fight and expel invaders; third, ad hoc assembly of the tribes and villages into something like a state, and fourth, people who have been detached from both villages and tribes as a result of warfare. Though not monolithic, what villagers and tribes that compose the area of Afghanistan share is their determined resistance to foreigners. Polk explains:
For the Afghans, of course, what the British and the Russians thought – and sought – was irrelevant. They just wanted the foreigners to leave them alone. They always had stoutly opposed the entry of foreigners; the struggle against them was the substance of their sagas and myths. They hated the foreigners even when, as was true of many of them, they counted the foreigners among their forbearers.[33]
This backdrop to Afghan society should give us some insight as to why it is impossible for the United States to successfully impose a Western-style social organization on Afghanistan, which it tried to do soon after invading it in 2001. Afghan villages and tribes have developed a tradition of banding together to fight foreigners that invade their territories and they have been successful at fending them off throughout their history.
Recalling his experience in Afghanistan in 2002, Middle East correspondent Thomas Friedman has argued in The New York Times that it was sheer folly for the United States to have a state-building project in Afghanistan after the invasion. He visited the country with Joe Biden, who was then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Friedman recalled thinking that it was a big risk to try to “graft a Western political culture onto such a deeply tribalized, male-dominated and Islamic fundamentalist culture like Afghanistan’s.”[34] Friedman’s colleague, the Times’ Maureen Dowd, agrees when she forthrightly states, “The Bush administration was arrogant and ignorant about occupying this medieval moonscape. Officials thought they could bomb the bejesus out of the people who hated us, so that they would never look at us cross-eyed again. We would be the swaggering hyperpower.”[35] Indeed, brute force can only go so far.
A deeper New York Times analysis of the U.S. folly in Afghanistan comes from Max Fisher. He points out that on December 7, 2001, the Taliban had surrendered to the United States and its allies and sought to “go home.” But the United States refused that surrender and pursued a zero-sum, hardline condition against the Taliban and developed a quixotic project of westernizing Afghanistan, basically asking the group to disappear. The Bush administration pursued such a hardline stance that it did not even allow any modest terms of surrender from the Taliban leader for him to come back home to Afghanistan after fleeing to Pakistan.
Soon thereafter, Washington oversaw an international agreement to impose a political system in Afghanistan that was akin to what the United States has: a federalist system. In the policymakers’ hubris and desire to quickly achieve the goal of shaping Afghanistan into a familiar liberal nation-state that would be subservient to the U.S. globalist vision, it followed a contradictory strategy that evidently failed after 20 years of trying. Fisher argues that it was a contradictory strategy to centralize the country by simply eradicating the Taliban by military force and installing a pro-American central government based in Kabul because the Taliban has a formidable influence throughout the country; the group represented a crucial Pashtun constituency in the rural areas that cannot be discounted politically and militarily. The Taliban was working to build its own centralized rule from the bottom up while the United States seeks the same goal with the Afghan government from the top down.
The subtext to Fisher’s analysis is that in order to achieve lasting peace in Afghanistan and have a government there that the United States can live with, U.S. policy should have been to work along with the Taliban in slowly building a centralized government by reconciling different tribal groups and warlords on the local level and eventually build it up to a bigger, centralized government based in Kabul. But instead, Washington pursued a zero-sum stance on the Taliban: either you are “with us or against us.”
Fisher describes one other problematic aspect of this U.S. strategy:
Warlords and fighters were expected to join the central government against the Taliban. Those who did not were treated as the enemy. It flowed from the strategy of installing a unified state and defeating the Taliban. But it blocked local groups from consolidating control by forcing them into the wider war. And it essentially forced them either to side with the Taliban, strengthening that group, or to align with an American-backed order that increasingly seemed unable to survive American departure.
Hence, U.S. policy essentially turned Afghanistan into a network of strongmen propped up by the American military. If the Americans leave, nation-building crumbles. Military leaders under both Republican and Democratic administrations stubbornly believe that at some point, with enough military pressure, the Taliban will eventually disappear and the United States can then succeed in their project of installing a puppet government in Kabul that would effectively rule all of Afghanistan. This has been the U.S. goal for 20 years now and it has not worked.
Just before the United States switched combat forces to the war in Iraq in March 2003, there were 8,000 troops in Afghanistan. The mission successfully routed the Taliban but it was able to regroup in the subsequent years and regained enhanced fighting capabilities. By mid-2010, the Obama administration decided to implement a surge in Afghanistan leading up to 100,000 U.S. troops. Despite this surge, additional NATO combat forces, and U.S. airstrikes, the Taliban only grew stronger, was able to fend off the attacks, and inflict heavy casualties on Afghan security forces. Indeed, it was demonstrably an unwinnable war for the United States.
20 years of war in Afghanistan has devastated the country causing up to a hundred thousand Afghans dead, thousands of U.S. troops dead and several hundred thousand wounded. It has costed the U.S. trillions of dollars. Additionally, the U.S. decision to stay in Afghanistan to reshape its society and soon thereafter also invaded Iraq caused militant groups in the region to metastasize over time. For instance, there are four times as many Sunni Islamic militants in 2018 operating worldwide as there were on September 11, 2001. There are now about 230,000 Salafi jihadist fighters in nearly 70 countries, predominantly in Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.[36] More and more policymakers have acknowledged that the war has been costly and interminable. The real hard part for them is figuring out how to sustain the United States’s reputation of being the hegemonic power in the world while leaving Afghanistan. This would be akin to the United States admitting weakness and defeat against a perceived weaker enemy, which it was loathed to do in Vietnam in 1973. Analyst Robert Kaplan writing in The New York Times succinctly described the American dilemma:
No other country in the world symbolizes the decline of the American empire as much as Afghanistan. There is virtually no possibility of a military victory over the Taliban and little chance of leaving behind a self-sustaining democracy – facts that Washington’s policy community has mostly been unable to accept.[37]
The fact that policymakers today, whether Republican or Democrat, are unable to accept defeat in Afghanistan and loathed to damage U.S. reputation of being a permanent global power is an indication that the original globalist vision of U.S. planners in 1940 has had a lasting impact on U.S. policymakers today.
China
In terms of overall measure of world power and significance, the United States only has one major competition left: China. The United States and China have two of the biggest economies in the world representing about 40 percent of the world’s GDP and 50 percent of its military spending.[38] Throughout the post-Cold War world order led by the United States, China has had a policy, under leader Deng Xiao-ping (1978-1989), of keeping a low-profile in world affairs biding its time until the country gains enough power economically and militarily before it asserts itself.[39] Now in 2021, its time has arrived, as Steven Myers of The New York Times reports: “China hopes to position itself as the main challenger to an international order, led by the United States.”[40] China’s recent assertion of its renewed status in the world has evidently caught the United States and NATO’s attention as demonstrated in a June 14, 2021, 79-paragraph communiqué: it mentioned China close to a dozen times compared to in past NATO summits where the country was rarely mentioned.[41]
China has come a long way in 2021 from its status as a struggling country during World War II suffering under Japanese imperial rule to boldly challenging the United States in world hegemony. Right after Japanese rule weakened and collapsed in Manchuria, China burst into civil war. The war was between the corrupt and unpopular Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek and the Communist guerrillas led by Mao Zedong. The United States was supportive of the Nationalists as it sent almost $3 billion in aid to it between 1945-1949. Nevertheless, American money did not do the Nationalists much good in winning the civil war. At the time, the Truman administration did not regard China’s civil war as a major geopolitical concern and was overconfident that the Nationalists would win. The Communists eventually won and took over the mainland. Jiang’s regime then collapsed and fled to Taiwan (Formosa) where it set up a government-in-exile. Major voices in American foreign policy, like John Foster Dulles, considered the defeat of the Nationalists as a major defeat of the United States against Communism in Asia. Truman explained that there was little his administration could have done to stop Mao’s advance, but midwestern and western conservatives in the United States refused to believe him and critiqued his handling of the war as a major failure in U.S. foreign policy. These conservatives considered Asia as more important to shield against Communism than Europe.[42] Republicans blamed the Democrats for having “lost” China and used that notion to help them win the next election.
By 1950, Truman’s Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who shared the blame for the failed China policy, started to adopt a hardline stance on China. Influenced by the “China lobby” in the United States, the administration recognized Chiang’s government in Taiwan as the sole legitimate government of China and viewed Mao’s People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a Soviet ally - and therefore an enemy. In addition, the administration blocked the PRC from China’s seat at the United Nations.
In a March 2021 Anchorage, Alaska meeting between China’s diplomatic envoys and their U.S. counterparts, China alluded that it now considers itself “equal” to the United States. At meeting the Chinese envoys were assertive and projected confidence as they criticized and lectured the United States in its racial problems at home and failings in democratic governance. China has much to boast about now as the country has withstood U.S. interference in its internal affairs for decades during the Cold War. Much of expert analyses confers what Washington has always feared would develop and come to full fruition since 1949: an economically and militarily powerful independent, nationalist China that would disrupt U.S. hegemony in Asia. Since China made itself known as a communist state, Washington regarded it as its main enemy in Asia and directed policy toward isolating and then containing it. The U.S. relied on Taiwan as the bulwark against China’s rising power in region. Policymakers wanted to direct their attention to protecting the island against Chinese encroachments, securing its position in the United Nations and imposing harsh sanctions against China.[43]
U.S. policymakers since the late 1940s have had a plan to shape Asia in accordance to their global vision for setting up the American-led, post-war world. So, when the Chinese communists won the civil war, allied with the Soviet Union, and the prospect of Communist China becoming a model for Third World “wars of national liberation,” intense U.S. hostility toward the country developed. Policymakers were deeply concerned that “China’s intensely asserted independence and its impassioned nationalistic determination to find its way to great-power status” would then thwart U.S. goals to organize the world. Specifically, “At the root of American hostility throughout these years was opposition to a China that would not accept the new Asian capitalist order that the United States was shaping,” author James Peck contented.[44]
U.S. hostility toward China was already evident to scholars like Peck, but recent new details continue to emerge in support of the fact. The hostility reached fever pitch during the Cold War in 1958 when U.S. generals in the Eisenhower administration drew up plans to strike mainland China with nuclear weapons as a response to Mao’s forces’ shelling of islands controlled by Taiwan. Fortunately for the world, the conflict was averted after Mao’s forces broke off the attacks and President Eisenhower decided against his generals’ suggestion and relied on using conventional weapons instead.[45]
U.S. military leaders like top Air Force commander for the Pacific, General Laurence S. Kutner, sought authorization for a nuclear attack on mainland China in response to a potential armed conflict over the islands. As a tactic, he and other military leaders proposed to attack Chinese airfields first with atomic bombs to placate skeptics in the United States of nuclear warfare demonstrating how the United States practices restraint; so that then, as their reasoning went, it would be harder for the skeptics to stop the further escalation of war.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Nathan F. Twining said at the time that if China did not back off the conflict after U.S. bombs its airfields, he advised the United States to attack mainland China with nuclear weapons even though he knew the risks of the act included Soviet nuclear retaliation against Taiwan and Okinawa (where American military forces were based). This attitude was echoed by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles who pointed out that U.S. policy was not overly concerned about losing the islands per se but was more inclined to demonstrate to the world that U.S. military power can destroy communism; as Peck stated: “For Dulles, American global credibility had to be preserved at all costs.”[46] And even though U.S. officials considered the risk that a nuclear strike on China would prod the Soviet Union to come to the defense of its ally and directly strike the United States with nuclear bombs, they believed it would be worth it.[47]
From the policymakers’ point of view, losing Taiwan to Communist China would be a double blow against American globalism and must be avoided at all cost because it was all they had as a launching pad to recapture mainland China from the communists; but also, if that is not achieved, the island served as a linchpin for continued plans to shape Asia according to the principles of American globalism despite China going its own way. The offshore islands may not have been important to the United States in of themselves but their loss would, they believed, precipitate a domino effect where it would cause other countries like the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Thailand to fall to communism or independence and eventually lead to the loss of Taiwan itself, as Peck asserted, “The blow to the Nationalists [in Taiwan] might lend force to subversive movements, and the loss of Taiwan would be a staggering blow to the United States.”[48]At best, all the United States could hope for at the time was a contained Communist China, which would be forced to accept a U.S.-organized Asia and an independent Taiwan as the officially recognized Chinese government with a seat at the United Nations.
As bad as the situation was, tensions between the United States and China had eased since the Nixon administration starting in the early 1970s. American elites and major voices in U.S. foreign policy were calling for the Nixon administration to finally normalize relations with China because they thought that isolating and containing it were outmoded policies that ultimately did not benefit the United States. Agreeing with the elites’ opinion, the administration believed the benefits of normalizing relations with China were fourfold: it may improve the slowing U.S. economy by opening up the country as a potential limitless market; it may serve as a leverage with the Soviet Union and Vietnam to end the war; and it may be useful for political/publicity gain for Nixon as being the first U.S. president to visit China in 1972. Thus the president and his secretary of state Henry Kissinger decided to move cautiously toward normalization. Likewise, China saw advantages in opening up to the United States: access to foreign ideas, high technology, and imports. Easing tensions with the United States, Chinese leaders believed, would allow the country to decrease its defense spending, increase its access to trade and new technology, grow its economy, and strengthen its national security.
At the time, border tensions between China and the Soviet Union were increasing and Chinese leaders saw that being on better terms with the United States as a good counterweight to the USSR. Moreover, China sought recognition as a world power and a rapprochement with the United States would be a step toward that goal. China’s leaders started to see that meeting the United States halfway in normalizing relations would be the best move forward for the country.[49] By the late 1970s, the United States formally recognized Mao’s People’s Republic of China as the sole legal government of China, while downgrading Taiwan’s status.
Such was the first phase of the Sino-American ties. The second phase involved, among other things, cooperation with the United States against the Soviet Union in its invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, which lasted for about two decades until 1991 at the end of the Cold War. The third phase involved cooperation with the Bush administration’s “war against terror” campaign after 9/11 but was mostly characterized by increased economic interaction, with the interaction dovetailing nicely with the demise of the USSR and the rise of globalization. This third phase was led in China by Deng Xiaoping who took control of the PRC in 1978 after Mao’s death. He made the official policy of opening China economically to the United States and the world. This phase was the beginning of China’s rise to economic superpower.[50] Unfortunately, this optimistic phase has now ended and is now followed by a Sino-American hostility reminiscent of the first phase in the 1950s.
If this fourth phase of Sino-American relation deteriorates into what it was during the first phase, it is going to be more difficult for the United States to employ its traditional approaches in dealing with an independent China: to isolate and contain it. As international relations expert Richard Haass has written in 2018 during the Trump era:
The question now is what a new, fourth era of Sino-American relations will look like. There is a good deal of speculation that it will be a new cold war, but a cold war is a possible (and undesirable) outcome, not a strategy. The containment strategy that shaped U.S. policy against the Soviets doesn’t apply to a new challenge that is more economic and military.[51]
More importantly, the tension between the United States and China is already starting to heat up again over Taiwan, moving toward how it was in the mid-to late-1950s. Unintentional war may be on the horizon. This time though the danger is more pronounced: China possesses nuclear weapons and has built up its military power to a significant level since the mid-1990s. It was prodded by a short show of force between the two countries in 1996 over Taiwan. In that year China fired missiles into the seas near the island and as a response, the United States dispatched two aircraft carriers. This U.S. show of might intimidated China and made it back off. But since then, China’s leaders started pouring money into its army: The People’s Liberation Army. In the ten years since, China increased its military spending by 76 percent, reaching $252 billion in 2020. (By comparison, the United States spent $778 billion in the same year.) In addition, President Xi Jinping reorganized the army, raised the status of the naval and air forces and had his commanders trained to master joint warfare. Many recent war simulations and exercises conducted by both the United States and China resulted in China winning.[52]
In a recent opinion piece in The New York Times, analyst Peter Beinart warns about the potential war between China and the United States as a result of the Trump administration and later the Biden administration’s Taiwan policies. A number of consistent policy actions between the two presidents are moving the two countries closer into a conflagration. During Biden’s presidential campaign in 2020, for example, the Democrats removed the “one China” phrase from its platform and then a later President Biden invited, for the first time since 1978, a Taiwan envoy in his inauguration, and he eased the limitations on official U.S. contacts with the island. These acts are upending a “diplomatic fiction” that has secured peace with China for decades, Beinart warns. Similar to the United States verbally promising the USSR’s Gorbachev that at the dismantling of the Berlin Wall it will not expand NATO to the East, but then broke the promise soon thereafter, so it is with the Biden administration breaking a U.S. diplomatic promise made to China in 1978 to recognize that there would only be “one China” and that its government resides in Beijing and not in Taiwan. This policy also alluded that at some point, China would be able to take back the island peacefully and incorporate it back to the mainland. “These policies are increasing the odds of a catastrophic war,” Beinart fears, “[t]he more the United States and Taiwan formally close the door on reunification, the more likely Beijing is to seek unification by force.” He advises that the United States continue with the one China recognition appeasing the country while at the same time also maintaining U.S. military support for Taiwan in order to prevent war.[53]
Visionary Globalism Revisited
Examining some major historical events in U.S. foreign policy in the three major countries addressed in this paper - Russia, Afghanistan, and China – we learn that since the end of the Second World War, U.S. foreign policy has been driven mainly by the original principle of visionary globalism of the post-World War II planners. Hence, the policies of Republicans and Democrats through the decades of U.S. primacy since 1945 have remained consistent with trying to achieve and maintain a unipolar world where the United States reigns supreme. Looking at the history of U.S. foreign policy since 1945 may help give us some insight on what the Biden administration has in store for the world in its foreign policy. U.S. policymakers today stubbornly stick with the visionary globalism of the policymakers of the 1940s in their foreign policies despite that, as we have examined in some situations, they have been proven extremely dangerous, destructive, and no longer sustainable. Unchecked, visionary globalism may even lead the world to a catastrophic third world war.
[1] Timothy J. Lynch and Robert S. Singh, “Don’t Expect a Big Change in U.S. Foreign Policy,” The Wall Street Journal, June, 2, 2008, A15.
[2] Stephen M. Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), 217-254.
[3] Ibid., 226.
[4] Ibid., 224.
[5] Ibid., 227.
[6] Stephen Wertheim, “America Has No Reason to Be So Powerful,” The New York Times, October 16, 2020.
[7] James Peck, Washington’s China: The National Security World, The Cold War, and The Origins of Globalism (Amherst & Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 17-18.
[8] Stephen E. Ambrose and Douglas G. Brinkley, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938, 9th ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), xiii.
[9] Peck, 16.
[10] Ibid, 23.
[11] Benjamin I. Page and Marshall M. Bouton, The Foreign Policy Disconnect: What Americans Want From Our Leaders But Don’t Get (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006).
[12] Peter Beinart, “The U.S. Doesn’t Have to Lead the World,” The New York Times, December 6, 2020.
[13] Stephen Wertheim, “America Has No Reason to Be So Powerful,” The New York Times, October 16, 2020.
[14] Kathryn E. Stoner, “The U.S. Should Stop Underestimating Russian Power,” The Wall Street Journal, December 26-27, 2020, C3.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Daniel Yergin, The New Map: Energy, Climate, and The Clash of Nations (New York: Penguin Press, 2020), 78.
[17] Ibid, 95.
[18] Lorne Cook, “Putin Marks 5th Anniversary of Russia’s Annexation of Crimea,” PBS News Hour, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/putin-marks-5th-anniversary-of-russias-annexation-of-crimea.
[19] Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions, 32.
[20] Rajan Menon and Eugene Rumer, Conflict in Ukraine: The Unwinding of the Post-Cold War Order (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2015), 157.
[21] John J. Mearsheimer, “Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin,” Foreign Affairs 93, no. 5 (2014) 78.
[22] Walt, 32.
[23] Mearsheimer, Foreign Affairs, 77.
[24] Ibid. 79.
[25] Ibid, 80-81.
[26] Menon and Rumer, Conflict in Ukraine, 159.
[27] Mearsheimer, Foreign Affairs, 82.
[28] Menon and Rumer, Conflict in Ukraine, 159.
[29] Thomas Grove and Alan Cullison, “Russia Mobilizes Near Ukraine,” The Wall Street Journal, April 1, 2021.
[30] Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore and Thomas J. Sugrue, These United States: A Nation in the Making, 1890 to the Present (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2015), 600-601.
[31] Helene Cooper, Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Eric Schmitt, “Biden Sets End Date For Nation’s Longest War,” The New York Times, April 4, 2021.
[32] William R. Polk, Crusade and Jihad: The Thousand-Year War Between the Muslim World and the Global North (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 293-296.
[33] William R. Polk, Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism & Guerrilla War, From the American Revolution to Iraq (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 182.
[34] Thomas L. Friedman, “I Was With Biden in Kabul in 2002,” The New York Times, April 21, 2021.
[35] Maureen Dowd, “Biden Ditches the Generals, Finally,” The New York Times, April 21, 2021.
[36] Eric Schmitt, “17 Years After 9/11, Militants Have Steadily Multiplied, Study Says,” The New York Times, November 21, 2018.
[37] Robert D. Kaplan, “Time to Get Out of Afghanistan,” The New York Times, January 2, 2019.
[38] Yergin, The New Map, 129.
[39] Chun Hang Wong and Keith Zhai, “China Repackages History In Support of Xi’s Vision, The Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2021.
[40] Steven Lee Myers, “China Takes Message On the Road, Challenging U.S. for Global Leader Role,” The New York Times, March 30, 2021.
[41] Andrew Restuccia and James Marson, “NATO Allies Stress China, Russia Threats,” The Wall Street Journal, June 15, 2021.
[42] Paul S. Boyer, Clifford E. Clark, Jr., Joseph F. Kett, Neal Salisbury, Harvard Sitkoff, and Nancy Woloch, The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People, 4th ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000), 798.
[43] Peck, Washington’s China, 175.
[44] Ibid., 5.
[45] Charlie Savage, “The U.S. Nuclear War That Almost Happened,” The New York Times, May 23, 2021.
[46] Peck, Washington’s China, 189.
[47] Ibid.
[48] Ibid., 190.
[49] George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 775.
[50] Richard N. Haass, “The Crisis in U.S.-China Relations,” The Wall Street Journal, October 20-21, 2018.
[51] Ibid.
[52] Chris Buckley and Steven Lee Myers, “China Military Taunts Taiwan, Testing the U.S.,” The New York Times, October 10, 2021.
[53] Peter Beinart, “Biden’s Taiwan Policy Is Reckless,” The New York Times, May 6, 2021.
