Laicie Heeley & Ishaan Tharoor on the Middle East, China, and the Future of America’s Global Role

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Show notes:

“Xi’s China is preparing for a new world order” (Ishaan Tharoor, The Washington Post, 12/14/20)
Eurasia Group Foundation survey on U.S. public opinion (September 2020)
The Jakarta Method (Vincent Bevins, 2020)
Tomorrow, the World (Stephen Wertheim, 2020)
The New York Review of Books

Archival audio:

How will US president-elect Biden deal with Iran? (Al Jazeera, 12/6/20)
Biden’s Path Back to Iran Nuclear Deal Won’t Be Easy or Fast (Bloomberg, 11/13/20)
Pompeo's 'lame duck' trip: Middle East readies for end of Trump era (France 24, 11/20/20)
Analysis: Trump's Middle East plan: The farce, the fraud and the fury (Al Jazeera, 1/29/20)
China's New 'Dual Circulation' Strategy for Growth (Bloomberg, 10/24/20)

Transcript:

December 23, 2020

ISHAAN THAROOR: The liberal world order has been fraying over time, and one of the things you hear people in the Biden camp saying is that a major plank of what the Biden Administration hopes to do is reinvigorate those institutions that underpin, if not the Washington consensus, some kind of international liberal consensus.

***

MARK HANNAH: My name is Mark Hannah, and I'm your host for None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. Today, we'll be discussing what the transition from a Trump to a Biden presidency means for America's role in the world. We're speaking to the Washington Post's Ishaan Tharoor and Inkstick Media's Laicie Heeley about what this means for the Middle East and the U.S.-China relationship, and of course, about what is in store for the future of an American-led world order.

We're going to start off with Laicie Heeley, who's the founder and CEO of Inkstick Media and the host of the wonderful national security podcast, Things That Go Boom. Before we dig into the news of the day, Laicie, tell us how Inkstick Media came to be.

LAICIE HEELEY: The reason I started Inkstick Media three years ago is because I had been in think tanks my entire career working on nuclear policy and defense budget policy. I'd been in a lot of rooms of very serious people. I'd written for a lot of very serious publications. And to me it never felt like any of those publications were written for me as a young woman in the field. And even more than that, I had some recognition in Charlottesville around that time that I was a young white woman in the field, and there were more of me than there were colleagues of color. So, I started Inkstick Media as an effort to broaden and diversify the conversation and very pointedly publish a broader and more diverse range of voices for a broader and more diverse range of voices. And part of that means changing the way we have the conversation, changing the conversations we have that naturally flow from changing the people who are involved. And it's been a crazy, wild ride.

HANNAH: That's awesome. So, Laicie, there's been a lot of talk about Joe Biden's foreign policy being a kind of restoration of American leadership. But there are a lot of people who, after decades of endless war, call for a more humble and maybe more achievable foreign policy than what came before Trump. So, in a word, what do you think Joe Biden's foreign policy mantra or watchword for Joe Biden's foreign policy will be?

HEELEY: In a word? That's a good question.

Steady. You know, we are coming out of an unprecedented moment here. We should not discount how much Trump will linger over decisions made over the next four years and particularly over the next year. Every decision at the start of the Trump administration in some ways was made to counteract things the Obama administration had done that Trump disagreed with. He came in and ripped deals up and signed a whole number of executive agreements. And here we are coming in with the Biden Administration. In some sense, we're going to see the same thing. We're going to see a lot of moves away from Trump policies, immediate shifts backward. And I will say, actually, from my perspective, watching all of this play out, it immediately draws me to a concern I had even prior to Trump, which is that the U.S. has a real problem of consistency. And part of that is a result of our system that switches back and forth every four to eight years. Possibly a bigger part of that is a result of our incredible political divide that is so much deeper in this moment than it has been at other times. So, we see even bigger shifts every four to eight years. How the Biden Administration is going to dig in and prove to our allies, our adversaries, and the world that America is steady and the ABA and that the Biden Administration is not the only thing that is steady is going to be a real challenge. I'm going to be really interested to see how that begins to play out, because steadiness is something that's really important for all of us.

HANNAH: You said something there about our allies and our adversaries requiring this kind of predictability. Now, it strikes me that the challenge is potentially greater with our adversaries and competitors, since these are the countries we're actively trying to negotiate with, and we have sort of thorny problems and challenges with them. So, for instance, I'm thinking of trying to get Iran back to the negotiating table.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: Given the polarization of American politics, do you think Joe Biden will be able to establish a trust and predictability as we go into negotiations again, or will a country like Iran just say, “You know, screw it. Why bother if four years from now we could have a Republican president that just tears it up again?”

HEELEY: Yeah, that's a good question. You brought up Iran. Going back to that negotiation of the JCPOA, one of Iran's—the negotiators’—greatest concerns during the negotiation was that this would be all for naught because we were near the end of the Obama Administration. They knew there was a chance a Republican would be elected. They did not know that was Trump. They didn't know it was someone who was going to going to be quite on that level in terms of the adversarial relationship. But they did know there was a chance that getting this thing through as an executive agreement—it was all just going to go away. And they were really, really hesitant to make a deal with us that bound them in a way they might regret in a few years.

And I think your bringing up our adversaries is so correct in the way we think about this, because in some ways when we conduct diplomacy, the folks who we really need to convince we are trustworthy are our adversaries, the people we are conducting diplomacy with, that we are trying to stop short of more aggressive action, that we are trying to deter. Anything we are trying to do in communication with our adversaries requires a level of trustworthiness, and rebuilding that trustworthiness is going to be very hard. You have an incoming administration that is more familiar with working with the Hill. You have a long history of relationships between Biden and folks like Mitch McConnell and others who are going to be playing a huge role in the deals and decisions that will have to be made. One of the first things the Biden Administration is going to have to do is set a budget. That's not going to be easy if they plan to change much at all, because there's a lot of inertia that goes along with the budget. I think that will be one of the first places we really see this play out in terms of whether or not Biden can bring folks along with him on the Hill. I have a lot of skepticism in terms of the relationships there. I lived through the Obama Administration. It was not better. It was worse. So, the relationships that the true partisan polarization in Washington right now—it's going to be really hard to overcome.

HANNAH: I wanted to learn more about what the rest of the world thinks about the coming change in American presidential leadership, specifically what countries are cheering on this transition and which ones are lamenting Donald Trump's departure. So, we turned to journalist Ishaan Tharoor, who covers foreign affairs for the Washington Post and anchors the terrific column “Today's Worldview”

THAROOR: Of course, it really depends on which country you're talking about and who you're asking. To begin with, obviously, I think the majority of the international community is somewhat relieved that a more predictable status quo internationalist president is coming into the White House. Obviously, this varies country by country. If you look at Europe, almost certainly you've seen officials across the board welcome Biden and celebrate the fact that you're going to have American leadership again that doesn't undermine global efforts to mitigate and reckon with climate change, that is going to be bolstering multilateralism in various ways, and that isn't going to launch unnecessary trade wars across the Atlantic. The one arena where Trump absolutely made his mark and pushed a pretty provocative agenda is in the Middle East, and with Israel and a handful of Arab monarchies, Trump really set out his stall in terms of yoking his agenda to that of clutch of political elites in the Middle East who view Iran with antipathy, who are opposed to political Islam in various forms across the region, and who really found in Trump a willing power to abet their various agendas.

HANNAH: What will Trump's legacy be when it comes to getting countries to normalize their relationships with Israel? And do you see the Biden Administration rolling back any of that in any way or just kind of allowing the Trump folks to take credit?

THAROOR: The clearest thing that has been accomplished is that Trump essentially entrenched the alienation of the Palestinians.

Interlude featuring archival audio

THAROOR: We've known for quite some time that myriad Arab political elites are not invested in the sort of Israeli-Palestinian issue as much as they were in the past, especially the leaders of the countries we're talking about—the UAE, Saudi Arabia. They have already privately articulated impatience with having to put up with the regional politics that get triggered by the emotions surrounding the Palestinian issue. And Trump took what was unspoken and made it overt. You've seen the extent to which the questions of what happens to Palestinians living under military occupation no longer preoccupies the politics of the region. And you're obviously seeing that with these acts of normalization, but also more broadly, the fact that at this point there is not much international effort in reviving a meaningful process toward a two state solution. Biden is not going to come to power and suddenly reverse any of the things Trump has done vis a vis Israel. I think, by and large, the Washington foreign policy establishment welcomes these Arab states that are American partners on other fronts. Mending fences with the Israelis—I think that's broadly viewed as a good thing here in Washington, and Biden will certainly not try to undermine the advances that have been made.

HANNAH: There are some critics that would suggest this is kind of a cynical ploy to get American-made weapons. And of course, we do see there are some arms deals happening in tandem with this. Can you break down to some extent what the motivation of these leaders was and whether they're facing any domestic political blowback in their own countries for throwing Palestine under the bus?

THAROOR: The UAE, as you said, secured a mammoth arms deal and clearly that was a guiding motivation behind the normalization. You see the United States completely reverse its policy on Sudan and not only take it off the state sponsor of terrorism list but also take a certain set of steps to offer more aid and financial help to the Sudanese. This is a pretty major accomplishment from Khartoum. And if you look at what happened in Morocco, the concession Trump made—this recognition of Morocco's claims over Western Sahara, something no other major world power has done and would consider doing—was a huge political coup. And given the fact that on the street in these countries, attitudes towards Israel are incredibly negative, the ability of these governments to secure major concessions and diplomatic wins they can tout from Trump was a guiding principle. But there is something a bit deeper there. I have it on good authority that when Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman came to the United States for this kind of valedictory tour he did—of course, this is before people affiliated with him carried out the assassination of my former colleague, Jamal Khashoggi—he would go around talking to anybody he could about how obsessed he is with the Israeli tech sector. And he, in various private conversations—I'm told to believe—insisted throughout that he is not too bothered about the Palestinian situation. He doesn't think Israel has to make them any concessions to the Palestinians. This was rhetoric that a Saudi official would never say in public, but which you better believe is part of a certain realigning regional thinking right now. They see Iran as a much greater ideological and military threat facing them. If any of these countries were real democracies, they would not have taken the steps they did to normalize ties with Israel without there being a meaningful solution for the Palestinians. But they're not democracies. They’re not accountable to the public in any meaningful way, and they took the decision that they did on the basis of the fact that these are countries where they can make decisions without much of a public say.

HANNAH: OK, it's now time for a round of extraneous and miscellaneous questions for which we expect spontaneous answers. Ishaan, what is the book about America and the world you’d require the incoming president to read?

THAROOR: If I can cheat, I'll say two recent books that came out in the past year. The first is The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins, which is a terrific survey of the misdeeds of American foreign policy in the name of anticommunism. And I would also suggest Tomorrow, the World by Stephen Wertheim, which looks at how America came to be the world power we now see. And I think for liberal internationalists like Biden, it's good to read histories that humble his ambitions about American power on the world stage.

HANNAH: Laicie, what is the worst American foreign policy mistake of the past century?

HEELEY: Building our systems on an unequal playing field. We are still struggling to build the kind of foreign policy apparatus that not only accurately represents America and its interests but also does so in a way that's empathetic to other nations we interact with. It's going to be very hard to break it down and rebuild it, but we're building back better.

HANNAH: One piece of professional advice you wish you had received as a kid?

HEELEY: Breathe. If you want it, you'll make your way. I spent a lot of time as a kid deciding to not do things because I didn't think they were as realistic as I might have wanted them to be. And what I realize now is that if you work hard towards something, where you land in that something, if you are passionate about it, it is as satisfying as it's going to be. And it's more worth taking the risk than not taking the risk.

HANNAH: Ishaan, give me a publication you read every day.

THAROOR: The New York Review of Books. It remains one of the few publications I have maintained my print subscription to. I'm, of course, a deeply digital person. I'm constantly on Twitter. I have to read lots of things. I've virtually read all the major newspapers and magazines for the column that I muster every day. And I find the NYRB gives me this, sitting on my chair in my living room on a weekend, to sink into that big broadsheet.

HANNAH: OK, Ishaan, I want to change gears here and ask you about China, which is probably the biggest security and strategic challenge for the United States in the foreseeable future. You wrote a piece in the Washington Post last week that was entitled “Xi's China is Preparing for a New World Order.” You basically mentioned the decoupling strategy hawks advocated for in the Trump Administration, but you also introduced the concept of dual circulation. Can you talk about that specifically?

THAROOR: Right. Dual circulation. This is a phrase that has been circulated by Chinese officials, including prominent level leaders like Xi, over the past year when talking about how they see China operating on the world stage.

Interlude featuring archival audio

THAROOR: And sort of buried within this concept is the fact that they don't necessarily need to be playing by the same rules or working in the same system as the West or many other parts of the world. This is a kind of understanding that has crystallized very acutely in recent years, especially the past year, when people like Xi have seen they are facing a West that is increasingly hostile. They see in the U.S. bipartisan consensus, essentially, that is deeply—that views China as a systemic threat. You have conversations not just in the United States, but in other parts of the world, too, about finding ways to unmoor your supply chains from China. And so the Chinese are essentially figuring out a way to project their future strategic visions while also hunkering down a bit and building up a bit of a fortress. A key part of this five year plan they're rolling out starting next year is that Xi and the Chinese leadership around him really want to beef up China's domestic market. They don't want China to be an economy defined as an export-driven power. So, they want to build up the market and domestic middle-class consumption. They are slowly pivoting—or at least they have been pivoting—toward becoming a bit of more mature economy. At the same time, they're thinking through—of course, rather especially to a non-Chinese-speaking reader in the West—in a rather opaque terms, the means by which they can project power and rise in the world stage while also shoring up their own economy and stability at home.

HANNAH: There is there is something in history called the Washington Consensus, right? After the World Wars, people from different countries met at Bretton Woods and created international organizations like the World Trade Organization or the IMF and kind of created what became known as the rules-based international order. And what you're saying in this piece essentially, is that Washington consensus is being challenged in the eyes of many Western analysts by what it sees as a Beijing consensus, which is basically that somehow China is going to now set the rules of the game. Is China going to replace the U.S. as the global hegemon or not?

THAROOR: I lived in Hong Kong from 2006 to 2010, so this is a totally different historical era, almost. I was there perhaps at the height of the positive China narrative in the West. We had the Beijing Olympics. You had this world they were living in Hong Kong at the time. People still almost felt that Hong Kong was—or Hong Kong is—what China would become. And now, a decade later, since I've lived in Hong Kong, the opposite is the case. Hong Kong is this besieged, and at this point defeated, outlier attached to a state dominated by a deeply authoritarian, ruthless leadership that is not interested and has recognized overtly and clearly that its economic rise has nothing to do with liberalization at home and has nothing to do with any kind of advance of political reforms or democracy. And China has put the lie to these liberal visions of the end of history of the world becoming flat. No, of course not. And so the Hong Kong I knew is very alien and rather, it's lost compared to the Hong Kong that now exists, in which you have Western media companies deciding to leave because it's not safe. You have activists running in exile. You have dissent being chilled in all sorts of ways. We've seen a pretty sudden decline.

And so when we talk about a Beijing consensus, part of what was so effective about the Washington consensus was that people wanted to live under it. People wanted to play by those rules because they saw a greater future for their societies within it. The same cannot be said for this emerging Beijing consensus. And one can’t even know for now if there even is a consensus at this point. I think it's far too early to imagine a parallel set of rules challenging the ones that exist.

But at the same time, you are seeing recognition that the existing rules—this, quote unquote, “international order” or the liberal world order—have been fraying over time. And one of the things you hear people in the Biden camp saying is that a major plank of what the Biden Administration hopes to do is reinvigorate those institutions that underpin, if not the Washington consensus, some kind of international liberal consensus.

HANNAH: Laicie, how do you see the relationship between China and the U.S. changing from the Trump Administration to the Biden Administration?

HEELEY: At this point, it's unclear to me where it will change. I think there is a lot of agreement in Washington that Trump’s China policy has been an unmitigated disaster. A lot of folks have been heavily critical of Trump's China policy. But when it comes time to look at the Biden Administration's China policy, it's a sticky issue. And the idea that Biden is going to significantly upend a lot of the moves Trump has made—he's not going to make a shift on tariffs. He said that. Trump has been pretty tough—relatively tough—on human rights. I don't know—that's not going to change under the Biden Administration. Certainly, the relationship is going to be less adversarial because that is, I would imagine, going to be a goal of the Biden Administration across the board.

HANNAH: How could it be less adversarial? I mean, Trump was talking about—first of all, you said Trump has been tough on human rights, but he kind of gave a free pass on Hong Kong to some extent, although there wasn't much he could have done. But he was sort of writing love letters or claiming that she thinks he's his best friend and all these things.

HEELEY: We had the chocolate cake, but we also had the “Chinese virus.” Right? There's been a lot of rhetorical attack. There was—I think, in tariffs and trade and all of these things, Trump certainly like tried to at least give the appearance that he was going at this issue head on. But I think maybe, to your point, his particularly adversarial nature is shown in the fact that it's not likely the Biden Administration is going to change a whole lot. What they will change is our policies at home.

And I think when we're talking about China, the word that is always used is competition, and it's a really problematic word because competition puts us immediately into this very American space o, “We have to win.” It's a very American feeling—the idea of competition with another nation. But in many ways it sends it to us down a not-so-great path because we immediately go to competition in the South China Sea and competition in tech, which I think are both important things. But they're not the only things. We're also competing with China in the way we treat our people at home. We're competing with China in the health of our economy and our society and our political divide. All of those things are hurting us at this moment when the competition with China is actually about who the greatest power is. How you define great power significantly changes how you react and conduct competition. That's one place where maybe we have not had as much emphasis—on the economy and on the health of our society and on diplomacy as we should have. And I do see those things changing under the Biden Administration.

HANNAH: To what extent was a liberal international order ever really a thing to begin with versus a kind of abstract ideal? Versus, if it was a thing, how will that materially change by China's growing influence? What do you see as the main fear of China starting to call some of the shots?

HEELEY: I think it is interesting to look at because it was essentially the default order. We were so far and away the power—the world power—that we were able to kind of do whatever we wanted. And I think the great risk is perhaps not a risk at all. But many people see the great risk is that we would become less relevant in the world. And where we stop that decline in relevance, I think, has more to do with us and the way that we behave than it has to do with China.

HANNAH: Who cares about relevance? Are we so steeped in the celebrity culture that we feel like we need to be—and I mean that sincerely. Is relevance important because it is an extension of—or it accretes to—power to defend our values and promote our interests? What is the importance of relevance?

HEELEY: Yeah, I get a really icky feeling from “promote our values,” but it's—yeah, absolutely. That is a good question. That is exactly the question we should be asking right now. And frankly, a lot of the polling you guys have done and a lot of polling out there says younger generations—Americans in general—have questions about American exceptionalism. Do we need to be exceptional? Is that even a thing? Were we ever exceptional? I think there is a very strong case to be made that we were never exceptional. You look back to great presidents who put horrible segregationist policies into place. You look at our long history of racial inequality, gender inequality, and so many problems here in America. I'm not sure we ever had a real claim to say we were exceptional. Perhaps part of this entire conversation is just that it's good we can start to see that.

HANNAH: I want to give a special thanks to Laicie Heeley and Ishaan Tharoor. Thank you both so much for joining us today.

I'm Mark Hanna, and this has been another episode of None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. I want to give a special shout out to our None of the Above team who all make this possible: our producer Caroline Gray, editor Luke Taylor, sound engineer Zubin Hensler, and EGF’s graduate research assistant Adam Pontius.

If you enjoyed what you heard, we'd appreciate you subscribing anywhere you subscribe to podcasts—that could be Apple, Spotify, or Stitcher. Please rate and review as it does mean a lot to us, and if there is a topic you want us to cover or a guest you want us to invite, shoot us an email at info@egfound.org. Thanks for joining us. Stay safe out there. Stay healthy, and we will catch you next time.

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