This week’s readings led me to revisit several pieces by Ambassador Bill Burns, former State Department official and current president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Though it was published over a month ago, Burns’ recent article in The Atlantic “The U.S. Needs a New Foreign Policy” dovetails nicely on some of the ideas he expressed in his Foreign Affairs piece we read for this week. That piece underscored the need for reinvestment, rebuilding, and reform in U.S. diplomacy and the State Department specifically.
In this newer piece, Burns discusses the future of U.S. foreign policy and describes three separate paths the United States might pursue in world affairs: retrenchment, restoration, and reinvention. Burns describes retrenchment as a less radical, more strategic take on the current administration’s foreign policy approach, which would mean “narrowing our concept of vital interests, sharply reducing global military deployments, shedding outdated alliances, and reining in our missionary zeal for democracy-building abroad.” Meanwhile, Burns describes restoration as a renewed commitment to robust U.S. global leadership in the post-Trump era, given that “it continues to have the world’s strongest military, most influential economy, most expansive alliance system, and most potent soft power.” But the strategy Burns ultimately recommends is reinvention in U.S. foreign policy. He says this is the middle path that strikes “a balance between [U.S.] ambitions and limitations.”
Ultimately, Burns’ concept of reinvention sounds to me like smart retrenchment. Burns says reinvention will mean recommitting to multilateralism in acknowledgement that the era of the U.S. as lone global superpower has ended. It will mean thoughtfully managing our alliances and competition with rising global powers. Reinvention has a very nice ring to it (it’s a word he used an awful lot in his State Department piece) but I’m not sure I see how it is meaningfully different than retrenchment at the end of the day.
Burns also says that rebuilding the middle class in the United States will be key to the reinvention of U.S. foreign policy. This discussion echoes some of the ideas in his Foreign Affairs piece in which he made the (very important) point that the State Department would do well to highlight the economic and commercial work it does overseas and focus on explaining how that work benefits workers and communities in the United States. Connecting foreign policy objectives to prosperity at home is absolutely critical.
Thanks, Shana, for this thoughtful and interesting blog post. Burns was one of the premier US diplomats of the past decade, and it was a great loss when he left the Foreign Service. The options he laid out in his piece seem reasonable to me, and they do capture the options. I would hope that he will be called upon to serve on the State Department transition team if Biden wins.
Clearly, after the disastrous leadership of Mike Pompeo, the State Department and US foreign policy are in severe disarray. Hundreds of highly qualified diplomats have left (or were driven out of) the Foreign Service. It’s going to take years to re-build this capability. But first, as Burns suggests, we need an underlying strategy. –Professor Wallerstein