Unlikely US strategic consensus is forming over China
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Despite both being seen as decent men, US Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower came to heartily dislike one another. Spurning Truman’s offer to succeed him as the Democratic nominee for president in 1952, Eisenhower went on to secure the presidency that year running as a Republican. As if that were not bad enough, Truman was aggrieved that, in not directly standing up to Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s demagogic and utterly unfounded efforts to blacken the name of George C. Marshall — former secretary of state and, as US military chief of staff, the organizer of America’s victory in the Second World War — Eisenhower had allowed the country’s greatest statesman to be unjustly humiliated. While Eisenhower went on to help secure McCarthy’s witch-hunting downfall from behind the scenes, Truman never forgave him for not more publicly defending Marshall, the man who was his personal idol and who had made Eisenhower’s glittering military career possible.
But all this bad blood did not prevent these two highly successful presidents from jointly securing one of the great political-strategic successes of all time: The domestic political adoption of the containment doctrine as America’s guiding path throughout the long Cold War between America and the Soviet Union from 1947-1991. As a Democratic centrist, Truman saw off the leftist strategic option embodied by former Vice President Henry Wallace, who advocated appeasing Joseph Stalin and doing nothing to secure Western Europe (let alone the rest of the world) from communist domination. At the same time, the center-right Eisenhower saw off the far-right views of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who advocated a militaristic rollback of communist gains around the world, even if tactical nuclear weapons would need to be deployed.
Instead, despite their personal animus, Truman and Eisenhower jointly championed the containment doctrine, which called for the West to engage in a political conflict with communism, while drawing clear red lines around the world (such as in Berlin and through the NATO treaty) that the US would defend from Soviet encroachment. Eschewing direct military confrontation with the Soviet Union (to the dismay of the far right), the US at the same time committed itself to a geopolitical competition with the USSR (to the frustration of the far left). This moderate domestic political consensus amazingly held over the next 45 years, making a lie of the notion that democracies could not sustain a coherent foreign policy over time. In the end, the Truman-Eisenhower nexus was crowned with the incredible victory that the Soviet Union dissolved, while the world avoided direct superpower confrontation.
Ironically, Biden finds himself reinforcing, and not overturning, Trump’s China policy.
Dr. John C. Hulsman
Don’t look now, but a similar domestic-strategic process seems to be at work in America concerning how to handle America’s new primary geopolitical rival, China. Despite heartily disliking one another, Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden have begun the process of forging a new foreign policy consensus.
In terms of being the first major American political figure identifying China as a dangerous and rising rival to the US, Trump will surely be lauded by history; in fact, this will likely be seen as his most significant accomplishment. Before Trump, America’s bipartisan foreign policy commentariat was settled around the utterly erroneous notion that the rise of China was likely to be benign and should be encouraged, as Beijing was certain to become a more status quo power and more pro-American as it became richer.
Then in the wilderness, Trump was one of the few voices warning the opposite. China’s rise would not make it a pillar of the present order, but instead, as a rising global power, it would seek to remake the American-dominated world. It is a measure of Trump’s success over this one central geostrategic insight that he leaves behind a Washington where both parties are united — over this, if nothing else — in seeing the rise of China as a direct challenge to the US and the world order it has created.
Now, ironically, Biden finds himself reinforcing, and not overturning, Trump’s China policy, with the critical added tactical innovation of seeing this primary geostrategic contest in terms of cultivating allies as a means to geostrategic victory. Whereas Trump was all too often crudely transactional in terms of foreign policy — alienating the very allies that provide the US with an invaluable strategic edge over largely friendless China — Biden has gone out of his way to cultivate great powers Japan, India and the Anglosphere to see off Chinese expansionism in the Indo-Pacific region.
Just this past week, at the first ever leaders’ summit of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (The Quad) — a nascent anti-China strategic grouping in Asia comprising the US, India, Australia and Japan — Biden broadened its agenda to include vaccine production, as well as the more usual strategic calls for freedom of the seas. In doing so, Biden is deepening the Quad’s agenda as it evolves into a nascent NATO.
While it is very early in the process, what is happening is clear. As was true for Truman and Eisenhower, once again two US presidents who heartily disapprove of one another are forging the domestic political basis to a geopolitical agreement over how to deal with America’s primary superpower rival that seems bound to stand the test of time.
• Dr. John C. Hulsman is the president and managing partner of John C. Hulsman Enterprises, a prominent global political risk consulting firm. He is also senior columnist for City AM, the newspaper of the City of London. He can be contacted via chartwellspeakers.com.
