【明報文章】With Donald Trump’s return to presidency, the United states’ foreign policy is amid its transformational shift. The US is trying to get rid of geopolitical distractions such as war in Ukraine and the Middle East and shift its full attention to the Indo-Pacific region.
Nowadays Trump is doing what his predecessors likewise aspired to achieve but each was unable to do because of recurrent crises across Eurasia. Under George W. Bush it was the war on terror, under his successors – Ukraine and smaller crises in the Middle East. Each administration recognized that the major geopolitical battle of 21st century will be unfolding in the Indo-Pacific region where the rise of China transformed the very foundation of post-Cold War geopolitics. Therefore, for Washington, or so the argument goes, it would be essential to shift fully its attention to this theater.
The problem however is that the US cannot abandon the European theater. Surely, the disagreements between Washington and its allies in the Old Continent are increasingly palpable and there seems to be a genuine belief in the EU that security guarantees provided by the US are no longer as credible as before. Nevertheless, the North America and the European continent are bound by geography and any major disturbance to Europe will have direct ramifications for the security of the United States.
Thus Washington has two critical theaters to deal with: one in Europe and another in the Indo-Pacific region. To this should be added a third one – the Middle East – where the US fears that the Islamic Republic of Iran could eventually build a Irano-centric order. The Middle East is obviously of lesser strategic importance to the US than Europe or the Indo-Pacific region, but the real dilemma for Washington is how to maintain security in these regions without losing its primacy in the world.
Hence comes the idea of pushing America’s allies to take on greater responsibility for their own defense. This has been the case during Barack Obama, Trump’s first term, and even Joe Biden’s presidency, while under Trump’s second term the trend has merely become more pronounced.
In other words, the world is witnessing the rise of a retrenched America. It is not an outright isolationism as in the interconnected world the US won’t be able to shut itself from what is happening on other continents. Instead, the US will interfere where it feels necessary and important to its interests. These interventions might be military, economic and simply diplomatic, but they will be increasingly chaotic not fitting into any system under which the US had pursued its foreign policy throughout the past decades.
This policy also means the end of liberal internationalism and dawn of what could be referred to as a deregulated world order where spheres of influence will be a new norm. Relatedely, the new system would also resemble a multipolar order essentially built around several major actors which beyond China, the EU, the US, and Russia would also include South-East Asia, perhaps Brasil and a few other smaller but important countries. In other words, the new order will be the one dominated by bigger states.
If the retrenchment of the United States might be a new phenomenon, the fundamental shifts in America’s foreign policy are not. More than a century ago, the US withdrew from Europe following the end of the World War I. This was a major change back then. Yet the US was not much entangled in early 20th century Europe and the rest of the world. In a way, the return to isolation after 1919 was a logical step.
What happens presently in the foreign policy of the United States, however, is qualitatively much more different in its scope and perhaps even longevity. The turn toward the Indo-Pacific is now in full swing. With concessions toward Moscow over Ukraine, the US hopes to have Russia limit its pivot to Asia. Would this also involve Russia distancing itself from China is far from clear. After all, Moscow and Beijing have built highly close type of relations which ended relative distrust which persisted in their bilateral ties since the Cold War period. Therefore, though the US now looks increasingly toward the Indo-Pacific, it is far froom clear that the containment of China would be successful.
Emil Avdaliani is a professor of international relations at the European University in Tbilisi, Georgia, and a scholar of Silk Roads. He can be reached on Twitter/X at @emilavdaliani.
