TPI Replay: The Case for Liberal Realism, With Charles A. Kupchan
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Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, Director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is The Case for Liberal Realism. With me to discuss whether and how the United States should adapt its foreign policy to a changing international environment that includes the return of great power competition is Charles Kupchan.

Charlie is a senior fellow at the Council and a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University. He has held several positions in the U.S. government, including from 2014 to 2017, when he served as special assistant to the president and senior director for European affairs on the staff of the National Security Council under President Barack Obama.

Charlie's most recent book is Isolationism, A History of America's Efforts to Shield Itself from the World. This episode of The President's Inbox is the third in my series on U.S. grand strategy. Charlie, thank you for joining me. Jim, very glad to be with you.

As I mentioned just moments ago, ours is a discussion that is part of a series on different perspectives on what U.S. grand strategy should be. So perhaps we should start out with a basic question. How do you define the term grand strategy?

Grand strategy for me is the intellectual architecture that policymakers use, or at least should use, to guide statecraft. You could also think about it as a blueprint. What does your map of the world look like as you go about the task of trying to strike a balance between

strategic ends and economic, military, and political means. The grand strategy is really about the application of available means to desirable ends. And you bring to the table as you try to keep ends and means in balance, a set of conceptual or guiding suppositions that inform how you think the world works, where the main fault lines are,

And what are the foundations, if you will, that should be guiding statecraft? So I take it that you think grand strategy is a useful analytic concept and not, as I heard one person describe it, global baloney. Not only useful, Jim, I would say essential.

In the sense that, you know, if you're not bringing to the table a set of guiding assumptions or foundational principles, then you're just going by the seat of your pants. And it's always difficult to formulate statecraft and keep ends and means in balance because the world is a gnarly place. Countries are unpredictable.

That having been said, when you're sitting around a table trying to formulate how to respond to a crisis or how to achieve a long-term objective, you are much better off reading history, drawing on case studies, thinking about first and second principles than just going by the seat of the pants. My one caveat would be

in some ways, don't bring to the table the wrong grand strategy, because that can really upset the apple cart. And I think there are times in which you want to be very nimble in terms of grand strategy. That is to say, you don't want to impose on an unpredictable and a changing world a set of principles that may last only today and tomorrow.

Charlie, there's a lot there to dig into, but before we do that, I'd like to begin with you describing sort of the assumptions or approach you take to understanding the world. You are often described as being a foreign policy realist. I don't know if you agree with that label or not, but how do you see yourself and what are the assumptions you make as you begin to try to understand that, as you put it, gnarly world out there?

Yeah, I mean, I think that I do fall into the broad realist bucket. And that means I think that the most important force in the world is power.

And that when you think about statecraft, the first question that you ask is how many poles of power are there in the system? And what is the relationship among those poles of power? Unlike a structural realist, asking those questions only gets you so far. And that's why I'm a liberal realist.

And I like to throw in that adjective liberal, both for normative and analytic reasons. Normative reason is that I believe that realism is escapable.

That is to say, the default position in international politics is rivalry. It is a Habesian dog-eat-dog world. But we know from history that it is escapable. And that's because we see relationships that are not governed by the balance of power and realpolitik. Look at the relationship between the United States and Canada.

That's a very long land border that is completely undefended, except for a few guard dogs, immigration officers looking at passports. The U.S.-Europe relationship is more or less pacified.

right? The chance of Germany and France going to war again, very slim. And that's why I'm a liberal realist and not just a realist, but I remain a realist because I think that peace is difficult, that carving out space in which geopolitical competition is not rampant is hard to do, and it requires care and feeding.

And then analytically, I'm a liberal because I think variables other than the balance of power matter. I think domestic politics matter. When I think about U.S. foreign policy today, and I don't think you're going to disagree with me here, Jim, I think you've got to understand the partisan divide. You've got to understand the ideological difference between Democrats and Republicans.

Hard-boiled realists don't care about those kinds of ideological differences. So those are the two reasons I think I best describe myself as a liberal realist. Well, there's a lot there, Charlie. Let me just pick up on two things. One is that you talked about polls in the international system. And I think for people who haven't gone to graduate school or taken World Politics 101, we're essentially talking about the number of great powers or constellations of power blocs in

in the international system, correct? Yeah. A poll is really a polity, or in some cases, it may be a grouping that acts with sufficient heft and strength on the global stage that it shapes the nature of the international system. You might even think about it like billiard balls,

How many balls are on the table? Because that tells you a lot about what's going to happen when there's motion. And in general, in international relations, we think about three different kinds of systems. A unipolar system where there's only one kid on the block and therefore no real competition. A bipolar system, as there was during the Cold War, where there are two blocks or two billion balls and they butt heads.

and a multipolar system where there are three or more major actors. And we tend to think about multipolar systems as the most unstable and difficult to manage simply because there's a lot of stuff going on. One other question, Charlie, has to do with how you think about power. Is power simply about economics plus military power, or is it more complicated than that? I think the two fundamental things

aspects of power are the material ones, and they are economic strength and military strength. And we know from history that when a power becomes a great power economically, it eventually translates that economic strength into military strength.

There are other aspects of power. They are political power, which in my mind means the ability to extract resources, the nature of the polity, the political system, and ideological power. This might be what my friend and colleague Joe Nye calls soft power. And that is, do your ideas have

appeal? Are you able to win over and influence players, not just because you bring goods to the table, but because you bring ideals to the table that are attractive? So Charlie, how would you describe U.S. grand strategy over the eight decades after World War II? Was there a grand strategy? Were there grand strategies? Well, I think we've been through

two long periods in American grand strategy.

The first running from the founding era, 1789 until 1941. And I tend to look at that as the era of isolationism or the era of strategic detachment. The United States was deeply engaged in the world from the get-go economically, but it tended to avoid strategic commitments far from North America.

Certainly until 1898, Spanish-American War, but even after 1898, we returned to a more isolationist mindset during the interwar period. That all changes literally overnight, December 7, 1941. And that, in my mind, marks the beginning of the era of liberal internationalism.

which was in some ways the flip side of isolationism. If you think about that first period of American grand strategy as an America that wanted to detach itself from the world, to run away from the world, to perfect the American experiment, after Pearl Harbor, we wanted to run the world, to spread the American experiment, to take manifest destiny on the road, if you will.

And there was a bipartisan consensus. Moderate Democrats, moderate Republicans came together behind a compact between power and partnership. What I mean by that is a readiness to project power abroad, ships, soldiers, aircraft, but to do so in partnership with allies through international institutions, through multilateralism.

And that compact really lasted into the 21st century. And now I think we're in many ways at the beginning of a new era in which we need to find a middle ground between the first era, which was running away from the world, the second era, which was using liberal internationalism to run the world,

Right now, we're in a situation in which the world is again changing from unipolarity to, in my mind, multipolarity. And that domestic consensus behind liberal internationalism has cracked. Democrats and Republicans no longer share common views of America's role in the world.

And that's why I think today, Jim, we can talk about the United States as entering a new era of grand strategy, even though we don't yet know what that grand strategy will be. Well, what, Charlie, based on your diagnosis of our current situation, both domestic and foreign, should that grand strategy look like? Well, in the end of the day, because I'm a realist,

I believe that we are headed into an era of multipolarity. In the first instance, I think you can think about the world in bipolar terms and that there will be a Western bloc consisting mainly of the United States and its democratic allies in Europe and Asia, and an Eastern bloc, which at least for now consists of China and Russia with some help from North Korea and Iran.

But I don't think that we're headed to a new bipolar world because the diffusion of power that is underway is going to be far more far reaching in scope. And I think that, you know, by the second half of this century, the United States is the only country

advanced liberal democracy that will make it into the top rankings as an economic power. China, India, Indonesia, other developing countries like Brazil, South Africa, Nigeria, Turkey, they are all climbing the ranks. And we are seeing, particularly amid the war that Russia has launched in Ukraine,

that many of those developing countries don't want to choose sides. In some ways, I think India is the bellwether. India is looking at this new rift between East and West and saying, hey, don't look at us. One day I'm going to go and have a state dinner with Joe Biden in Washington.

The next day, I'm going to fly to Moscow and have a tête-à-tête with Mr. Putin and give him a bear hug at the end of the meeting.

And so in that sense, I think we're seeing that a country like India, the Saudis, the Brazilians, the Indonesians, they're going to play a different game than they have in the past. They're going to say, what's in it for me? And on one day, they're going to align themselves with the US and its allies. On another day, with China and the grouping that it seems to be trying to put together.

And that says to me that we have to be fleet footed. We have to prepare for a world of shifting, unstable coalitions. And we need to make sure that the liberal anchor of the international system, which is the United States, along with its key allies, has its lights on and is able to, in a purposeful way, try to guide

the onset of this multipolar world. And in some ways, that's my biggest worry right now, Jim. The management of the transition in the international system is tough enough. It's particularly tough at a moment when political centers on both sides of the Atlantic are under siege.

And we spend a lot of time talking about the threat posed by Xi Jinping and the threat posed by Vladimir Putin. We also need to talk about the threat from within and how the United States and its partners are going to go about rebuilding their political centers. Because I think if we get our houses back in order and we have our lights on, we'll figure out how to navigate and lead a multipolar world.

If we're sitting around fighting with each other and taking pot shots at the candidates for president as they rally in Pennsylvania, we're going to be in a heap of trouble. Well, I take your point, Charlie, that it's hard to maintain any kind of grand strategy or any kind of foreign policy.

if the country is divided against itself. And we clearly, as we survey the scene around American politics, and as you note in Europe as well, really deep-seated divisions. And I'm not sure that anyone has any quick solutions for those problems, is how one regains sort of the coherence of the political center.

So I think it's worth keeping that in mind. But thinking about the issue of grand strategy going forward,

What should the goal of that grand strategy be? I hear some people writing that American foreign policy should at the end seek victory, that it's not sufficient to carve out a modus vivendi with the Russians or with the Chinese. How do you think about that end state? Is it even proper to think about foreign policy in terms of an end state? Well,

This is to some extent uncharted territory. We haven't been here before in several respects. One is that the world is more interdependent and globalized than it's ever been. And as a consequence, many of the overriding grand strategic challenges that we face, like climate change, global health, nuclear proliferation,

These are issues that will not be effectively addressed if we are not working with other centers of power, including centers of power with whom we do not share ideological affinity.

To be more blunt, if we don't figure out a way of working with China, at least on issues that are global in nature, we're going to be in trouble. We will all sink together if we don't row together.

A second guiding light here is that, you know, ever since the United States emerged on the scene as a power that was willing to sit and try to guide the global system, it's been the top dog. And I don't think that's going to last forever.

simply because the global balance of power is shifting. Yes, the United States is still number one economically. It is still number one way ahead of the others militarily, but it won't last forever. It might last another decade. It might last another two decades. But I do think we have to figure out how to work with other countries and share leadership with them.

simply because we are moving to a world that is going to be decentered. And to some extent, I feel a little bit like the Biden administration, as well as many others in the foreign policy community, aren't there. The National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, recently wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs. And the first sentence, if I recall correctly, is nothing in international politics is inevitable.

And if you look at the Biden administration's policies toward China, I think their view is we can stop them from rising through export controls, through other means of preventing China from generating the kind of economic strength and competitive advantages that would enable them to become number one.

And that leads you to a very different grand strategy. It's a grand strategy of restoration, stopping the other guy. I'm more of a pragmatic realist. I don't think we can stop China from becoming a full service pole of power, a peer competitor. And as a consequence, we need to figure out how to compete with them, but at the same time, how to cooperate with them, particularly when it comes to avoiding great power war

and to tackling the global challenges of our time. Charlie, I will let Jake Sullivan come on the president's inbox if he wishes to defend his foreign affairs article. I want to ask you a slightly different version of the question, which is,

There has been talk about the rise of an axis of the aggrieved that China and Russia, Iran, North Korea have come to make common cause. And that the challenge the United States faces, even if it comes to the conclusion that it needs to share global leadership, is that it's facing a bloc that doesn't want to share leadership.

And that gets us back to the question as to whether and to what extent U.S. foreign policy should be aimed at trying to split that axis, to try to break up particularly the growing alignment between Russia and China. Is that something the United States should do or is that a fool's errand? I think it is something the United States should do.

And it's worth keeping in mind that during most of the Cold War, China and Russia were at odds, China and the Soviet Union. And that made a huge difference. And it was, I think, a perfect example of

of the liberal realism or the pragmatic realism that I'm talking about when Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon reached out to Beijing in the 1970s, ended up establishing diplomatic relations with Beijing. And that really did foster a further split because the split between the two really came from within.

when Beijing and Moscow went their separate ways in the late 1950s. But by capitalizing on that divide, it made it much easier to navigate the Cold War. So yes, I do think that we want to look for ways to drive a wedge between Russia and China. It will not be easy. And that's because the Russians made the big mistake of invading Ukraine.

That has pushed the Russians into the arms of the Chinese. And at least for now, the Chinese are sticking with the Russians, despite the fact that they're committing a bald act of aggression in Ukraine. But I do think that it is a relationship that does not have deep roots.

It's heavily dependent upon the relationship between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. I think deeper down in the bureaucracies and publics, Russians and Chinese don't much like each other, don't much trust each other.

And as a consequence, whether it's in Central Asia, the Middle East, the high north, I think the U.S. should be looking for ways to reach out to China. And I do think that deep down inside, and I've heard this from Chinese, there is a great deal of discomfort beneath the surface in how

strongly the Chinese have supported Russia and Russia's attack against Ukraine. And I do think that at the right time, when we get to negotiations and to the prospect of a ceasefire, I think China may be able to play a useful role in putting pressure on the Kremlin. Let's talk a moment, if we can, Charlie, about those countries that

That you note are sitting on the sidelines or perhaps more accurately looking both toward the United States and like-minded countries into China and countries in its wake looking to see who can give them the best deal the India's the Brazil's the Indonesia's the Nigeria's South Africa and

Does it make sense for the United States to try to attract and embed them in a Western, I won't say alliance, but network? Or is that something that's simply not going to be achievable? Well, I think it makes sense for the United States to more effectively and sensitively understand the wants and needs of what we call the Global South, the New South, the developing world.

And I think it's important for Americans to understand that for many countries in Latin America, in the Middle East, in Africa, in Southeast Asia, they don't look with great relish and respect at what we call the liberal rules-based order. They feel that it is an order that is

about American power and Western power, and that it's a system that has advantaged the North at the disadvantage of the South. And this is one of the big differences between myself and my friend John Eikenberry, who was also a guest on your show. For John, liberal internationalism, the liberal rules-based order is very much about ideals and values. This is what any country would want to do to play fair.

And I like the rules-based order. I think it is about as good as we're going to get, but it serves American interests.

It is about American power and the preservation of American power. And I think we need to understand that in many parts of the global south, it is seen in those terms. And that as a consequence, if we're going to do a better job of reaching out to the Indias, to the Brazils, to the Nigerias, to the Saudis, we're going to have to understand that they are playing the field, that they have options.

And that we need to make them offers that are competitive with the offers that China is making to them. And let's be honest, China right now is offering and has been offering deals that we don't have the resources to offer through the Belt and Road Initiative, through loans, through ports.

through other kinds of investments. And that's just the new reality. Well, I would say, Charlie, going back to your point earlier about the importance of having domestic support for any grand strategy, that you would not have domestic support in the United States and in many other countries for offering to the Indias, Nigerias, particularly countries like Saudi Arabia, a package that would be appealing. That would be a very tough sell.

politically. I mean, one difference between the United States and China is that Xi Jinping does not need to get the Chinese public on board with the offers that he makes to countries around the world, many of which are autocracies who are headed in that direction. Well, yes and no. I mean, I do think that in some ways, the foreign policy elite overestimate

the importance of ideology. Yes, the United States, the American public does buy into the exceptionalist narrative, the ideals of spreading the Republican experiment. But the United States also has a very impressive track record of working with non-democracies when it's geopolitically expedient.

of making deals, for example, at the beginning of the Cold War, the Yalta Agreement, which provided the Soviet Union a strategic buffer in Eastern Europe. Many criticize that on moral grounds, even though it may have been the right thing to do geopolitically. So I do think that part of liberal realism, part of pragmatic realism,

is realizing that we need to work with countries whose domestic politics may not be to our own liking. And I do think that the more we do that, the safer the world ultimately is going to be. Because as I said, we need teamwork if we're going to be able to tackle this new set of global challenges. Charlie, I want to come back to a point you made near the beginning of our conversation, which I think is worth mentioning.

emphasizing, and you noted that it is important to have a grand strategy because in the absence of one, any road will take you where you're trying to get because you haven't decided either the destination or the route. But you also said, quite importantly, that it's important not to have the wrong grand strategy.

Now, as you know, there are a number of different contenders for a successor grand strategy to the one that guided American foreign policy over the past eight decades.

And I'd like to get your assessment of a couple of them just quickly. I mean, one obvious possibility, it's popular in some quarters, is some version of isolationism, though I actually much prefer your characterization of 19th century American foreign policy as being fundamentally one of strategic detachment. Why can't the United States just come home as many people are calling for?

Well, the kind of detachment that the United States pursued during the balance of its history simply is impossible today.

And that's in part because in the 19th century, wide oceans and relatively nice neighbors provided the natural security that we don't have today. And when it comes to economic interdependence, when it comes to missiles that can fly from China or Russia to the United States in a matter of minutes, when it comes to pandemics,

that can come in through our airports or across our borders silently and deadly. You know, we don't have that natural security that we used to. On the other hand, I do think that one of the reasons that our domestic consensus has cracked on grand strategy is that we tried to do too much.

that we especially, and to make reference to another grand strategy, neoconservative approaches that emerged after 9-11,

took the United States into overseas commitments that ultimately proved to be more than the American public were willing to bear. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and Syria, we call them the forever wars. And as a consequence, we need to be mindful that we need to pursue an ambition abroad that is sustainable at home.

And for me, that means retrenchment of a modest sort, not isolationism, not pulling out. And I also think we need to be more mindful of the degree to which hyper-globalization also is responsible for the situation that we find today, where during the 1990s and during the post-Cold War era, we let the market reign.

globalization, financialization, deregulation. And it worked well in the sense of it expanded the pie and it increased corporate profits and it increased shareholder value. It didn't work very well for average working Americans.

And that may be one of the reasons why you're seeing the hollowing out of the political center. In my mind, it's the main reason. It's because of automation, the digital economy, free trade, financialization. Many working Americans that used to be in the middle class that worked on a GM production line making in today's dollars, let's say 35 bucks an hour, they're now in the service sector. They're now making $12 an hour.

They're having difficulty making ends meet. And so we need to think about what kind of grand strategy, what level of globalization is going to work for the American voter.

Because our grand strategy not only needs to work abroad, it needs to work at home. And right now, I don't think we're meeting the standards that we need to meet on either front. That reminds me of an argument Charlie made in a book titled Foreign Policy Begins at Home by our former council president, Richard Haass.

Let me just close by asking you sort of two somewhat specific questions about grand strategy. You mentioned a moment ago a neocon strategy, neoconservative strategy for American foreign policy.

Is that the same thing as what now is properly called a grand strategy of primacy? And my other question would be, is there a difference between strategic retrenchment or isolationism in what is in academic circles called offshore balancing? I mean, neoconservativism, yes, I would say it's pretty close to a strategy of primacy.

It has a bit of a more of an ideological bent to it and that primacy is simply about we're number one and nobody's going to catch us.

Neoconservatism was we're number one and nobody's going to catch us. And while we're at it, we are going to spread democracy by force if necessary. So there was ideological ambition that was attached to preponderance. But I do think that today you see a very similar kind of strategy

And in many respects, I think the Biden administration has been guided not so much by neoconservatism, but by a kind of liberal interventionism and the preservation of primacy that is somewhat similar. And it is, in my mind, one of the reasons that I think we need a course correction.

On the second front, isolationism to me is cut and run, draw up the drawbridge, put the moat between us and the outside world. Retrenchment is about pulling back to a sustainable middle course, which is where I end up. I think we don't want to overreach, but we also don't want to underreach. And for me, offshore balancing is underreaching.

because it means that we decamp from our forward position in Europe. It means we decamp from our forward position in East Asia, and then we come running in with the fire trucks after war breaks out. Well, number one, I don't think we want to sit around while war breaks out. And number two, after war breaks out, we may not want to send in the fire trucks because it's very costly.

And so offshore balancing, I think, could lead to the slippery slope of strategic detachment. And that's why I think the middle course

forward deployment, but in a way that is sustainable, given the diffusion of power and given the need that we need to sell grand strategy anew to a skeptical American public. On that note, I'll close up the president's inbox for this week. My guest has been Charlie Kupchan, a senior fellow here at CFR and a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University. Charlie, as always,

It's a pleasure to chat. Jim, thanks very much for having me on the program. Please subscribe to The Presence Inbox on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, wherever you listen, and leave us a review. We love the feedback. You can email us at tpi at cfr.org. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The Presence Inbox on cfr.org.

As always, opinions expressed on the President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. Today's episode was produced by Esther Fang with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks go out to Ethan Wicks for his editing assistance. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.