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| Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio attend a bilateral meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in Germany. (Leah Millis/Reuters) |
| A bit more than half a decade ago, a curious phrase arose from discussions of Chinese foreign policy. A cohort among Beijing’s long-colorless diplomatic corps had started taking a different approach to their work, pushing back against any criticism of China in public forums, especially on social media. Their sarcasm and anger was a reflection of a more emboldened Asian power, eager to assert itself on the world stage and less tolerant of foreign censure and moralizing. These diplomats were called “wolf warriors,” a term that had entered the discourse via popular Chinese blockbusters that depicted brave Chinese peacekeepers saving the day in far-flung locales, no matter the designs of perfidious Westerners. “A prominent feature of wolf warrior diplomacy was its emphasis on divisions between ‘us’ and ‘them,’” wrote political scientist Tyler Jost in a Foreign Affairs essay last year. “Chinese diplomats characterized foreign officials as hypocritical, unvirtuous, or irrational compared with Chinese leaders, who exhibited consistency, moral rectitude, and common sense.”
Jost continued: “In June 2021, for instance, the Chinese ambassador to France said that he was ‘honored’ to be called a wolf warrior and he commented that such diplomats were simply protecting China from ‘mad dogs’ — the country’s critics abroad.” The motivating impulse behind China’s wolf warrior diplomacy was a sense of both geopolitical grievance and bullishness, animated, as Chinese officials insisted in private, by genuine nationalist sentiments at home. In some instances, Chinese diplomats scolded governments in smaller countries, showcasing the growing arrogance of a budding superpower. In others, midranking officials took conspicuous potshots at the West: consider when China’s deputy ambassador in Pakistan got into a Twitter spat over gun violence and racism in the United States. But it wasn’t effective diplomacy. The term wolf warrior itself quickly assumed pejorative connotations outside China and the behavior of these pugilistic envoys seemed to remind publics elsewhere of the rough edges of the world’s most powerful authoritarian regime. That streak of belligerence seemed to subside as Beijing tried to turn the page in the aftermath of the pandemic, though notable wolf warriors remain in prominent diplomatic postings.
Now, it’s the United States’ turn for some wolf warring. At home, President Donald Trump’s allies are gutting the federal government at an astonishing pace. And abroad, his administration is dramatically reorienting the uses of the country’s diplomatic clout, initiating cuts that endanger major pillars of the international humanitarian system while casting doubt on Washington’s commitment to its traditional allies. For Trump and his deputies, the aggressive moves — which include threatening trade wars on neighbors and seemingly bypassing European concerns in negotiations with the Kremlin over the war in Ukraine — are part of a necessary rebalancing of the international system. Not unlike China’s wolf warriors, who bridled at perceived plots to undermine Chinese influence, they believe the United States has been treated unfairly by other powers and deserves to get its due, even if that means ruffling the feathers of friends. Trump’s wolf warriors are an in-your-face reminder of the radically ideological bent of the new administration. One prominent White House envoy reportedly sought to pressure Romania to exercise leniency during the criminal proceedings of the Tate brothers, a duo of popular far-right influencers accused of human trafficking and other crimes. And during his speech at this past weekend’s Munich Security Conference, Vice President JD Vance cast Europe’s liberal establishment as a greater political threat than Russia and China. The audience in Munich widely interpreted his remarks to be a sop for Vance’s right-wing base at home and online, and far-right allies on the continent. It was “a fascist, anti-European speech,” one diplomat told French daily Le Monde. As Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman put it, Vance engaged in Soviet-style “whataboutism,” lecturing Europeans about their speech-stifling censorship laws while glossing over the combative moves taken by the Trump administration at home and “the looming betrayal” of Kyiv at the negotiating table. “Trump attempted to overthrow the 2020 U.S. presidential election. And his vice president presumes to lecture Europeans about respect for democracy?” Rachman asked, before declaring: “It is clear that the U.S. can no longer be regarded as a reliable ally for the Europeans.” Singapore’s Defense Minister Ng Eng Hen, speaking at a session in Munich, suggested that, under Trump, the United States’ “moral legitimacy” in Asia could be waning. Trump’s transactionalism and seeming desire to strong-arm partners into making the concessions of vassal states is a blow to U.S. soft power. “The image has changed from liberator to great disrupter to a landlord seeking rent,” he said. As was the case for China, the strategic benefits of American wolf warriorism are not that clear. Trump’s foreign policy aides “see themselves as realists, but just because you’re a realist doesn’t mean you don’t have allies,” Richard Stengel, a former undersecretary of state in the Obama administration, told me. “Realism doesn’t mean going it alone. It’s a very short-termist version of foreign policy, a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately foreign policy.” Stengel — a former editor in chief of Time magazine (where, full disclosure, I worked over a decade ago) — ran public diplomacy at the State Department. The official holding an acting position in that same role now is Darren Beattie, a full-fledged MAGA nationalist who was terminated from his speechwriting job in the first Trump administration after it emerged that he attended a conference alongside well-known white supremacists. He doesn’t appear that chastened: In October, he posted on social media that “competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.” According to a report in Semafor, the Trump White House has tapped Sarah Rogers, a New York lawyer who has defended the National Rifle Association and sued against online content moderation, for the role full time, with Beattie unlikely to get confirmed by the Senate. The pick is in keeping with the administration’s narrower view of American interests and values in the international arena. But Trump’s broader approach, including his apparent neo-imperialist desire to claim Greenland, may be a political gift to countries like Russia and China, whose officials have long called out U.S. hypocrisy and hegemony on the world stage. “With each statement by Trump that degrades the principle that territorial boundaries must not be redrawn by force or coercion, propagandists in Beijing likely are giving each other high-fives,” Ryan Hass, a China and Taiwan expert at the Brookings Institution, told my colleagues. Away from the online skirmishes of its wolf warriors, China is in the midst of a sprawling global project of soft power expansion, including massive investments in both physical and digital infrastructure around the world. China’s “argument, in an existential way, is that liberal democracy is not the best engine for prosperity and happiness in society, so don’t embrace it,” Stengel told me. “Be more like us, our system is better — that’s what their public diplomacy is about.” Trump and his wolf warriors, meanwhile, don’t seem interested in offering a counterargument. | ||||||||||||