The Crisis of American Foreign Policy and Its Origin

Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, the US is no longer the “beacon of hope” and “a city upon a hill” that it once prided itself. Although American diplomacy has faced many challenges in recent years, the mainstream political elites still insisted on full engagement overseas. However, the rise of isolationism and narcissistic nationalism domestically is shaking the foundation of American diplomacy.

From a historical perspective, American foreign policy triumphantly brought down the Soviet Union in the Cold War era. Yet, it was much less successful in the post-cold War era. The twenty-year anti-terrorism war following the September 11 attacks has sapped the United States’ national energy, and the historic rise of China after its accession to the World Trade Organization has tilted the power balance between the US and China, with any analysts positing that the “Pax Americana” era is ending.1 The American government and people are also shifting away from the liberal world order that bestows global leadership upon the country. Although the US is not in absolute decline, the country has found it increasingly challenging to sustain its overseas policies, and signs of a foreign policy crisis have emerged.

The recent Russia-ukraine conflict has introduced new elements to the US foreign policy environment, re-energizing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and strengthening American leadership in the alliance. It seems that the crisis has reaffirmed the US global leadership;

however, does it signal the US has turned around the corner and resolved its foreign policy crisis?

The Crisis of American Foreign Policy

A crisis of American foreign policy refers to a situation in which the country is facing unprecedented external challenges on a global scale, with the political elite unable to solve nor mitigate the challenges effectively, and what they do instead precipitate a more serious crisis. The origin of the American foreign policy crisis can trace its root to domestic factors more than any other cause. The relative decline of US national capacity makes it unable to keep the liberal international order and causes it to crumble. In other words, the US foreign policy crisis is a crisis of keeping order and national power. Domestic political constraints have limited the United States’ ability to recast a new global order, and the failure has triggered a series of regional and international crises. Specifically, the American foreign policy crisis is manifested in three areas.

Dysfunction of foreign policy decision-making

A manifestation of the American foreign policy crisis is the dysfunction of its decision-making mechanism. The paralysis is not unprecedented, but the current dysfunction has significantly disrupted American foreign policy and will likely hold the country back for a long time to come.

First, the legacy of President Donald Trump’s amateurish approach to foreign policy has hurt the US. With his unruly and capricious personality, Trump broke many norms of US foreign policy.2 As a result, during his presidency, American foreign policy often deviated from set rules and was chaotic at times, with the dysfunction resulting in far-reaching consequences. According to the mainstream opinion, the personality of Trump caused his norm-defying behavior and moved him away from the traditional

Republican establishment. Trump’s foreign policy circle was stuffed with inexperienced advisors, and his poor personal judgment of diplomats exacerbated the United States’ external environment.3

The Biden presidency has provided an opportunity to mend the problems of the previous Trump era. Still, three shadows remained: First is the adoption of Trump policies in the Biden administration, with many of them becoming official policies from earlier ad-hoc rules. Restoring professionalism in the Biden foreign service is not enough to offset the Trump legacy. Second, Trump remains popular among the Republicans, and there is a possibility that he can return to power in the 2024 presidential election. Lastly, the skepticism toward professional foreign policy-making stays high in the US, and the polarization provides a hotbed for policy extremism.

Second, nationalism is gaining ground in foreign policy formulation. Since the 2008 global financial crisis, nationalist sentiments have accumulated in the US society and grown into a formidable force. Trump’s “America First” campaign slogan aptly reflected this social momentum. The US is slowly transformed from a country believing in “American exceptionalism” to a more insular, inward-looking nation-state.4

In the economic area, Trump used tools such as tariffs and restrictions over the so-called “Entity List” to wage a trade war against China, disregarding global supply chain safety and stability. In the political arena, Trump’s unilateral, populist and isolationist approach undermined many multilateral and alliance arrangements, often causing damages very difficult to rewind.5

Though Biden tries hard to redress the problems of his predecessor, he has kept most of Trump’s policies in economic and technological areas.

In fact, Biden’s policies are no different from Trump’s in their common populistic advocacy of American economic supremacy.6 Under nationalist influence, Biden’s alleged return to the multilateralist path is partial and features club-style closed groups, which is in stark contrast to the multilateralism that the US once advocated. The populist tendency will likely stay for some time and shape the US engagement with major countries such as China and Russia.

Third, the check-and-balance self-remediation mechanism, which worked well in US history and helped the country to overcome crisis after crisis, fails today. The academic circle believed the self-correcting culture was key to the United States’ growth into a superpower, and the US subprime crisis, which triggered the 2008 global financial crisis, did not cut that trust. The academe still largely believed that the self-correcting ability would prevent the country from slipping into decline.7

The past decade, however, seems to turn such belief upside down. The US is faced with major trouble both domestically and diplomatically, but the government has taken an evasive attitude toward most of the problems. It seems that the country has lost its self-remediation ability. The perennial racial and social division problems have raised their ugly heads again, but the country has not been able to address them properly this time. On many global issues, the US is unprepared for their resolution. The two-decade-old Afghanistan War that ended in a disgraceful exit is an explicit manifestation of US failure in self-remediation.

The US no longer a “can-do power”

In the opinion of Samantha Power, Administrator of the US Agency for International Development in Biden’s administration, the US has been long respected by foreign leaders and publics because of its “willingness

to undertake challenging endeavors and its ability to accomplish difficult tasks – a significant but underappreciated cornerstone of American power.” In other words, the US is considered a “can-do power.”8 Confidence in the country is considered a major pillar of the US power projection in the world.

However, fewer and fewer people now believe the US can solve major global problems. A domestic school of thought suggests the country should focus on managing global problems instead of trying to solve these problems.9 There are indications that the country is shirking away from its traditional role of a global leading problem-solver. On the one hand, the US appears helpless in solving its worsening domestic racial divide and wealth gap problems and fails to control the proliferation of fake news and misinformation. It has also done a miserable job in controlling the COVID-19 pandemic. On the other hand, the Trump and Biden administrations have adopted a hands-off policy toward many countries’ rising political populism and trade protectionism. They have been unwilling and unable to cooperate with the international community to reform the global trading system and improve global governance. The American elite are re-evaluating the country’s future role in this touchy environment with myriads of domestic and international problems, and their thinking about how the US and the world should address the current crises is also witnessing changes.

Under the Trump administration, the US failed in its traditional role as a global problem solver and order builder. Instead, it became a troublemaker and order-destroying agent, turning itself into a kind of “rogue state.” The Trump administration launched several successive attacks on the multilateral institutions that the country painfully built in the past. It launched sanctions to coerce trading partners to yield to its demands and impose tariffs on major

trading partners, among which its trade war and technological blockade against China were particularly notable.

Biden tries to remedy the harm that Trump inflicted on many multilateral institutions, but his solution is self-centered with little regard for the interests of other parties; moreover, his proposed multilateralism is highly selective and limited to its small circle of friends and allies. It is therefore no wonder some scholars believe that the liberal international order the US has long advocated is only “an artifact of the Cold War’s immediate afterglow.” In fact, the transactional approach of Trump to US foreign policy is not a first in US history; such behavior has happened many times before. Trump’s imprint could endure long after he left office, and there is the danger that the US will become a “rogue superpower” in the future international system.10

Disintegration of the Us-dominated liberal international order

The crisis of American foreign policy is also reflected in the slow disintegration of the liberal international order it advocated. The upheaval of Eastern Europe and the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s expanded the liberal international order to the former Soviet bloc. The US won the Cold War, but concurrent with Francis Fukuyama’s prediction of “the end of history” was the emergence of a major historical undercurrent opposing democratization and globalization in the ensuing years.11 The trend accelerated after the 2008 global financial crisis, and anti-globalization has increasingly become a critical force that erodes the liberal international order. The Trump phenomenon was even globally considered a symbol of the order’s collapse, with two schools in the academic community justifying the claim.

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt represent the first school, and they are dubbed by Daniel Deudney and John Ikenberry as “the Quincy

coalition.”12 According to Mearsheimer and Walt, while liberalism seems the correct philosophical guidance for domestic politics, applying it to international politics is wrong. It underestimates the force of nationalism and would eventually undermine the interests of the domestic middleand lower-class, who would rise to oppose the imposed order eventually.13 Mearsheimer and Walt recognized American foreign policy’s problems, but it was not enough to blame liberalism. The crisis of American foreign policy surely has something to do with the country’s ideological choice, but it is also largely determined by historical laws. Walt accuses liberal illusions of causing the current Ukraine crisis,14 but the US move to squeeze Russia’s strategic space follows a realist logic, albeit conceptually different from Walt’s vision. Mearsheimer criticizes the engagement policy toward China advocated by US liberals, lamenting their most serious strategic mistake of attempting to change China that runs counter to basic realist logic and leads to inevitable China-us competition and conflict.15 But, in fact, the liberals were not blind to the potential risks of engaging with China; only the temptation of tremendous benefits from engagement led successive US governments to create the situation today.

The second group of scholars, represented by Ikenberry, claim themselves liberals. They admit that the liberal international order is facing a severe crisis: on the one hand, the US has adopted unilateralism, indulged itself in military aggression, recklessly advertised democracy worldwide, and resisted the liberal international order based on major-power collaboration and rules; on the other, the rise of China has impacted the original Usled order, and the key to the order’s sustainability lies in whether it can

accommodate China.16 However, this group of scholars insist that the future direction of the liberal order depends on America’s choice.17 Liberal democracies must withstand threats on multiple levels and rectify their internal failures. The US should address its problems, return to normal from the mess created by Trump, and revitalize America through domestic construction to compete more effectively with its rivals.18 The argument, logically self-consistent within the liberal spectrum, has been accepted by the Biden administration.

In summary, American foreign policy is now in crisis. It is dysfunctional in decision-making and practically unable to solve major problems. These are complications from the collapse of the Us-dominated liberal international order.

Foreign policy mistakes are of course to blame, but more importantly, there is something wrong with the United States’ domestic governance, which serves as the foundation for the liberal global order it sustains. The deep-rooted domestic problems have also led to the ugly side of America in foreign policy. The selfish stand of the US in its trade and technological conflicts with China and the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated little regard for international rules and norms. This attitude has laid bare the law of the jungle in front of the international community and alerted people on how far American domestic and foreign policies can go.

The Domestic Origin of American Foreign Policy Crisis

The Us-led international order in the post-war era is in essence one of “embedded liberalism.”19 The country must provide public goods for the

international community and maintain a multilateral international economic order. At the same time, it must also safeguard domestic economic stability and social harmony through state intervention to ensure its foreign policy of deeply engaging in world affairs is supported by the middle class. The sustainability of the Us-dominated liberal order depends on the delicate balance between foreign policy and domestic politics. The balance is fragile, however; sluggish economic development domestically and excessive burden externally will seriously erode the social foundation for the liberal order, which will in turn undermine the US foreign policy of extensive overseas engagement. Moreover, with the continuously shrinking middle class and a crisis of the democratic system, rationality across American society is fast breaking apart, hollowing out the domestic basis of the Us-led liberal international order.

Shrinkage of American middle class

The crisis of American foreign policy reflects major changes in its society, most notably the shrinkage of the middle class. There is a complicated historical context for the phenomenon, but the direct reason is the problematic national approach to globalization. Besides lower relative gains relative to its competitors, the US government has found its hands tied in response to the deteriorating racial issues and the widening gap between rich and poor.

In the United States’ initial idyllic vision of the post-cold War liberal international order, any country will succeed if it joins the Us-led system and follows the “Washington Consensus.” In the initial round of liberalism, the new industrial revolution brought tremendous benefits, emerging economies took part actively in the Us-led global industrial supply chain, and many states successively joined the path of democratization.

But the era that has created unprecedented wealth is also one when the gap between rich and poor and the division between social classes have reached a new height. This is especially the case for the US. On the one hand, the rapid rise of China in the post-cold War era has

challenged US primacy. After it acceded to the World Trade Organization in 2001, China quickly integrated into the world economy, and the US chose to relocate its industries to developing countries like China, thus rebuilding a global economic system in the liberal era. While China benefits from the system, the middle class in the US has suffered. On the other hand, non-traditional security challenges have eroded America’s power basis. Over the past two decades, precious strategic resources of the US have been poured into anti-terrorism wars instead of developing the economy and improving people’s livelihoods. The combined effect of these two forces is the widening wealth gap and the continuously shrinking middle class in the US, which leads to major changes in the country’s societal structure.

The dwindling size of the domestic middle class has aggravated social division and had tremendous implications for American foreign policy. The country has witnessed drastic fluctuations and oscillated between power and principles, strategic contraction and in-depth intervention, and multilateralism and unilateralism. The policy swing has posed an enormous challenge to the liberal international order. Since the Trump administration, the US strategy has experienced an adjustment of an intensity rarely seen in decades and is likely to witness a U-turn again in the future. And more importantly, in the presence of a formidable external rival, the budding foreign policy crisis will shape domestic politics and fuel political populism and economic isolationism, pulling US domestic and foreign policies into a vicious cycle.

Crisis of the US governance system

Overshadowing the liberal international order is the crisis facing the US governance system.

First, the quality of the American political elite is generally in decline, threatening the US political system and its international leadership status. The decline has a complex socio-economic origin and will leave a major historical imprint. Analysts believe the current crisis

is “a profound crisis of America’s leadership class, the result of elites becoming unmoored from the fundamentals of this nation’s founding and its traditional commitment to building a decent society.”20 The attempt to occupy the Capitol and overturn the 2020 election results in January 2021 has triggered a constitutional crisis. Trump’s refusal to concede defeat has also broken with American political tradition. As Fukuyama put it, the event not only marked the decline of American democracy but also “signals a significant decline in American global power and influence.”21 It is difficult for a domestically unstable America to sustain its global strategy.

Secondly, the political elite increasingly cannot represent the people amid a widening wealth gap. The aggravating income disparities in the US have brought two political consequences. The first is that the political elite do not truly represent the general public’s wishes. How to properly represent the public’s voice was once disputed between the federalists and anti-federalists in US history, and it is still an unsolved problem today. The second is that democracy has degenerated to mean one-time voting, with the people’s wish forgotten after voting. The necessary reforms that truly reflect the people’s interests are hard to take shape. From the “Occupy Wall Street” movement to the “Black Lives Matter,” social reforms sorted by the people have not happened, even though the messages sent by these events are well known.

Thirdly, racial relations have worsened. The increasing diversity of immigrants and the differential growth rates of populations from different ethnic groups have changed the United States’ demographic structure. Over the past four decades, the rapidly growing population of African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans have changed the American social landscape and are set to reshape US politics. As the changing demographic structure gives rise to more interracial tensions, building a democratic community

is even more difficult. As a result, there are uncertainties as to whether the American national characters will be preserved and how the US political traditions will be inherited.

Fourthly, the US media is experiencing a collective decadence. In general, the American media is facing three major challenges: first, a rigid interpretation of “political correctness” has deprived the media of its cherished fairness and neutrality; then, the rapid development of new media technologies has unleashed large amounts of disinformation that existing rules and regulations find hard to address; the last is the corporate tech oligarchs have to some extent manipulated the American public opinion and caused a deteriorating public speech environment.

To conclude, the declining quality of the political elite, the widening gap between rich and poor, the intensifying racial conflict, and the degenerating media environment are all syndromes of a crisis in America. Moreover, they reflect the defects of the US political system in social governance. In other words, the US is deficient in controlling the rich and improving social governance. The rapid expansion of the internet and mobile communications has resulted in an information explosion and unprecedented speedy transmission of information, but the US governance system has failed to manage the trend properly; instead, it is becoming a critical force that undermines the existing institutions. On the other hand, while globalization and the information technology revolution have accelerated the redistribution of wealth, the US government has not succeeded in managing the redistribution process. It has failed to disentangle the complex web behind the wealth gap and interracial relations. Without a functioning self-correction mechanism, social tensions gradually lead to negative social sentiments and irrational behavior.

Creeping irrationality in American society

The current crisis of American foreign policy reflects the creeping irrationality across the US society. Simply put, the crisis of foreign policy is one of rationality. For a long time, American social governance has been

developing on two bases: a structurally thriving middle class and people’s philosophical trust in rationality.

Apart from the shrinkage of the middle class because the US government has failed to regulate power and wealth in the post-cold War era, the philosophical foundation of American society has been eroded, and the spirit of scientism is challenged. America today is miles away from the one that believed in rationality and science, whether in terms of the government’s pandemic response or its advance of international cooperation. At the same time, the country has failed to control disinformation effectively. The resulting tensions between different social forces worsened to the point that threatened the stability of society and government. Focusing on “political correctness” has penetrated the fabric of American society and distorted people’s judgement of facts and quest for truth. Under the strong influence of values and ideologies, fact-based logic is no longer relevant in foreign policy, resulting in episodes of collective ignorance among the elite and the public.

George Kennan once proclaimed in 1977, “Doomed by our selfishness, materialism, and vulgarity, and so encumbered by our excessively democratic Constitution,” a rational and effective foreign policy is hard to come by.22 While such a concern might be an exaggeration more than 40 years ago, it is undoubtedly a foresight in the eyes of American foreign policy observers today. The foreign policy of the United States, whose domestic governance has encountered major problems, can hardly be rational and effective.

Biden’s Strategic Moves to Restore American Foreign Policy

In response to the unprecedented crisis, the Trump administration attempted to repair American domestic and foreign policies under the “America First” concept. Still, Trump’s foreign policy report card is full of

failing grades.23 In the opinion of US scholar David Lake, Trump’s “America First” philosophy has undermined the Us-led international order since World War II; the shift impacted liberal values and the basic principles that underpin a multilateral international system. He suggested giving more consideration to the underlying social factors that spawned “America First,” addressing domestic social division through a “re-embedded liberalism” and re-legitimizing hegemony through a new type of international coordination.24 The concepts behind the Biden administration’s policies are consistent with Lake’s suggestions. Specifically, Biden’s strategic measures to restore American foreign policy include three core components: revitalizing democracy, uniting democratic allies and partners, and building domestic consensus by identifying China as the United States’ rival.

Revitalizing domestic democracy

There is a consensus that American democracy has had serious problems. In Biden’s article on Foreign Affairs, he pointed out that the US must “repair and reinvigorate” its democracy.25 The Interim National Security Strategic Guidance released in March 2021 also stressed that “The United States must lead by the power of our example, and that will require hard work at home – to fortify the founding pillars of our democracy, to address systemic racism truly, and to live up to our promise as a nation of immigrants.”26 The Biden administration has made all efforts to redress Trump’s political legacy and bring the way of governance back to Democratic traditions. In addition, changes in a series of social policies have taken place to alleviate the problems in American society. Specifically, they include adjustments to immigrant and refugee policies, plans for large-scale

infrastructure building and employment, and policies to narrow the wealth gap, address racial contradictions, and consolidate democracy.27 Labelled as “a foreign policy for the American people,” these measures “look not only to make progress on short-term problems but also to address their root causes and lay the groundwork for our long-term strength.”28

In particular, the priority is revitalizing the American manufacturing sector and empowering the middle class. The Biden administration proposed a foreign policy for the middle class, attempting to renew American democracy from an economic perspective. According to analysts, the idea of a foreign policy for the middle class essentially means investment in domestic labor and infrastructure, as well as in innovation and competitiveness, which constitute the foundation of state power.29 Jennifer Harris and Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan also pointed out that “the emerging great-power competition between the United States and China will ultimately turn on how effectively each country stewards its national economy and shapes the global economy.”30 The statement means the China-us strategic competition is increasingly one over domestic policies, the outcome of which hinges on each side’s domestic governance capacity. The Biden administration has followed the basic concepts of progressive liberalism, which emphasize developing the economy and revitalizing the manufacturing sector to strengthen the middle class, consolidate the social basis of American democracy, and gain an advantage in long-term competition with China.

The Biden administration has stepped up infrastructure construction to boost economic growth to reverse the hollowing out of middle- to low

end manufacturing in the US. In March 2021, Biden unveiled the Us$2.3trillion American Jobs Plan for infrastructure building, which, together with the American Families Plan, was eventually trimmed into the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that passed the House of Representatives in November. The approximately $1.2 trillion in spending in the next five years will improve domestic infrastructure and create new job opportunities while investing in high technologies to maintain the United States’ global leading position. In February 2022, the House of Representatives passed the America COMPETES Act of 2022, which allocated more funding for the high-tech sector, emphasizing high-end manufacturing to enhance its international competitiveness. $52 billion of the funding would support the semiconductor industry, especially the R&D of critical components in semiconductor, automobile and computer production. The actual effects of these measures on boosting the American manufacturing industry and improving the situation of the American middle class, however, still depend on multiple factors.

Uniting democratic allies and partners

Repairing America’s ties with democratic allies and partners is a major component of Biden’s plan to compete with China. It helps to remedy the declining ability of the US to contain China and help the country to regain its upper hand. The US excludes China from the Us-dominated industrial supply chains by allying with small circles of like-minded allies and partners; The new supply chain highlights “value” to gain the moral high ground needed to unify the “free world.” In addition, the US has initiated an anti-china ideology campaign in Western World and used it to draw as many allies and partners as possible to its side. Over the past year, the Biden administration has taken multiple political, military, and economic measures to consolidate ties with its democratic allies and partners.

Politically, Biden focuses on improving the transatlantic alliance by enhancing the strategic coordination between the US and European