Where Are America’s Bold Foreign Policy Plans?

Michael Lind

Global Governance, Americas

Defining American concerns only by security threats, and ignoring economic opportunities, will cede the initiative to other powers.

Is there a deficit of American leadership? Critics of the Obama administration can be found blaming everything from the rise of ISIS and China’s provocations in the South China Sea to Russia’s seizure of Crimea and intervention in Ukraine on American weakness and indecision.

A case can be made, however, that America’s most consequential leadership deficit is on the side of what Harvard’s Joseph E. Nye calls “soft power.” Under Republican and Democratic presidents and Congresses alike, the United States no longer proposes imaginative new institutions or collaborative regional or global projects that can inspire people in other lands. Instead, American foreign policy has become overly militarized. We Americans tend to view the world almost exclusively through the lens of national security, and to measure American leadership by drone strikes and foreign body counts.

Meanwhile, other great powers have been filling the civilian soft-power vacuum. China, in particular, has been busy in soft power projection even as it has been building up its hard military might. China’s “One Belt, One Road” strategy, combining the “Silk Road Economic Belt” with the “Twenty-First Century Maritime Silk Road,” is a strikingly ambitious plan for Sinocentric Eurasian integration through investment in overland and maritime infrastructure. China’s new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) proved so attractive that U.S. allies like Britain signed up, over Washington’s objections. And China has been a key player in summits among the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China), which have produced the New Development Bank (formerly the BRICs Bank) as an alternative to the Western-dominated World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

It is true that the combined resources of the United States and Europe remain immense. But it ought to concern policymakers in Washington that rising powers like China and India and Brazil are collaborating to build elements of a new international architecture without the participation of the United States or its major allies.