President Joe Biden showed a lunatic believe of being 'the leader of world'. He cherished the extension of the 'unilateral moment' when the U.S., after the breakdown of the Soviet Union, could act globally without restrictions and without fear of consequences.
There is some dread abroad that President Donald Trump, with his boarish demanding style of negotiation, would also follow that view.
But Trump's choice as Secretary of State, former Senator Marco Rubio, is offering a different perspective. In an extensive interview with Megyn Kelly, Rubio is doing away with the unilateral moment and starts to endorse multipolarity.
He is asked for his big picture overview:
QUESTION: It’s such a tricky time to be Secretary of State, especially as a Republican, because you look at the Republican Party and it’s fractured internally about where we should be on foreign policy. […] So how – just give me the 30,000-foot-level view of how you’re going to navigate that fracture.
Rubio seems to have thought quite a bit about this. Foreign policy as practiced over the last years, he says, has lost its focus:
I think the mission of American foreign policy – and this may sound sort of obvious, but I think it’s been lost. The interest of American foreign policy is to further the national interest of the United States of America, right? [..]
[A]nd that’s the way the world has always worked. The way the world has always worked is that the Chinese will do what’s in the best interests of China, the Russians will do what’s in the best interest of Russia, the Chileans are going to do what’s in the best interest of Chile, and the United States needs to do what’s in the best interest of the United States. Where our interests align, that’s where you have partnerships and alliances; where our differences are not aligned, that is where the job of diplomacy is to prevent conflict while still furthering our national interests and understanding they’re going to further theirs. And that’s been lost.
To recognize that the other side is pursuing its own (at least subjectively legitimate) interests is indeed what had been lost at the basis of U.S. diplomacy.
Rubio expands on that:
And I think that was lost at the end of the Cold War, because we were the only power in the world, and so we assumed this responsibility of sort of becoming the global government in many cases, trying to solve every problem. And there are terrible things happening in the world. There are. And then there are things that are terrible that impact our national interest directly, and we need to prioritize those again. So it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was not – that was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. We face that now with China and to some extent Russia, and then you have rogue states like Iran and North Korea you have to deal with.
That is a great (if very late) insight from a U.S. secretary for foreign policy.
The Biden administration had overextended the unilateral moment by underestimating Russia. It had launched the proxy-war in Ukraine because it had thought that Russia was weak. It limited technical exports to China because it thought that would hinder its development. It was so blind that it came to believe that it was successful in this.
In an exit interview with the Financial Times Biden's national security advisor Jake Sullivan is still making those claims (archived):
“Our alliances are stronger than they’ve been in a very long time. Our competitors and adversaries are weaker too in ways that have defied expectations, certainly with China. And we’ve produced that very strong American hand without getting entangled in war overseas,” [Sullivan] argues.
People with clear eyes have a different view. Since the U.S. started its proxy-war in Ukraine, which that country is losing, Russia has nearly tripled its forces. The former British commodore Steve Jermy asserts that NATO would lose in a conflict with it:
In summary, NATO is positioning itself as Europe’s defender, yet lacks the industrial capacity to sustain peer-to-peer warfighting, is wholly dependent on U.S. forces for the remotest chance of success, is unable satisfactorily to defend its sea lines of communication against Russian submarine, or its training and industrial infrastructure against strategic ballistic bombardment, is comprised of a diverse mix of un-bloodied conventional forces, and lacks the capacity to think and act strategically.
An easy NATO victory cannot be assumed, and I am afraid that the opposite looks far more likely to me.
Sullivan's 'success' in limiting China's progress has also defeated itself (archived):
China policy, [Sullivan] adds, was another achievement. “America is in a demonstrably better position in the long-term competition with China than we were, and yet we did it while stabilising the relationship and finding areas to work together.”
He says the US and China are in a “decisive decade” that will determine which comes out ahead in key areas such as artificial intelligence and the transition to a clean energy economy. “Four out of those 10 years in the decisive decade . . . [have] turned in America’s favour in a really significant way,” says Sullivan, adding that the export controls the US imposed on high-end chips and manufacturing equipment have had a “demonstrable impact”.
They indeed had a demonstrable impact. Lacking access to U.S. made tools China set out to make its own, better ones:
Days after our lunch, a Chinese company called DeepSeek stunned Silicon Valley by unveiling an AI model that appears to rival US models. After the news broke, I emailed Sullivan to get his reaction. He says it shows that the US needs to “stay on our game” but he is “still confident in the American lead” in AI. He stresses that it “only reinforces” his view on the importance of export controls.
China has in fact blown up the U.S. idea of having expensive to use, privately owned AI models closed off from public scrutiny. It open-sourced its own better models which can now be used for mere pennies. There is no longer an 'American lead' in this field.
Rubio seems to have understood that unilateral behavior has failed and that a multilateral world requires to pragmatically compromise:
So now more than ever we need to remember that foreign policy should always be about furthering the national interest of the United States and doing so, to the extent possible, avoiding war and armed conflict, which we have seen two times in the last century be very costly.
…
[N]ow you can have a framework by which you analyze not just diplomacy but foreign aid and who we would line up with and the return of pragmatism. And that’s not an abandonment of our principles. I’m not a fan or a giddy supporter of some horrifying human rights violator somewhere in the world. By the same token, diplomacy has always required us and foreign policy has always required us to work in the national interest, sometimes in cooperation with people who we wouldn’t invite over for dinner or people who we wouldn’t necessarily ever want to be led by. And so that’s a balance, but it’s the sort of pragmatic and mature balance we have to have in foreign policy.
There are many foreign policy points in Rubio's long interview I wholeheartedly disagree with.
But I am delighted to see that he gets the basic principal right: the U.S. has interests; so do others(!); surviving requires compromise.