how to influence
the power of instruments of statecraft
Two stories bemused me this morning when put in the context of U.S. tools of statecraft. I could not figure out why U.S. officials would believe they have tools in place to lead to the policy outcomes the headlines described.
The first headline read ‘U.S. Scrambles to Stop Iran From Providing Drones for Russia’ David E. Sanger, Julian E. Barnes, and Eric Schmitt, 'The Biden administration tries to stop Iran from supplying drones to Russia', NYT.com, 29 December 2022 My first question was what leverage do we have with Iran? The United States and Islamic Republic have not engaged, except in fairly limited discussions such as on the Iran nuclear program, for 43 years. Teheran has been under siege by a large segment of its own population for weeks, illustrating its weakness. No bilateral trade nor educational exchanges nor informational nor anything on an on-going basis to build trust exists between the two governments (at least that I am aware of).
U.S.-Iranian relations are adversarial with hints things could deteriorate under the new House Republican leadership, beginning next week. Iran is still a major concern for non-proliferation reasons. The United States and Israel, along with Saudi Arabia, fear its nuclear ambitions threaten peace and stability across the Middle East and elsewhere. Without tools by which to influence Iran, however, I see few mechanisms with which we can even nudge Iran’s behaviour. The mullahs see their interests as fundamentally different from ours. Wishing for another state to change when it sees its interests as differing from our own rarely, if ever, works.
The second article was that the People’s Republic of China (PRC)’s trade with other Asian nations increased at the same time U.S. policy makers and analysts seek to limit or ‘decouple’ everyone from Beijing. Jason Douglas, 'China Increases Trade in Asia as U.S. Pushes Toward Decoupling', wsj.com, 28 December 2022 I suspect today’s report shocks a number of folks who don’t think through the details of how actions create (or don’t) create consequences.
U.S. concerns that China is too central to global supply chains, evidenced by Covid-related shortages and upheavals, along with generalised angst about China’s potentially manipulative behaviour, led to Washington espousing policies quite different from the decades’ long experience of an Asian trade realm focused on China. The problem is that espousing a different policy, with instruments to incentivise, motivate, reward, or even coerce the behaviour of other countries is an idea rather than a strategy without specific tools or ways of using the tools. While the international community has witnessed massive disruption since China began shutting down over Covid in 2020, that does not mean that other states pursue decoupling from China or have the incentives to do so, largely because they think it would hurt their own positions.
The missing element is that Washington has little concrete to offer immediately. China has a bigger trade relationship with all ten of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) along with Japan, South Korea, Australia, or India than those states have with the United States. The trade between China and Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and Vietnam—the economic powerhouses of ASEAN—grew 71% in the past four years. Even Taiwan, this week extending conscription periods for its military personnel because China threatens its very existence as a de facto independent place, has better trade links with its menacing neighbor than it does with the United States. Talk about things out of kilter.
The Journal articles cites several reasons for the bilateral trade China enjoys with this region such as geographic proximity (which Washington does not have), a lower cost export pool for consumer products (cheaper Chinese-made cell phones sell better than Apple products, for example) Southeast Asians seek, and the effects of the Trump-era tariffs intended to protect U.S. industries. All of those favour Beijing and make it harder for U.S. officials to lead Asian allies into stronger links to the United States.
Underwriting all of this, however, is the political reality of the United States rejecting the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). A trade system negotiated with U.S. involvement over the better part of a decade under the Obama administration, the TPP signified not only a trade agreement but a long-term investment in U.S. sustained involvement in Asia. When both candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton opposed it during the 2016 presidential campaign, Asians heard declining American commitments to the region rather than posturing for domestic politics. Asians saw this as abandoning of one of the two most fundamental tools the United States brought to the table over the decades of its regional involvement after 1941, proof that America is not in fact a Pacific nation which China most certainly is. The rejection of the TPP undermined confidence regarding enduring interest.
The Trump interlude was a convoluted one for this region with attacks on some of the bedrock regional allies, Japan and South Korea. Apparently chumminess with Xi Jinping alternated with tariff imposition, leading to daily apprehension. The more predictable Biden administration seemed determined to stabilize the situation by pursuing steps to checkmate Beijing’s prominence.
Yet again, despite repeated vows to the contrary ranging from the Obama ‘rebalance’ to the Biden steps towards decoupling from Beijing, U.S. policymakers increasingly used a single instrument to focus on Asia: the military. The Biden administration did not aggressively sign bilateral trade pacts with regional partners and has not stated whether it will participate in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPATPP) as a successor to TPP. Republicans, with their increasing skepticism about the desirability of global trade, probably will focus on limiting Biden’s options even further.
Additionally, climbing anxiety about Taiwan create further problems for Asian states. Not a single other major state in Asia has diplomatic relations with Taiwan; its dwindling diplomatic partners are concentrated in small South Pacific island and African or Latin American states. Beijing threatens partners who even vaguely appear willing to stray from China’s definition of appropriate (meaning none) political relations with Taibei. While Washington aspires towards a world economy less reliant on China’s role in the global supply chain, that transformation has not occurred and may not occur without a dramatic shift in the world economy. This can only occur with a far more integrated, unified American vision from within the United States regarding a clearer endstate (common understanding of what Americans seek as the outcome) than we see at present. Military power does not solve all problems nor does it operate as information, finance, trade, diplomacy, and other tools of government can in this region. We know what we don’t want but rarely articulate an endstate for which strategists can develop ways and means to achieve the desired outcome.
How and, more importantly, why do we think we can alter behaviours in either or both of these cases? If both the PRC and Iran are authoritarian, fundamentally threatening competitors, how and why do we believe we can alter their trajectories? What do we need do to alter their national interests or is that even possible? Understanding how to move a nation’s leaders to shift course overwhelmingly requires providing incentives or deterrents. Doing so, however, means that we must have methods and tools that change the views of the leadership. and, ultimately, the nation as a whole. Relying on the military as the major sustaining interlocutor with much of the world does not accomplish that. We rarely admit that others see their interests as different but equally important to how we view our own.
The Biden regime has prioritised diplomacy and the president’s time more effectively than have a number of recent presidencies but this is still inadequate. Too much emphasis remains on the military as a stick. The power of that stick, however, diminishes as it is a blunt rather than a nuanced. Diplomacy focuses on subtlety while the military tool is rarely an understated one. Most other governments, whether Teheran, Beijing, or Dar-es-Salam want to project internal independence, autonomy, and power rather than responding to coercion. Weakness, particularly for already vulnerable regimes, does not meet their needs, thus is not what they want to project at home or abroad.
Washington needs to vary the means by which we work to achieve our goals. That begins by clarifying what we want to accomplish in a positive, declaratory statement (surprisingly uncommon). We then need to determine multiple approaches to get to that end, exploring why we believe the approaches will get us there. Sounds simple but is too often the last thing we think to do. FIN