by Jonathan Movroydis
In this interview, Michael Auslin, the Payson R. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow in contemporary Asia, discussed the publication of America in the World 2020, a new special edition of the Great Decisions book series, published by the Foreign Policy Association (FPA). The volume of essays, coedited by Auslin and Noel V. Lateef, FPA president, is directed towards informing citizens about US foreign policy and features contributions by eleven Hoover fellows.
Auslin also provides insight on current geopolitical trends throughout the world, especially those shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic, and how US policy makers can best be prepared to mitigate future crises and secure American prosperity.
What is the Great Decisions publication, and how did you come to be involved in its special report, America in the World 2020?
Great Decisions is an annual publication by the Foreign Policy Association in New York, which was founded in early 1918, a year before the Hoover Institution. The primary goal of the publication is to inform American citizens about foreign affairs.
I got involved because one of our Hoover overseers, Henry Fernandez, is also the chairman of the board of the Foreign Policy Association. He thought that it would be a unique opportunity for Hoover scholars to be able to reach out to the FPA’s broad-based community of informed citizens via its Great Decisions publication. Unlike Hoover, FPA is not a think tank and relies on a network of scholars outside its organization. Hoover, of course, has a world-renowned fellowship of experts in several policy areas.
Tom Gilligan, former Hoover Institution director, approached me to be the fellow lead, asking me if I would work with Noel Lateef, president of the Foreign Policy Association. After some discussion, I proposed that we do a special edition of Great Decisions timed to the election, and that it should be focused on the great foreign policy challenges facing the next administration.
We started this project months ago, even before the spread of COVID-19 and subsequent lockdowns. Initially, we had no idea that there’d be a lockdown. We obviously had no idea who would be elected, let alone who the Democratic candidate would be. We had hoped to do a series of public events, both at Hoover and in New York, along with some roundtables, and unfortunately, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, these programs weren’t able to take place. But we did decide that we would produce a special edition of Great Decisions about key foreign policy challenges, and I asked eleven of my Hoover colleagues to write essays. We divided the essays into two different categories, one country specific and the other focused on policy areas.
For example, Niall Ferguson wrote an essay about major geopolitical issues, including the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Mike McFaul produced one about Russia. Larry Diamond wrote about promoting democracy, and H. R. McMaster covered the Middle East. Admiral Jim Ellis wrote about cybersecurity, and Elizabeth Economy discussed US policy toward China. So, we tried to divide it roughly between specific countries that present a challenge to the incoming administration and then also policy themes.
There is a total of 27 essays in the volume. They are short and designed to spark debate and discussion in informal citizen discussions on foreign affairs.
What are the major foreign policy issues confronting the new administration?
Clearly there are many legacy problems, including terrorism in the Middle East, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and the growing cyber capabilities of our adversaries. There are also some questions that will soon demand answers. For example, would a Biden administration undo Trump’s China policy, which broke from a forty-year pattern of engagement with Beijing? Obviously, because of what happened this year, we have a chapter on pandemics and global health from Lucy Shapiro, a scientist and Hoover senior fellow. Public health has always been an important policy issue, but we haven't had a global pandemic in one hundred years. Governments will be extraordinarily focused on managing this public health crisis moving forward. We now understand that an integrated world has enormous vulnerabilities and risks for individual countries, and we will have to figure out how to protect ourselves and prevent future pandemics.
In his piece, Niall Ferguson captures the broad shifts in geopolitics that are shaping the globe. Victor Davis Hanson ties these major issues together and says that the US should develop policies that build upon its strategic advantages. Almost all of the essays have specific policy prescriptions. Russell Berman, for example, describes policy implications for the US in light of the European Union’s economic and political challenges and debates over the future of the NATO alliance.
You mentioned that globalization poses enormous risks to individual countries. What factors should the United States consider when protecting its national interests while also remaining globally engaged?
That's a huge question. We now know that globalization causes vulnerabilities. We should have been better aware, but the COVID-19 pandemic really amplified the risks of globalization. The longstanding belief was that globalization was hugely beneficial to a nation, because it diversified supply chains, markets, sources of raw materials, and capital investment. This is accurate. An integrated world economy has enabled countries to modernize and move up the value chain. Look at the way we build airplanes today. We don’t build them all in the United States. The wings come from Japan and the engines are built in the United Kingdom, for example. Thus, everyone gets a slice of the pie.
We thought globalization allowed countries and firms to deal better with uncertainties, failures, unexpected shortfalls, and the like. However, we should have realized that by opening up to the world so much, we would make ourselves more vulnerable in ways that we haven’t been before. The pandemic started in Wuhan, a very interior city in China, a city that many Americans don't visit. Yet, because of the way China is integrated in the economies of nearly every country in the world, in the space of just a couple of months, the disease spread all over the world.
I don't think we'll make the same mistake twice. And of course the question is, how quickly do you shut down borders to prevent the spread of pandemics? Traditionally, we have never shut down the borders to people. Moving forward, I think that's going to be the first thing our leaders will do. We had never tried to shut down the economy. This will continue to be a contentious matter of debate.
Globalization has reshaped the way we produce, distribute, and receive goods. All of that has of course made products far more affordable for average consumers, yet we now recognize that there are enormous costs of globalization as well. So, we have to consider the degree to which we accept certain economic inefficiencies, such as higher prices or slower production times, in order to protect against a disease like COVID-19.
You write that profound geopolitical shifts are taking place throughout the world. What are those shifts?
I think the beginning shifts are immediately understandable. Proof is what I just mentioned. We will likely start producing more essential goods such as medicine and personal protective equipment at home.
At the beginning of the pandemic, it turns out that China bought over two billion pieces of personal protective equipment from around the world, including the United States. At the same time, American exchange organizations and companies, seeing a pandemic in China, were also shipping personal protective equipment for the Chinese people.
This was all done at a time when China was lying about the nature of this pandemic and communicating to the world that it could not be passed between humans. The fact is that it can be passed through the air to humans. If we had known that, we would have recognized that we were at risk. In a period where we felt we weren't at risk, but Chinese authorities understood the gravity of the disease, they basically stripped the world of personal protective equipment. When the pandemic came to the United States, we didn’t have a sufficient supply of masks. People were told to make masks out of bandannas. It was absolutely catastrophic. We didn't have personal protective equipment like gloves or gowns, and we weren't making respirators.
China was shutting down before the rest of the world and therefore affecting production timelines. China had essentially nationalized the production of personal protective equipment that was being made by US companies. 3M, for example, could not ship masks and other PPE to America from China, because they could not obtain an export license from Beijing.
We're seeing that large portions of this type of production need to be brought back to the United States. During the H1N1 flu pandemic of 2009, which infected far more people but was much less deadly, huge stocks of our national emergency–stockpiled medical equipment were drawn down but were not replenished by either the Obama or Trump administrations. This can’t be allowed to happen again. I think governments will now focus on building up their strategic supply stocks.
What also came to light during this crisis is that the US does not produce the majority of its medicines domestically. We don’t make our aspirins, ibuprofens, or blood pressure and diabetes medicine. Production has been offshored to China and India. In the near future, we’re going to see the onshoring of medicine manufacture.
The second step is not necessarily to say we have to make it all at home, but our supply chains will need to shift and diversify toward multiple countries. We couldn’t get masks made in Japan or Korea or Vietnam. Taiwan made some masks, but relatively few, even though they were extremely high quality. And everybody wants to get masks made in Taiwan versus those made in China.
Many companies across multiple fields have realized that they were held hostage to Chinese supply chains, and if China was having this outbreak and the Chinese factories were shutting down, then they wouldn’t be assured of receiving their own manufactured goods delivered to the United States.
Countries like Japan, under the former prime minister Shinzo Abe, started billion-dollar funds to bring Japanese companies away from China back home or to other parts of Asia. They relocated these companies to Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and other countries. This trend started during the US-China trade war, because China was becoming a more expensive and less competitive place to conduct business.
What is the current status of the US-China bilateral relationship, and what is the best course that US policy makers can take moving forward?
The relationship is at a low point. It's bad mostly because of the pandemic, but it has been worsening for years, thanks to the PRC’s [People’s Republic of China’s] increasingly predatory behavior. It's bad right now because Beijing reacted to the COVID-19 by claiming that the virus was actually manufactured in America. It’s bad because Beijing intimidated other countries and shipped garbage materials to the rest of the world. But the relationship had already been strained by the trade war. I think Trump’s policies against China are more a symptom than a cause. The world is recognizing that the bet that bringing China into the global economy would cause it to liberalize was no longer tenable. In the past, we would simply ignore all the ways in which China was taking advantage and abusing our open societies, stealing intellectual property and private information of Americans, dumping goods, driving competitors out of markets, and unfairly boosting companies with state subsidies.
We essentially made a deal that strengthened China to a degree that it could hollow out the American heartland, threaten its neighbors, and upend the balance of power in Asia.
All of these issues coalesced under Trump, but they were given further fuel by COVID-19. A Biden administration is going to have to decide how it will approach China. The worst thing the US can do is to go back to business as usual. That will give Beijing a message that it can now act with impunity and that it has withstood the worst from Washington. On the other hand, no one is talking about complete decoupling from China. I’ve described a strategic decoupling, but now the incoming administration is going to have to figure out how to reduce these vulnerabilities and support allies against an aggressive China.
Tell us about the Hoover virtual series associated with the publication of America in the World 2020.
We have a three-part webinar featuring Hoover fellows, which cover nine essays that they wrote for America in the World 2020. They are all available at Hoover.org.
Sometimes new presidential administrations maintain the same broad goals as their predecessors, but the tactics change. Sometimes there are strategic changes. We don’t know what path the Biden administration will take, and so this is an opportunity for our Hoover colleagues who are experts in foreign policy to provide analysis about major global issues. We're going to try to produce all the essays in digital form in order to reach a wider Hoover audience. Our hope is that this special report does exactly what Hoover does all the time, which is spark a public debate over the best way forward in a very challenging international environment.
