Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin observed of Russian history that there were “decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen.” The U.S. has entered a similar hinge moment in our history, and the next few weeks could determine our national prospects.
As a former senior U.S. national security official, I spend much time deliberating with colleagues around the world on geopolitical risks and trends. It is by now a commonplace that unprecedented uncertainty governs the international scene. Great power rivalries and regional instabilities are escalating. New technologies have changed the playing field. Furthermore, the U.S. itself has become a major source geopolitical risk.
I tell my foreign interlocutors – sitting and former officials, clients, other analysts – that it is necessary to monitor at least three tv screens simultaneously: the electoral horserace, the perils of transition, and the policy picture amid polycrisis. This multidisciplinary split-screen view is essential to grasp the dynamic complexity of the challenges before us and to plot course corrections. It will not be an easy task.
The Horserace
The first screen features the domestic electoral horserace in its last weeks: who’s up, who’s down in the myriad polls, what surprises does October hold, what else could affect voter turn-out. This drama is nothing new.
But the sheer volatility and intensity of this election cycle is new. For the first time since 1968, a president eligible for reelection has stepped back in favor of a largely untested vice president who did not obtain the party’s nomination through a competitive process. And a bloody-minded former president hell-bent on revenge is engaging in increasingly extremist rhetoric.
Trump briefly appeared to be an electoral shoo-in – his climax occurred in the bloody, fist-pumping “never surrender” days right after the first assassination attempt in Pennsylvania and his dramatic coronation at the RNC. In a spectacle reminiscent of World Wrestling Federation theatrics, Trump was so self-assured of victory that he doubled his bet on MAGA nativism rather than having truck with RINOs or other centrists.
Yet Trump has been struggling to regain the same level of confidence ever since Joe Biden was effectively forced out of the race due to perceived infirmity. Biden may have played a historically necessary role in defeating Trump in 2020, but in the eyes of his own party he had necessarily became political history in 2024.
Biden’s unceremonious ouster was achieved thanks to the months-long tandem efforts of his former boss Barack Obama and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, likely with the tacit cooperation of Vice President Kamala Harris herself. After all, it was Harris who quickly seized the mantle as party nominee. This power grab is probably the most impressive feat on a resume otherwise thin in executive decision-making and suggests more moxie in Harris than commonly appreciated.
Trump has been petulant about the “switcheroo” – fulminating about what was nothing short of a political coup within the Democratic party, but an entirely lawful one. As a result Trump has been deprived of his familiar old punching bag.
Despite palpable if not universal Democratic relief at the replacement of Biden, the electoral picture remains suspenseful. While the truculent Trump remains consumed with the quest for personal power and the need to stay out of jail, a cautious Harris avoids talking about anything that could be mistaken for a compelling strategy of national renewal, whether on economic or foreign policy. The United States, a nation with unparalleled capacity for adaptation, is badly in need of a paradigm shift in major policy areas and can ill afford drift and delay. More on this below.
Veteran political watcher and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan has archly summarized the contest as “Awful vs. Empty.” It’s clear that a reversion to the authoritarian and erratic Trump would be more than awful for the Republic, but it is not obvious that Harris has a credible plan to cure the country’s polarized malaise and reverse the incipient slide into chaos, notwithstanding her platitudes about “joy,” “a new way forward,” and “an American-built opportunity economy.” Who doesn’t want those fine things? More worrying, erstwhile co-pilot Harris is trapped paying lip service to Biden’s shaky legacy.
To be clear, one should unequivocally prefer Empty to Awful, but it’s hard to pretend that Harris’ Chauncey Gardiner act is what compelling leadership looks like. Not being Trump might be just enough to win, but it is not enough to govern and lead. Harris may yet fill in the empty spaces and measure up.
The Perils of Transition
The second screen looks at the perils of transition – and specifically the risk that election day might not be decision day.
The period between Election Day and the inauguration on January 20, is an unduly long, fundamentally unnecessary but constitutionally-required transition as America awaits the certification of the election and eventual investiture of the new president. The transition used to be taken for granted as a formality, but that is no longer the case.
The main drama of the transition is not merely the maddening passage of time but Trump’s preemptive threat to challenge the election results. The former president has essentially taken the position that he cannot rightly lose this election. The “big lie” which he uses to question the 2020 result after the fact has long since morphed into a tool to try to delegitimize the 2024 election in advance as “rigged.”
The Trump team has already unleashed massive lawfare tactics to change or challenge election rules at the state level. They are also prepared to dispute certification of the electoral count with a view to final judicial appeal to the Trump-stacked Supreme Court.
Only a Blue Wave and overwhelming Harris victory in the electoral college could forestall the risk of an unstable transition. Four of the six presidential elections since 2000 have been decided by fewer than 120,000 votes in a handful of states — in 2020 it was about 44,000 votes in three states — and the 2024 ballot is likely to follow that pattern.
Of course Trump could win free and fair. But he is also capable of trying to steal a close election he would otherwise win.
The most dire and cynical lesson Trump learned in 2020 was to strike first: not to wait for all the votes to be canvassed and counted and for a winner in a close contest to be declared. Instead, he knows it’s imperative to disrupt the counting in enough localities and states as quickly as possible to leave the outcome in doubt.
The underhanded goal would be to short-circuit the electoral college, maintain control of a majority in the House and force a so-called contingent election in Congress where a majority of Republican-controlled state delegations could pick the winner under the obsolete 12th Amendment procedures, most likely against the will of the popular majority.
Some of the leading tactical scenarios for ending up with a contingent election have been described in my co-authored three-part series “Dancing in the Dark.” Another variant of a disputed electoral endgame can be found here. Most of these troubled transition scenarios spring from the fact that the venerable old U.S. constitution provides a shaky framework for an indeterminate election and leaves too much authority over the presidential election with the states, making ample room for mischief.
One might say Trump is going full Venezuela, prepared to bend the constitution, to incite opposition street protests and to make a Maduro-style announcement of his own victory regardless of the facts. Trump has all but declared civil war by other means on the American Republic. This fact is noticed abroad, and has an impact on U.S. creds as a lamp of democracy, a fact seemingly lost on the foreign policy types which continue to preach democracy promotion as though nothing out of the ordinary is happening at home.
The vulnerability of our long transition period should make Americans envy parliamentary systems such as the UK’s where a new prime minister can take office on the morning after an election with a simple majority of seats.
Yet Biden’s lame duck status as president with plenipotentiary powers until January 20 and a new if worrying ambit of executive immunity thanks to the recent landmark Supreme Court ruling also presents an interesting possibility to stop electoral sabotage in progress rather than wait for a January 6th sequel.
Both the Congressional hearings in 2021 and the Jack Smith federal case against Trump have amply demonstrated that the insurrection and coup attempt were the result of a wide conspiracy as clumsy as it was brutal. What about now, in 2024? Is there any reason to believe a similar criminal conspiracy is not already underway in the run-up to this election?
The failure to prosecute and convict the capo for January 6th has fueled a dangerous sense of impunity. Will the sitting President at some point feel compelled to step in, whether through law enforcement or emergency powers to protect the constitution? The fact that these are valid and pressing questions highlights the uncertainty of our national predicament.
Policy Picture Amid “Polycrisis”
The third screen we must monitor has to do with policy, particularly national security and international relations. U.S. foreign policy has seemingly been on autopilot for some time while the world is increasingly on fire, literally and figuratively.
So much time and energy are spent by the political elite on the first two screens – the topsy-turvy horserace and the novel perils of transition – that there is little coherent policy engagement with the “polycrisis” engulfing the planet, including climate change, migration, widening inequalities and continuing poverty, the unregulated rise of artificial intelligence and the cold and hot wars threatening to plunge us into deeper conflict, perhaps even WW3.
Our national policy conversation is increasingly sophomoric and unserious. Trump’s response is a series of atavistic slogans about nationalism, protectionism and promises of quick fixes. By contrast, Harris alternates between vowing to stay the course of Biden’s ineffectual foreign policy, wedded as it is to a paradigm of U.S. power that no longer corresponds to reality, and committing to building a more “lethal” military. For its part, the U.S. Congress is a theater of the absurd, engaged chiefly in grandstanding and obstruction.
But we do not exist in a vacuum. And our track record is plain to see even if we engage in selective memory. The rest of the world noticed that after 9-11 the U.S. engaged in twenty years of failed military interventions and regime change exercises in the Greater Middle East, violating sovereignty at will and causing havoc and massive loss of life, all under cover of “the war on terror” and “nation-building.” One of the basic rules of power is that if you use it and fail to achieve your objectives, your power diminishes. Judgment is as important as raw might.
The world has noticed that the U.S. abandoned the people of Afghanistan after making piles of high-minded but unrealistic promises of transformative support, quite similar to those currently being made to Ukraine in the name of “defense of democracy.” The Vietnam War may be a distant memory, but it too was a muscular and failed democracy promotion expedition couched in dubious metaphors such as “the domino theory” and “strategic hamlets.”
The world has noticed, too, that Gaza at the hands of an unbridled U.S. friend looks a lot like Mariupol at the hands of an unhinged U.S. foe. There are many significant differences between the two cases but a common denominator is that the U.S. has failed to find a way to stop the cycle of escalation in either place — indeed, we may be underwriting it in both places.
The Global South has noticed that the U.S. and its allies did nothing to stop Ethiopia’s slide into brutal civil war and are now doing little to deal with impending famine in Sudan on a scale not seen in modern times.
The rest of the world has noticed the U.S. walking away from the gospel of free trade after Washington concluded that a rising China could be gaining the edge in platform technologies, supposedly by stealing intellectual property, and in access to critical minerals, allegedly by plundering Africa and other sources. The message is that globalization was acceptable as long as the U.S. won the competition.
It has often been asserted that globalization is a fact, not a theory. True enough, the world is objectively interdependent. Yet the once authoritative mantras of ineluctable global cultural and normative convergence thanks to open borders for trade and investment and the pursuit of market efficiencies have long faded from the prestigious panel discussions at Davos.
None of this is to lay sole blame on the U.S. for the global polycrisis – other actors share responsibility and have been engaged in astounding geopolitical brinkmanship – but we should focus on getting our own act together before lecturing others. Choices have consequences and it’s high time for a reckoning about our own ledger over the past quarter century.
Two pillars of the U.S. global security strategy – commitment to a binary struggle between democracy vs. authoritarianism and espousal of the “rules-based international order” – are fracturing in practice and need self-critical adjustment. Credibility matters, and we are losing it.
The “Blob” – meaning the Washington foreign policy establishment comprising pious liberal interventionists and pumped-up traditional hawks who play at being Churchillian and insist that America’s wars are by definition “good wars” and our economic dominance is intrinsically beneficent – would dismiss all such criticisms as forms of whataboutism, appeasement and declinism. They are right to lobby for a better world, but wrong to tar skeptics who counsel greater strategic prudence.
Not only does the Blob tend to self-congratulate, but they manage to self-perpetuate. It is striking that so few members of the foreign policy elite responsible for what Zbigniew Brzezinski aptly called “suicidal statecraft” have lost their jobs over the past few decades. Instead, many of them have been retained and promoted across Administrations in their respective parties. The primacy of loyalty and patronage over insight and track record could be one reason foreign policy experts are held in such low regard.
Can the U.S., once a pioneering architect of multilateralism, adjust to a new power balance? A major reckoning lies ahead if the U.S. wishes to maintain its preponderant global status, dynamism and relevance.
Make no mistake about it. The volatility on the first two screens contributes to the risks we see on the policy screen. And the rest of the world is watching the show. Foreign actors monitor — and often misinterpret — America’s internal disarray. They also act on those (mis)perceptions. Some of them also try to meddle in our election through disinformation and other methods, partly as payback for a long history of U.S. interference in the internal affairs of other countries.
Thus, we see U.S. allies, foes and those in the vast grey middle alike hedging their strategic bets, testing the envelope, not knowing which version of America will emerge: isolationist, liberal interventionist or something new? The policy whiplash from Bush-Cheney to Obama to Trump to the current Biden interregnum has left U.S. predictability is in tatters. The central questions now are whether and how credibility can be restored in a significantly changing world.
To do so, the US must define and pursue sustainable long-term policies based on a hard-headed assessment of national interests as opposed to abstract values alone. As other analysts have argued, an effective rethink will require a revival of the principled pragmatism of George Kennan who counseled the U.S. “to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming” in favor of “our immediate national objectives.”
The Democrats have no monopoly on wisdom on these policy issues. And, in fairness, Trump has raised numerous valid policy questions about the way the U.S. wields power in the world and minds its own affairs. Indeed, Trump’s unexpected rise within the Republican party in 2016 was based on impertinent takedowns of the post-9/11 Bush-Cheney doctrine as well as the globalist neoliberal ideology espoused by Wall Street masters of the universe. Trump, however, almost always fails to answer convincingly the strategic questions he might justifiably pose. Thus, the messenger taints the message, further crippling our national deliberation.
A meaningful strategic reckoning will include the following three elements:
First, we need a revival of robust diplomacy backed up by the judicious use of power. Perhaps as a result of the insouciant post-Cold War triumphalism of the Clinton-Gore Administration (in which I served) and the go-it-alone bravado of the Bush-Cheney Administration, the U.S. State Department has evolved into an agency that prefers to speak only with friends, allies and mentees. Senior officials who dare to open channels of dialogue with dangerous U.S. adversaries risk professional banishment.
The U.S. is unilaterally and unnecessarily surrendering its considerable advantages in diplomatic knowhow and prowess. Today almost anybody who advocates for conflict resolution through diplomacy is liable to be labeled an appeaser. We are weaker for it.
Every attempt at negotiation is not a repeat of “Munich,” referring to Chamberlain’s failed strategy of appeasement of Hitler or “Yalta,” referring to FDR and Churchill’s supposed betrayal of Eastern Europe. The U.S. should embrace not forget its skills and experience at diplomacy with difficult adversaries.
On the Korean Peninsula , where U.S. forces were direct combatants – my father served in the U.S. Army under General Douglas MacArthur — we negotiated a ceasefire that has held since 1952, allowing our ally South Korea gradually to emerge from dictatorship to democratic prosperity.
Under Nixon, the U.S. was the architect of the “one China” formula to keep the peace across the Strait and allow Taiwan to emerge from dictatorship to democratic prosperity over decades, yet now Washington hawks recklessly promote Taiwan’s declaratory independence, baiting conflict with an irritable and irredentist Beijing.
At Dayton in 1995, the U.S. and Europeans and Russia negotiated with a triumvirate of Yugoslav war criminals to stop the massive killing in Bosnia and put in place a peace plan that has largely held in the Balkans since then.
These historic U.S.-led deals were all imperfect diplomatic solutions based on pragmatic compromise and prudence, both of which are moral virtues in a policy universe of suboptimal choices and necessary tradeoffs like the one we inhabit. Our key interlocutors in all those situations were not nice people.
Second, a strong dose of unsentimental historical perspective in place of political correctness and self-righteous moralizing. This requires knowledge of history – yes, context matters — and encouragement of open debate.
Obama, who was probably the most perceptive internationalist to occupy the White House in recent times, once commented: “We are a superpower, and we do not fully appreciate the degree to which, when we move, the world shakes… Our circumstances have allowed us to be ahistorical. But one of the striking things when you get outside the United States is—Faulkner’s old saying, ‘The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.’ . . . People remember things that happened six hundred years ago. And they are alive and active in their politics.” The circumstances of America’s ahistoricism may have expired.
Ideological rigidity comes in many forms. The 9-11 Commission identified “group think” as a major contributing cause of the intelligence failure. That problem has metastasized. Not since the McCarthy era has doctrinaire pablum quashed critical thinking and robust policy debate as it does today among the national security elite and pundit class.
A corollary of historical perspective is awareness that buying time can be strategic and that containment is often better than confrontation. “Give me liberty or give me death” is a heroic sentiment but can be a lousy national security strategy. In a contentious world, “die another day” is not a bad maxim for life or for foreign policy.
A third and most difficult mental challenge is that the U.S. will need to accept a new type of multilateralism if it hopes to enjoy a bigger role in reshaping it. To rebuild credibility and effectiveness in a crowded world of cultural differences with a flatter distribution of hybrid power, the U.S. must embrace multilateralism that is both more multipolar and more multicultural.
After the end of the Cold War, the U.S. was intellectually spoiled by a period of essentially unipolar multilateralism in which “the rules-based international order” looked suspiciously like the rule of America’s law. The U.S. habit of imposing the latest evolution of its own legal norms on other countries, typically via financial sanctions and conditionality, while at the same time exempting itself from multilateral treaties such as the International Criminal Court and the Law of the Sea, is a telltale sign of policy solipsism. It represents “our way,” meritorious as it may be, masquerading as universalism. The best that can be said of this foreign policy strategy is that it was viable as long as we could get away with it.
Foreign accusations of U.S. unilateralism are often self-serving but they also represent the flip side of America’s self-appointed “exceptionalism” touted by the liberals and hawks alike. Evidence suggests the hegemonic post-Cold War moment has run its course. The U.S. should get more used to the ways of reciprocity and mutuality: a world where “sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.”
Yet this need not be the end of American leadership. It’s late in the day for a foreign policy reckoning, but not too late. The good news is that there are inchoate stirrings in both the Democratic and Republican camps (for example, see here and here), which admittedly are not monolithic. However, in the current environment of bitter national polarization, it is unclear whether and how something like a new cross-partisan consensus on durable approaches to national security can be achieved. The next president must strive for it.
The alternative to articulation of a coherent U.S. leadership vision adapted to “the world as it is” will be further descent into domestic disillusionment and international anarchy. That outcome is unequivocally not in the U.S. national interest.
Again, the three screens of America’s ongoing reality tv drama are interlinked. Continued foreign policy drift will lead to more discontent at home. Equally, avoidance of impending election and post-election chaos at home is the necessary, but not sufficient, condition for our forward progress on the wider policy front. And Trump and Harris are the only two choices left on the menu.
To steer away from impending disasters, we will need multidisciplinary insight and bold leadership willing to change directions. The same goes for other major world powers, whom we may influence but do not control. To borrow from futurist Yuval Harari, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the stakes in the current complex nexus of political and policy challenges are existential.