School of War - Ep 127: Robert Blackwill & Richard Fontaine on the Failed Pivot to Asia

Episode Date: June 11, 2024

Robert Blackwill & Richard Fontaine, authors of Lost Decade: The US Pivot to Asia and the Rise of Chinese Power, join the show to talk about America’s failed pivot to Asia and why they think it still needs to happen. ▪️ Times      •      01:59 Introduction      •      03:10 Was the pivot serious?     •      07:40 Absent compulsion     •      13:25 War in Europe?     •      22:46 Changes to the plan       •      28:28 A bigger budget      •      32:23 Domestic resistance to TPP         •      38:25 The ultimate goal         •      44:36 Why not regime change in China?     •      51:08 Henry Kissinger Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack Follow the link to buy the book - Lost Decade: The US Pivot to Asia and the Rise of Chinese Power

Over a decade ago, we, the United States, were supposed to pivot to Asia. It didn't happen. Why? And why with most people in 2024 in general agreement that East Asia is the primary theater of strategic peril for American interests? Is this pivot still not happening? This really interesting conversation with Bob Blackwell and Richard Fontaine gets into those questions. And we also debate what our ultimate attitude towards the Chinese Communist Party should be. Are we seeking detente? Are we seeking victory? My guest today disagree with what Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher were arguing on the show just a few weeks ago. Let's get into it. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infinite.

The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stay on it. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram. And also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean.

Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to be welcoming to the show today, Richard Fontaine, who is the CEO of the Center for a New American Security, with a long career in defense and foreign policy here in Washington, D.C., before that, to include serving as John McCain's foreign policy advisor, also welcoming to the show Robert Blackwell, who is the Henry Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, with a long career in government, also serving in the George W. Bush administration, working for Henry Kissinger early in his career, which perhaps is something we can get into. And they are together authors of Lost Decade, the U.S. pivot to Asia and the rise of Chinese power. Robert,

Richard, thank you so much for joining the show. Thank you for having us. So I'll just open up with a very general question and we'll see where it takes us, which I can remember being a young infantry officer in 2011, relatively fresh back from Afghanistan and hearing the announcement of the pivot to Asia, the Hillary Clinton foreign policy piece that you gentlemen discussed in the book and all of the publicity around it. And thinking at the time that it was a little ridiculous, that it seemed to me to be a rhetorical gambit more focused on what we didn't want to be doing anymore, namely spending a lot of time

and energy in the Middle East, rather than a serious effort to actually do more in Asia. This was an instinct. It wasn't informed by any particular knowledge, certainly not inside knowledge. and it was probably on some level informed my more sort of partisan instincts about the Obama administration writ large than on any kind of serious analysis. Was it serious? To what extent was it serious as a policy proposal? And your book, of course, argues that it didn't exactly work out, but that on some level we wish it had and we still need to do it. So let's just start with was it serious? Well, let me start perhaps. My answer to that is it was certainly serious by Hillary Clinton. and by the people close to her, they believed that it was strategically necessary to revolutionize American grand strategy. And that's what the speech essentially did. And it was a radical

departure in American history because we'd always been a Europe first nation. And this notion, as you said, suggested that for the first time ever Asia should have first priority in policymakers, time, attention, resources, and so forth. So I do believe it was serious. But as you said, and I'll go on here for a moment if I might, it never happened. And part of the reason it never happened, and we can get into that later, we discuss in the book why it never happened. But part of the reason was that, Implementation failed. And so the United States did not pivot to Asia during the decade of the 2010s, thus the lost decade in competing with China.

And we finished the decade in a weaker position in Asia than we began it. So the strategic reorientation that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, heralded failed. We regard that failure, Richard and I, and we say so in the book, as one of the three most serious foreign policy failures since the end of World War II, along with the 1965 Lyndon Johnson decision to escalate in Vietnam and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But we say in the book, and I'm almost done, that it's more important to pivot to Asia than ever before because of the consequences of the, what we call the astonishing rise of Chinese power in the 2010s. And I'll make one final point, Aaron, which is not in the book, but I think is pertinent

for the future, which is that various... experts and pundits, now call for escalatory measures by the United States, both with respect to Iran and with respect to Russia and the war in Ukraine. And we would only counsel that as we think our way through the merits of these, we keep in mind that such an escalatory decision on the part of the American president, which led the conflict, either with Iran or with Russia, would put the end to any idea of pivoting to Asia now. So usually when people, individuals who we respect and who are prescribing in good faith, talk about those regional issues. They never mention what the opportunity costs would be with respect to the pivot to Asia. Well, something that you say.

say in the book towards the end that I found to be very interesting is unlike the other two errors that you cite, escalation in Vietnam and the invasion of Iraq, this is an era of omission as opposed to an era of commission. And you also say in your breakdown of why did it fail, that one of the reasons may have been that it had no forcing function, at least at the time. There was no catastrophe like a Pearl Harbor or, you know, major muscle movement in the world to compel the United States to make this dramatic change. And you suggest that that kind of thing historically is what's needed for major reorientations in American policy. I mean, if that's true, then I think we're still in for a rough road ahead. Do you think that's true? What do you think the odds are that we will actually

pull off the kind of pivot or rebalance to Asia that you suggest is still needed? Richard? Yeah, I would say it has been true, but it need not be true, or at least we hope it, need not be true. If you look at big shifts, as you were saying, and as we try to write about in the book, in U.S.S. Grand Strategy, it was Pearl Harbor or the dawning of the Cold War in a quite visceral way, the invasion of South Korea or 9-11, and these prompted huge shifts in what policymakers were focused on and where diplomats spent their time and how much we had in the way of military and economic resources and where in the world they were devoted. And so the pivot, which we should say when it was announced in 2011, we think that was the right call. That was the right

strategic impulse. But for a variety of reasons, including the endurance of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the fact of not having a forcing function and our own domestic politics and lots of things. Besides, over the course of a decade or so, it didn't come in really into effect. in terms of implementation. And that was, you know, kind of a bipartisan failure as well, because you had the contraction of our defense spending through sequestration. You had a Trump administration that was not able to focus much more on Asia than had been the case toward the end of the Obama administration and so forth, although it recast the terms of the relationship with China. So when you put all of this together, you know, it may have been that the

pivot was ahead of its time as a strategic impulse. But given the sort of gathering clouds, if not storm, in Asia with China's rise, to wait for a cataclysm in order to reorient our priorities would be the height of strategic folly. And so it's our hope and I think our contention. We should, policymakers should do the harder things now and not await for a forcing function. Aaron, can I just add to that that your instinct was not entirely wrong because the pivot in 2011 was not primarily generated by a realization of the growth of Chinese power and its strategic objectives in Asia and beyond. This was well before the lengthy process in which, the United States finally, finally in the Trump administration, abandoned the illusion that we could persuade China to become a responsible stakeholder in the international system.

This was rather generated by one thing you mentioned, which is the wish to get out of the wars in the Middle East. That was certainly a driving reason. for it, and it's explicitly mentioned in Hillary Clinton's foreign policy article, but also a realization that the future economic engines of the international economy, in addition to the United States, would be in Asia. And the strategic importance of Asia was only going to grow. So both those far outweighed the notion that we were going to have to contend with a China that sought as it does today and has for many years to undermine every single one of America's vital national interests. So as a preface to this next question, I want to say it. I basically agree with your argument. And I also think there's a pretty broad consensus emerging.

It's increasingly unusual to come across a serious contributor to the debate on foreign policy in the United States who doesn't think that the Pacific or East Asia are the primary theater of competition. The disagreements start, of course, with, well, what are you supposed to do about that? But let me ask this question to you. You say in your account of why the pivot did not succeed, that it lacked policy articulation. That is to say, there was just a lack of planning in terms of what this was actually going to mean in practice, you know, whether in terms of defense assets or otherwise, what gets moved where

and how. There's just a shortcoming there. Can I ask that sort of reverse of that question, which is when I discuss this issue with colleagues or friends who make an aggressive version of this case, you gentlemen are both familiar with folks, particularly associated with the American, with the Republican Party, who very, very strongly believe that an Asia First strategy is the way forward, and it should come at a pretty substantial cost necessarily to our, you know, force posture in the Middle Eastern Europe. It strikes me that there's an articulation problem in the other direction, too, that is to say, if we all kind of agree that the emphasis needs to be in the Pacific and that China is the biggest problem, and that's just going to require assuming some risk in the Middle

East and Europe, what does that actually mean? And how do we think about the potentially destabilizing effects, not potentially actually destabilizing effects? They're already underway to some extent in the Middle Eastern or in Europe. What if a drawdown in American capacity in Europe, even if only restricted to air and C assets like you gentlemen propose, takes us several steps closer to a general war on the European continent. Like, help me, help me. This is actually, you know, this is like a live question for me and a lot of people who want, I think, to follow your argument through to its conclusion,

but also do worry about what the heck we're going to do with the other two-thirds of Eurasia. Yeah, I'll take this on up because I think it's, in a way, the key question. Just to go back to your first point about how much, consensus there is that Asia should be the priority region. One of the things that was perplexing that we wanted to look at in the course of doing this was why there was so much consensus, even in 2011. And yet we didn't see more success in implementation. When the Obama pivot was announced, it was one of the very few things, the Republicans and Democrats and Congress and everybody else seemed to agree on, think was a great idea. And then when the Trump folks

came in, they didn't use the same language. But, lot they repeatedly articulated that Asia with the priority region and so forth. And so, you know, in addition to the sort of historical interests of the degree to which it succeeded or failed, in the absence of more success, how do you explain this consensus? And that's when we get into the hard things and some of the hard things are exactly what you're talking about, which is how do we actually set priorities? And particularly when you're talking about military force structure, which has a certain zero-sum quality, unlike trade agreements you could pursue in two different regions at the same time or something like that. You know, we are always and always will be in a world of constrained resources and how do you set the priorities and allocate them appropriately?

Some of this just comes down to judgment. But an overly kind of blunt, broad Asia-first or even Asia-only mantra is not, in our view, the way to think about this. I mean, at a conceptual level, the notion is any given amount of military resources in any given place in Europe, Middle East, or Asia, what benefit would they confer if moved to Asia and what risk would they increase, potentially, if moved away from it? So, for example, in 2011, Obama did pull all of the troops out of Iraq, and the notion was, well, we'll get a bit of a peace dividend on that and maybe we can do something more in Asia. But if they went back in 2015 in greater numbers than they would have been, had they just stayed in order to wage a five-year campaign to fight off ISIS that was extremely resource-intensive. Had we left a residual force there, we probably would have saved resources in that area. The same may be true of Afghanistan. So when we looked at this, the question was that one, which is where can you move or where could you conceptually move resources from one,

or to another that would increase the benefit by moving and have manageable risk on the downside. So, you know, the increase in troops in Europe since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they're not fighting Russians. Those are on a reassurance mission. You know, the air and naval assets that can be redeployed, as we have seen in the Middle East, for example, the dispatch of carriers off the coast of Israel since the war there and so forth, you know, you're able to move some things around. But we, you know, we have five air bases in the Middle East. Don't know if we need five. We have troops in Kuwait, et cetera. So that's sort of how we have thought about this. Let me, let me chime in, building on what Richard said. And this will be epigrammatic, but follows

your question. First, it's true there's a consensus now that China is now a generational threat to American vital national interests. And it's rare to find someone who disagrees with that. We agree with that. The problem is that it's almost entirely rhetorical in character. So everybody says it, but we don't act consistent with what everybody says. And our force posture in Asia, for example, has been dramatically changed on the Chinese side, but on the U.S. side is weaker than in 2011. So we keep saying that it's a generational change, and we don't, the Congress doesn't vote budgets to reflect that. The executive branch doesn't submit budgets to reflect that. We have no trade policy toward Asia essentially now, leaving the field entirely to the Chinese and so forth. So I'm tempted to say when

people said, well, we now have a consensus in Washington regarding the Chinese challenge. I'm tempted to say, so what if we're not willing as a government to do anything about it? Second, we try to demonstrate in the book, and there's loads of data in the book. We try to mimic Mike Bloomberg's charity, which says, in God, we trust everybody else bring data. Well, there are just tons, as you saw, of data in the book that show there was no pivot. But what we did find in the 2010s and into the Biden administration is that it was U.S. not present, which was the critical variable in how the U.S. did in these regions. For example, our problem with the Russians was not generated by the various force deployments

of the United States in Europe. It was generated, at least in part, by the United States doing nothing with respect to the 2014 annexation of the Crimea, by the United States. Putin. Well, what do we think, what conclusion did we think he was going to draw from that? The same is true in the Middle East, where we think policies are not presence with a deciding factor. Two American presidents drew red lines with respect to Iranian and Syrian behavior and then did not respond when those red lines were crossed. Well, that wasn't a matter of where our force posture was. It was a matter of the quality of. of American diplomacy and of presidential decision-making.

So we don't believe that the force reorientation that we recommend in Europe and in the Middle East from both those theaters to Asia is going to have a major effect on deterrence in those regions. Last point is among our friends who, for example, believe that it's either defend Ukraine or defend Taiwan, we think this is a false choice. And it ignores, and I'll just try to be vivid here, it ignores the connections between our allies in Europe and our allies in Asia, the reaction of our allies to a U.S. policy. If you were a Japanese decision maker and you followed closely, which you do, the evolving American policy toward Ukraine, how would you feel about the reliability of the American defense commitment to Japan if you watch the Americans enthusiastically

engage to defend Ukraine and then just got tired of it? Just got tired of it. Well, we have other things to do and so forth. Let them, let it fall where it may. Well, that's an obvious connection, and we could name five others in the same way. They do, the Asians, watch our policies in other parts of the world and draw conclusions about the consequences for them. I always think about this issue in terms of the junior employee who's not very good at their current assigned responsibilities. And when challenged on this fact, they say, well, look, I'm sort of just, you know, I'm saying,

I don't find this work very engaging. It sort of wrote, I'm saving myself up for the bigger task, which when you promote me, you know, I'm going to crush it then as a mid-level manager. It's like, no, that's not how it works. You have to, if you're going to claim that you're going to effectively deter aggression in the Taiwan straight, it's helpful if you can also deter aggression by a much weaker power in the form of the Islamic Republic. You gentlemen have a really interesting chapter on the evolution of American defense policy

during the decade that you're studying. And you have a quote from Bob work, which I'm just going to, I'm going to paraphrase. But he essentially says, look, we didn't pivot. Anyone can see we didn't pivot. But there were important changes in the nature of our planning and the nature of our operational concepts and the technologies that we are going, that we are developing in support of those concepts that are China-centric. And my question to you is, well, I would just ask you to evaluate that statement and talk us through some of these things, whether it's the third offset or whatever aspects of this issue you'd like to emphasize. And I'm going to assume that you will, you will say, you know, it's ultimately not enough. But to what extent is this mitigating?

To what extent has the Department of Defense gotten more serious about a world in which China is the primary military adversary that we think? Yeah, I think Bob is right. And it happened first at an intellectual level. And then the intellectual energy has started. to kind of drag the budget and force posture and everything else behind it slowly and hopefully surely, but of course, as you said, there's a long way to go. I mean, you know, if you go back to when the pivot was announced in 2011, the Pentagon was spending most of its time planning, training, and equipping for counterterrorism operations and large scale stabilization operations in the greater Middle East. You know, Obama himself had just, you know, the surged in Afghanistan and all the rest.

And so, you know, we went from an era of MRAPs and, you know, PRTs and things like that to one that was going to be focused on what war might look like in the Western Pacific. You got into airseat battle before that became something that gentlemen apparently don't say out loud. The air seat battle office and all of this, which was renamed and then joint concepts and all this. So the concept development trailed, and that kind of came along. The emphasis on China and on the Western Pacific in particular became more acute. You know, even as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places continued, they, you know, and some of the resource intensity diminished over time.

So you sort of fast forward to where we are now. And I think at an intellectual level, it's the Pentagon is, the Department of Defense is there and has been for a while. At a budgetary level and at a force posture level and, you know, they're getting there. You still have, you know, these raging debates about even if you agree that we should be equipping ourselves for to deter a China fight, what's the best way to do that? Is it carriers and manned aircraft flying off of them that are tanking their way into the Western Pacific? Or is it, you know, intermediate conventionally armed rockets and missiles that can be shot from allied territory and more subs and all these other kinds of things? So that, I think, is where the debate, I'm going on for a while here, but I think that's where the debate really is today and is in a sort of the most interesting way of trying to deterred. precisely how we offset the Chinese geographic and other advantage so as the best to turn war.

We're doing a lot more planning than we're doing acting, which is perhaps not entirely unique. So when we talk about the military balance in Asia, of course, we have to look carefully at the evolution, in planning in particular that Richard has just mentioned. but we have to examine, and the book does in great detail, this extraordinary surge in Chinese military power, especially in the waters adjacent to the Chinese mainland. And they've changed the military balance in the Taiwan Straits. And again, on issues of policy versus deployments, the failure of the Obama administration to react to the Chinese military,

creation of the artificial islands and then their militarization. That's a policy decision on the part of the United States. So we are still in a situation in which every day, every day, the military balance with respect to the United States and China is deteriorating in China's favor because they have been much more consistent, resolute, and ambitious than we have been, as we rhetorically recognize the threat, than we've been in action. And it does, if I can put it like this, it does test how serious a country we are, doesn't it? That have we come to the unconscious view that speeches are enough, All we have to do to deter is give another speech because we certainly don't have a defense budget that anywhere near matches the threat. And we go into that, as Richard said, in the book.

I wholeheartedly agree with that very last point. And I think the Roger Wicker plan, which came out last week, was a significant step in the right direction. I'm curious to know what you gentlemen think about that. Let me also ask you, one thing that I don't think I knew. before reading your book, or if I did know it, I hadn't put the numbers together in my mind and drawn the right conclusions, was that the wild difference between foreign military financing for the Pacific compared even to the Middle East, which, again, I think it's hard to come across. You will find the odd duck out there contesting that Europe is a primary theater over Asia.

It's pretty rare to find someone to include most Middle East experts who would claim that the Middle East is anything other than the tertiary theater. And yet, our foreign military financing, as you gentlemen outlined there is on the order of multiple billions of dollars. I don't have the number right in front of me. Well, it's just sort of course in character. We know why it's there. But again, its inertia has been too powerful and our commitments too robust to change the reality. And again, we need a bigger defense budget. And it's the, The idea of trying always to cut our clothing to ever smaller percentages of our GDP and trying to meet our vital national interests, which in terms of GDP is the lowest, the lowest since the height

of the peace dividend and the immediate years after World War II. And let me, while I have the floor, just make one other point, which is related, which is that our forces can be surged. And we've just had a vivid example of that. So we had a crisis sparked in the Middle East because of the Hamas attack on Israel. And we surged forces, including two carrier battle groups, into the Mediterranean, to deter. to deter. And they had the proper effect, and Iran stayed out of the war in that immediate period. So if we face crises, if we face crises in either Europe or the Middle East, while structurally emphasizing strengthening of our military position in Asia, we can surge forces to those regions.

But I wouldn't want this conversation to be only centered on the military balance because the fact that we have no trade policy toward Asia and are not, we recommend a re-vigorization of American trade policy toward Asia. If the Trans-Pacific Partnership is out of the question, we need to do something out there to try to compete with the Chinese. Again, in the 2010s, the Chinese increased the margin of their trade advantages across all of Asia, increased it because we had no trade policy. And so that is something that it's an absence which hurts us every day. And then there is diplomas because we are a global power. And we do have vital national interests in Europe. We do

have vital national interests in the Middle East. And so we can't be monochromatic here. Asia is crucial. It's the most important region. But again, America's a global power. So in 2016, I attended both the Republican and Democratic conventions, which was an interesting experience. And I remember that opposition to TPP, both in the convention halls and in the streets around both conventions, was about equally intense, I think. If anything, maybe marginally more intense at the Democratic convention. And because of Trump's success

within the Republican Party, you sort of forget that Bernie Sanders oriented populist wave in the Democratic Party. But suffice it to say this was an unpopular policy for the bases, both parties. Say more about not only what the right economic policy in the Pacific is, the right trade policy for the United States, but how do you gentlemen think about navigating

the domestic political trouble that advancing such a policy presents. It's obviously at the core of a lot of our populist kind of revulsion at the recent history of American foreign policy, rightly or wrongly. Yeah, I, at the height of the debate over TPP, out a conversation with a member of the House of Representatives, his district of the 435 in the United States was one of the district's most dependent for its employment on trade with Asia. And he said, set his constituents were resolutely against TPP, right? So I think part of this has to do with how this is explained and what TPP or CPP is it now is what actually do. I think those of us in the national security sphere probably made an error in the framing this last time around because it was

often framed as if China doesn't, if we don't do this, China will write the rules rather than America write the rules we have to do this because this signal strategic engagement in the region. Those are true, but I think it left the impression on a lot of people's minds that there was a major economic cost to be had to getting into TPP, but it was worth it because we want to use to somehow contain China. But of course, the reverse was the case. And so now we're in a situation where there are two pan Asian trade agreements. China's party to one, RSEP, it's applied to join the other CPP, the United States,

is parted to neither. What does that mean in practice? Well, it means tariffs on exports of U.S. beef to Japan are significantly higher than they would be if we were in TPP. I mean, the models that have been performed by all kinds of groups show that it would be, you know, a marginal but are relatively small, but nevertheless, positive input on U.S. growth, employment, and so forth. You've had people like Senator Bernie Sanders went out and said TPP would cost millions of American jobs. There's just no evidence that that's actually the case. And for most of these countries, their access to the U.S. market wouldn't change very much. It's our access to their market, which we should want more of us.

And there's one other point, which we can't go home again, but the Trans-Pacific Partnership could have been enacted well before you took those two trips. And yet it was delayed and delayed and delayed until there came a point where it's, became a red-hot issue in the presidential campaign. And Hillary Clinton, of course, it went from the gold standard. I will resist saying what standard it went from gold to whatever. But in any can, that needn't have been the case. It was a error in forecasting and in judgment. And if it had been enacted, signed by the president, which it could have been much earlier. on in the second Obama term, then they may have been protesting about it in the streets, but it would be a matter of law, and it seems highly unlikely it would have been overturned.

So again, it's one of those you can't go home again. You can't return and freeze frame. Likuan Yew once said to me that you Americans seem to think that when you get engaged in other parts of the world, there's a freeze frame that happens out here in Asia. And we just stop doing anything until you remember we exist. But again, it's a matter, as we've been saying throughout this discussion of first recognizing we're a global power, but taking into account in every policy we can that what our priorities are. Nietzsche once said, man, man, most enduring stupidity is forgetting what he is trying to do. And we keep forgetting what we are

trying to do. And of course, that's the hardest thing for a strategist in the press of daily events to keep remembering what we're trying to do. And what we're trying to do for the foreseeable future, probably decade, is ensure that China doesn't upend. world order and the rules and practices, the Western generated rules and practices that have brought the countries of Asia and Europe and the United States into prosperity that they'd never seen before. That may be the first time ever that anyone has quoted Nietzsche and Lee Kwan, you in response to a question about trade agreements in Asia. This is the business we're in here on School of War. This is where I left out Schopenhauer.

We said something relevant too. I won't press my life. I'll, I'm going to introduce some additional names, not great philosophers, though they're both young men, so we'll give them time. But certainly very active and articulate participants in the policy debate here in Washington, Mike Gallagher and Matt Pottinger, who, as you gentlemen will know, had a piece in foreign affairs. Yes, about a month ago now calling for a quote-unquote victory strategy with regard to China. They also came here on the show to discuss it. And then just last week, set of responses was run in foreign affairs. The dean of Seiss, the former head of China policy for the Biden administration, a bunch of folks contributed and offered criticism.

Just sticking with this notion, Robert, of, you know, we need to keep in mind our ultimate goal here. What is our ultimate goal with regard specifically to the People's Republic of China? Our attitude towards it should be, should it be a Reagan, like attitude, which is just my shorthand for what Gallagher and Pottinger are proposing, where we wish to see a kind of collapse internally of Chinese Communist Party control. Is it not that? Is it something else? Do we need to decide in order to fill the vision that you propose? Just help us think that through. Well, first, I would quarrel with the notion that Ronald Reagan's policies were meant to bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union.

That simply is not true. He sought to contain, as his predecessors at all successfully done, Soviet power and influence, especially in Europe. Now, it is true that the collapse came on, not during his terms in office, but back to the foreign affairs piece, they seem to believe. both fair-minded and good people who care deeply about our country, that victory entails regime change in China. And if you set that as the standard, an analyst has to ask, how likely is that? And does its mere expression, when it doesn't occur, make us look weak? And by the way, what's its

effect on our allies in Asia, beginning with the Japanese, who want to ensure, as I said before, that China doesn't topple, disrupt, destroy these conventions, these free and open conventions across many domains, and that we prevent that. And that's essentially, I believe, the objective. I'm not a big fan of applied history, and especially of the phrase Cold War II, because I think if you look at it, it's so different the China challenge than the Soviet challenge was. But in any case, in any case, and we can't use the word containment, because again, our allies will be repulsed by the bumper sticker. but what we want is to balance Chinese power. That's what we want. And in that, to deter them and prevent them from endangering, threatening, even weakening our vital national interests.

And I do not see where regime change fits into that. And it's very pursuit, I think, would be contrary to those objectives. Because no one will join us. No one in Asia and Europe will join us with that objective. No one. Richard. Yeah, I wrote about two years ago an article for foreign affairs where I said that increasingly America's policy toward China was putting into place everything that we would want with one big exception, which is an objective, because you couldn't actually draw out. We knew what we didn't want.

We don't want China to repress the Uyghurs. We don't want them to invade Taiwan. We don't want them to take over the South China Sea. We don't want that, you know. But it was real hard to figure out what we do want. What is the, is there a long-term equilibrium that we could accept? And if so, what does that actually look like? So I tried to answer that question there.

And it's the same, essentially the same answer that Bob just gave in which we outlined to some degree in the book, which is we have a lot of preferences about different things, but we have to attach probabilities to outcomes and then a policy that would try to bring those outcomes into effect. And what we really care about is the overturning of the regional and global orders by an illiberal, ever more powerful China that acts against our interests. So ultimately, China that is either unwilling or unable to do that is what we want to aim at. And there's various scenarios under which that might happen. Could, under their own circumstances, lead to some change in the governance of China.

But it could also be China governed by the Communist Party that nevertheless is either too weak to do it or changes its definition of its own interests or so forth. So, you know, if I think we have to keep our eyes specifically on the things that are most desired. and undesirable. And at the end of the day, we want to deter war in China without capitulation to Chinese dominance because of all of the bad effects that would have on the region in the world. And that's what we aim at. Will you gentlemen object? Maybe they would object. If I, if I channeled my inner Gallagher and Podinger for a moment and said something in response, I want to hear your response. We want, presumably we want to maintain this order. We take it as an objective to maintain this order.

because ultimately we see that order as a means of preserving our freedom and prosperity at home, preserving the American project. And we believe happily that there is tremendous overlap between the preservation of the American project and the beneficial effects of the order more broadly beyond America's shores. And in the kind of competition that we've entered with China, we find ourselves in a place where whatever the pressures we have in our domestic politics, and it's been a period of a fair amount of upheaval in storminess, not as bad as it's been in American history, but bumpy in the last few years. We still, I mean, we are far from the situation

that I take to be the case in Beijing as is the case in regimes like Beijing's, where the preservation of the regime is a very high priority because you have a very legitimate reason to be afraid of a lot of the people in your own country, which seems to me to be a comparative advantage for the United States in the competition. And Ambassador Blackwell, you may, you may disagree with this, but it seems to me to have been a comparative advantage in the American competition with the Soviet Union as well. Why would we not apply pressure, whether or not we thought it would come to fruition in the form of regime collapse, regime change in the short turn along that axis as one more means of competing with China? What is what is the argument against that? I'm happy

to clarify what I mean further, but I'll just cut myself off there. Well, I said earlier what I think the best argument against, which is that in order to produce this equilibrium in Asia and indeed globally of the kind that has been so good for America and the West, we need our allies. We can't do this by ourselves, especially in the economic domain, but not only there in the military domain, the Japanese, the South Korean. and in Europe, of course, with our allies who are responding in many cases vigorously to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The idea of an America succeeding in the world over time alone doesn't seem to me to be borne out by American history. We've always done better American presidents, at least from the Second World War onward.

we've done better when we have been joined enthusiastically by our allies. And so the notion of America in the world offending its allies, which call for regime change would do, we'd end up talking about that with them rather than how to deter Chinese action against Taiwan. And it's worth saying one last thing about that. I am struck now, and we say this in the book, but probably not at enough length, which is, well, what's the greatest danger in Asia now? It is a Chinese miscalculation regarding Taiwan, which would lead them to use force against Taiwan, which could bring America into the war. U.S.-China War in the Taiwan Straits and the South China Sea would be a catastrophe with escalatory possibilities. It would be a catastrophe. And so our diplomacy needs to be based, first of all,

on the Reaganesque strength proposition, but also an effort and effort to manage this relationship with China, and we all know it's in its worst state in more than a half a century. Well, that should worry us all. It should worry us all. And part of responding to that is, and I give the Biden administration credit, is to build this web of new arrangements to try to strengthen deterrence. And the Japanese, of course, have led the way in that regard, doubling defense budget and taking the lead on Western trade conventions and so forth. So what are we trying to do with China? Two things. We're trying to maintain the current system of Western values and freedom across the Pacific and across the world. And we're trying to avoid a war with China.

That's what we're trying to do. And I think regime change, if you go back to Richard's point of about probabilities just diverts us from the idea of regime change diverts us from those two tasks. Aaron, just one thing that that we don't mean though, which is the abandonment of US values as a key element of our foreign policy and frankly, a key comparative advantage in the contest with China. I mean, the United States stands for individual freedom, basic rights, the sovereignty of countries, really from freedom from internal interference in the way that China likes to talk about, but does not. China is aiding the Russian war machine as it attempts to seize territory in Europe. The United States stands for the primacy of the individual over the state

rather than the other way around and so forth. And those things should be trumpeted, emphasized, and frankly, I think more than we have thus far. But that is different, from saying that our goal with China is regime change and we won't be successful in this relationship until we've accomplished that task. Would the Chinese agree that there's much difference there? That is to say, are we going to get credit for not specifically calling for regime change if all we do is talk about the importance of individual? Essentially, talk about the importance of values that render the Chinese Communist Party's rule morally anathema. Well, the Chinese think that we are after regime changed. But that's not relevant in this.

discussion we're having. We're talking about the United States and its allies. And I would point out that Ronald Reagan never called for the overthrow of the Soviet government. He never did. He said, tear down this wall. Well, that's something completely different. And the only, I believe my history is correct, that only John Foster Dulles called on the captive nations to revolt. We did not, Reagan, the Republican presidents, certainly not the Democrats, never called on the East Europeans to revolt. We were the beneficiaries of their own animations and rebellions. So, again, Richard put it well, we need to defend and promote our values because they are ones based on freedom. And I just think it's a, and we think that it's a diversion.

a sidetrack to have a discussion, whatever the Chinese think. And they've thought, I think, for at least a decade that we wish to overthrow the regime. And of course, Mike Pompeo said that frequently. So that the articulation has to do with our allies, not what the Chinese think. Gentlemen, I'm conscious of time. But Ambassador Blackwell, if you're willing, I wanted to ask one question about Henry Kissinger before we close. You were a associate of his at the start of your career, worked directly for him in the 70s and maintained a relationship much later in his life. What is Henry Kissinger's legacy?

Well, our friend Neil Ferguson is struggling with that in his second volume, I think. I would say I don't want to get into individual policies, which we could talk about a lot. But I think, I would say, what are his admonitions? What are his admonition? And there are two of them. And he clung to those from a world restored his first book all the way to the end of his life at the end of November of last year. And they were, you cannot have over time successful governance, international governance,

without a considerable degree of order. So that's number one. Order. stability. And the second was that with respect to relationships between and among superpowers, restraint is the key. Restraint is the key. And it's not obvious to me, despite the cosmetic improvement in U.S.-China relations. And I think it is entirely cosmetic, I think both our views. it isn't obvious to me that either side now, and this is vivified by the Warren Affairs piece, either side is exhibiting sufficient restraint, sufficient restraint.

And Kissinger, to the end of his life, and I was very close to in the last several years in particular, and to the end of his life, did believe that we are headed for a war unless the two, sides begin to show more restraint. Now, one can argue with that or not, but he was a strong advocate of a U.S. military buildup in Asia, a strong advocate because he worried the Chinese would draw dangerous conclusion by the progressive weakening of a U.S. military force projection into Asia. So, but diplomacy, he didn't think that was going to solve the problem. It just was the proper base for diplomacy, which would produce the stability and restraint, he thought necessary, and to avoid catastrophe. Robert Blackwell, Richard Fontaine, authors of Lost Decade, the U.S.

pivot to Asia in the rise of Chinese power, from which even though I lived through the period you were chronicling, I learned a tremendous amount from and found it to be very valuable as I found this conversation serious and really, really engaging. Thank you so much to both of you for making the time. Thanks for having us. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.