The Truth of the World (Dünyanın Gerçeğı)

 

The truth of the world

Daniel DePetris  May 14, 2021

Ask five U.S. foreign policy experts about their opinions on the Biden administration's foreign policy, and you will likely get five different answers.

Some experts, particularly on the Right, will lambaste President Joe Biden for negotiating a U.S. return to the Iran nuclear deal. They'll add that he's wrong to reenter multilateral fora such as the United Nations Human Rights Council. Biden’s allies inside and outside of government, meanwhile, will inevitably applaud the president for jettisoning the prior administration’s tendency to run a scattershot policy process (among other things). Others, such as yours truly, are somewhere in the middle.

But all of these analysts will likely point to a dramatic shift in the rhetoric that U.S. officials are using with allies, competitors, and adversaries alike. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, for instance, isn’t shy to cite the so-called rules-based international order on a near-daily basis. Nor is he hesitant to condemn governments that flout those rules in search of a sphere of influence in their neighborhoods. The United States, Blinken said during a U.N. Security Council meeting last week, will "push back forcefully when we see countries undermine the international order, pretend that the rules we’ve all agreed to don’t exist, or simply violate them at will." Blinken no doubt had China and Russia on his mind — the former for its claim to the entire South China Sea and human rights abuses, the latter for its annexation of Crimea, its cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure, and its de facto occupation of eastern Ukraine.

One familiar problem?

The real world often militates against how foreign policy elites believe it should work. In other words, our perception of reality isn’t necessarily reflective of reality itself.

Take Ukraine. There's no doubt that Russia has engaged in a litany of disturbing behaviors toward its smaller neighbor. It has seized and incorporated Crimea into the Russian Federation. It has sustained a separatist rebellion in eastern Ukraine that continues to claim the lives of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians. The deployment of tens of thousands of Russian troops near Ukraine’s eastern border last month was as much about sending Kyiv a message about the stalled Minsk II diplomatic process as it was about testing the Russian military’s capabilities. But the deployments were assaults on the very essence of how a rules-based order is supposed to function. Stronger nations, the theory goes, aren’t supposed to intimidate weaker ones.

Ditto China, which not only has a habit of plopping civilian and maritime fishing boats in disputed waters to rewrite territorial boundaries, but is more than happy to rattle Taiwan with trade and military antics. To the average policymaker in Washington, D.C., all of this is ghoulish behavior, the kind of "might makes right" bullying that has no place in the enlightened 21st century.

What too few of these policymakers seem to accept, however, is that the 21st century doesn’t operate on a magic set of rules. Humanity and kindheartedness are not elevated above state-on-state competition. While it would be far too cynical to describe international affairs as a larger-scale iteration of Thomas Hobbes’s observation that life is "nasty, brutish, and short," the cold, hard fact is that statecraft is ultimately a game of geography, power, and self-interest.

The strong may not always seek to dominate the weak. But in many cases, stronger powers will do what they must to enhance their own geopolitical position, preserve flexibility in their own backyard, and ensure competitors don’t have an advantage. This is in part what Russia is arguably doing in Ukraine and what China is doing with respect to the South China Sea.

Don't misunderstand me. This isn’t about making excuses for Russia and China’s behavior. It's simply about understanding why countries such as Russia and China are making certain choices, even if the U.S. foreign policy community finds them highly objectionable.

U.S. foreign policy elites like to think the entire world is bound by a set of common principles: the inviolability of borders, free and fair trade, universal respect for human rights, and war as a last resort.

But when you distill international relations into its most basic form, states remain guided by naked self-interest. This may not be the sophisticated, high-minded narrative about a rules-based order that is taken as gospel in the Beltway. But to improve U.S. foreign policy, it's a truth we must accept.

Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.

Tags: Opinion, Beltway Confidential, Blog Contributors, Foreign Policy, China, Russia, South China Sea, Ukraine, Joe Biden, Antony Blinken

Original Author: Daniel DePetris

Original Location: The truth of the worl