Mark Toner answers questions during the State Department’s daily press briefing in Washington © Getty
Anne-Marie Slaughter and Richard Haass, both distinguished foreign policy practitioners who served in different US administrations as director of policy planning at the State Department, would have largely completed their most recent books when Americans went to the polls to vote for a new president last year. In happier times The Chessboard and the Web and A World in Disarray might have been taken as extended application letters for senior posts under either Hillary Clinton or a mainstream Republican. Yet by the summer, the second of these outcomes was no longer a possibility; by the morning of November 9, Slaughter and Haass must have recognised that the world they had been writing for had not in fact come to pass.
A week is a long time in politics, so the adage goes, but it is barely the blink of an eye in publishing. As a result, we can read these books in two ways: as memento mori from an era of relatively collaborative US foreign policymaking that is gone for now; and for some faint trace of antecedent or explanation for the emerging America First policies of President Donald Trump.
The latter finds some echo in Haass’s analysis. A veteran of George W Bush’s State Department who is now president of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) think-tank, Haass does believe that the antidote to the Obama years is a more decisive US leadership that hues closer to national self-interest. However, his vision does not come close to the prescriptions for Mexico and its wall, the Middle East, China, Russia or Nato that Trump and those around him embrace. Trump has started from the same place as his predecessor, with a recognition of some relative decline; but whereas Barack Obama sought to respond to this with caution towards overseas entanglements and a preference for multilateral solutions, Trump proposes a reassertion of American might combined with sharply narrowing engagement to where US national interests are directly at stake.
Haass accepts the reality of a more co-operative international system in which US dominance can no longer be taken for granted. He argues that America’s influence depends on putting its own house in order and, among other steps, reducing its national debt. Although his book might well enjoy the approval of the new secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, or other more establishment voices in the cabinet and Congress, its strategic and indeed fiscal moderation will receive no such welcome in today’s wheeler-dealing White House.
Slaughter, who served in the Obama administration and now runs New America, a progressive think-tank, would be hard-pressed to find any corner of Trump’s Washington where there is sympathy for her thesis of a people-centred and networked world. She writes that “just as the Digital Age subsumes the Industrial Age, so must a grand strategy for our world operate both on the chessboard and in the web. It must acknowledge the state-based international order even as it makes room for a people-based order.”
Where Slaughter is fundamentally at odds with the new Washington is in her belief that foreign policy is not a zero-sum game. For her, politics is more than a bilateral tussle over trade or security. Indeed, a book that would have once been unremarkable now reads like a brave tribute to the idea that international co-operation can be a win-win proposition. She argues her case from both an extensive review of the literature and her own experience in government, citing examples such as the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change.
Until last November, ideas such as these stood in the mainstream of US foreign policy thinking. It was common orthodoxy that networks linked by interest or conviction and often centred around platforms such as the United Nations were supplementing or even replacing traditional inter-state diplomacy with its more competitive — or chessboard-like — character.
Trump has changed all that. Now the zero-summers have it — and reading both books, one is left wondering how long it will be before their authors’ common sense approach returns to fashion. Instead, allies and foes alike are bracing for more disruptions in foreign policy as the new administration grapples with unforced errors of its own making.
Perhaps reason will ultimately prevail. Trump is evidently struggling to impose his direction on a Republican national security mainstream. But the vote of no-confidence that elections in many countries, not just in the US, are delivering on globalisation suggests that Trumpism may well outlast Trump. Less erratic standard-bearers of nationalism seem likely to make this a long-term re-ordering of political alignments across the west. If that is so, zero-sum foreign policy is here to stay.
There has long been a certain complacency in the US foreign policy community that, with hindsight, left it exposed to a fall such as this. Traces can be seen in both books. The litany of failures is long: the Middle East, notably the catastrophe of Syria and the sorry mess of Iraq and Libya; the inability to contain or engage Russia; unbalanced trade and geopolitical relations with China and Asia more generally. Such disarray hardly called for the incremental, rather self-satisfied solutions of Obama’s Washington, or Clinton’s promise of essentially more of the same. Trump may not have the answers but he was asking questions that many Americans evidently felt needed raising.
As a consequence America, and hence the world, has stumbled into a moment of great uncertainty. However ephemeral Trump’s presidency proves, we may have a long wait before the assumptions of Slaughter and Haass about a collaborative global order look mainstream again. The publishing cycle has become a lifetime, it seems, in foreign affairs.
The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Networked World, by Anne-Marie Slaughter, Yale University Press, RRP£18.99/$26, 304 pages
A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order, by Richard Haass, Penguin Press, RRP£21.99/$28, 352 pages
Lord Malloch-Brown is a former deputy secretary-general of the United Nations
Photograph: Getty Images
