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Welcome to the Asia Chessboard, the podcast that examines geopolitical dynamics in Asia and takes an inside look at the making of grand strategy. I'm Andrew Schwartz at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Welcome to the Asia Chessboard. I'm Jude Blanchett, joined by my colleague and friend, Mike Green. We are delighted to be joined by two of America's best and most respected strategic thinkers, Bob Blackwell and Richard Fontaine, for a discussion of their very important new book, Lost Decade, The U.S. Pivot to Asia and the Rise of Chinese Power.
I think both our guests will be known to all our listeners. Their bios are too long to go over in full here, but just in brief, Bob is the Henry Kissinger Senior Fellow for US Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. Prior to that, he served as Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Planning under President George W. Bush as presidential envoy to Iraq and as the ambassador to India from 2001 to 2003. Richard is the CEO of the Center for New American Security.
CNAS or CNAS, depending. There's an ongoing debate in the think tank community about which one. Prior to CNAS, he was foreign policy advisor to Senator John McCain, worked at the State Department, the NSC, and on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Bob, Richard, thank you so much for joining the podcast. Thanks for having us.
Thank you for having us. First question we ask all guests is a bit of biography and origin story. Both of you, we could do a podcast each on origin stories and how you got into this focus on grand strategy on Asia. So maybe ask for the Cliff Notes version. Bob, maybe I'll start with you. How did you first get interested in U.S. foreign policy, grand strategy, and this acute interest in Asia?
Well, I first went abroad from the Kansas farm where we thought Colorado was a distant foreign country as a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa.
And I came back and to my surprise, I think everyone else's, I actually passed the foreign service exam and became a diplomat. I served in Africa, spoke a couple of African languages when I got there because of my Peace Corps experience. And then in London and then in Tel Aviv.
And so I had, of course, read the New York Times about Asia, but no concentration on it at all. And that really didn't happen until, and you just mentioned it, I went to India that President George W. Bush sent me as ambassador to India. And that, of course, is a position where
all of Asia, especially at that period of India emerging from its socialist past and reaching out, was of importance to the U.S. ambassador to try to understand how and why India was behaving the way it was in an Asian context. So that's where I got started. I came back then and detoured to the war in Iraq,
and then left the administration and began to write about especially India and China during the next decade. And this is my second book on essentialism, the center of which is China.
The first was on geoeconomics and China's use of economic coercion for geopolitical purposes. Thanks. And I would just say, Bob, that I think that book on geoeconomics was ahead of the curve. That was one of the first books I read that was really centering this and would just give you kudos for seeing the importance of economic statecraft. Everyone gets it now, but that book was really, I think, one of the first entries into the modern era of economic statecraft. Richard, over to you, please.
I grew up in and around New Orleans, Louisiana. I was always interested in foreign policy, but there wasn't a lot of foreign policy where I came from.
And I was always interested in Asia and in Japan in particular. So I spent a year at Oxford University and joined the Japan Society, which was not intuitive to most of my classmates. And then after college, there was a Japanese consulate in New Orleans and they were advertising the JET program, the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program, that I believe Mike Green did as well.
And I had never been to Asia, couldn't say konnichiwa, and nevertheless went over and taught English at a Japanese high school.
After that, spent a few months backpacking around places like southern China and Mongolia and Southeast Asia. And by then, I was pretty fully smitten with the region as a whole. And it's been a region of fixation of mine ever since. Richard and Bob, first, just want to congratulate you on this very important big new book that came out, as I've mentioned a few times to both of you,
This book is obviously going to be one that
folks who are interested in grand strategy, in China policy, in Indo-Pacific strategy, are reading and arguing with and citing 10, 15, 20 years from now. And it was obvious to me in the first few pages that this book was in that caliber. So firstly, just congratulations. And that lends to my first question, which is the origin story of this book. It's in some ways an obvious book to write, and yet no one has written it. And when you see it, it's
surprising as well that a book of near history is out and making such a powerful argument. So I'm curious, how did this come about? Well, it came about through, in its origin, a Council on Foreign Relations study group on the subject of the pivot. And we had eight sessions, and Mike led us off in that endeavor. And about halfway through the
we realized, Richard and I, that the 8,000 words that we were allocated for a Council on Foreign Relations special report wasn't going to do it. And so we decided to write a book. But here I'll say, of course, the book...
says definitively there was no pivot as the pivot was designed and described when it was unveiled. But we didn't know that when we began. And so we essentially discovered that in the course of our research, which we hope was exacting. Mike Bloomberg's philanthropy arm has a mantra, which is, in God we trust, everybody else bring data.
And we brought a thousand footnotes of data to this project. So that's how it evolved. And it's taken us probably from beginning to end a couple of years to get to where we are now. For the sake of a baseline, I wanted to ask you just about counterexamples that we can hold this up against of where...
a proactive, fundamental, grand strategic change has taken place where resources are reallocated, prioritized towards a specific challenge or set of challenges. I'm hard-pressed to think of an ideal type grand strategy pivot. We can think of reactive, messy ones, global war on terror, early origins of the Cold War, which happened after the big rupture of 1945. So are there examples that you can hold this up to and benchmark
To say it was a failure, and you do talk about this in the book, is this just the messy reality of democracies, which is we're good reactively after there's been a crisis, but a proactive shift where a problem is emergent and there's still debate about exactly what the problem is, is just inherently far, far harder.
Yeah, I would say that a lot of this is making foreign policy in a democracy, but it's not only that. And policymakers should be able to see and anticipate the necessity of big shifts and start to make those even in the absence of some cataclysm. You're right that most of those big shifts have followed a cataclysm. There's
at least arguably an exception or two. I mean, the U.S. and Britain articulated the Atlantic Charter in 1941 before Pearl Harbor started planning for what a post-war world would look like, huge increase in defense spending and so on. Now, there was a crisis in Europe, to be sure, but we hadn't had the cataclysm that Pearl Harbor inflicted on us. But yes, it's hard. It's very hard to be anticipatory
which in a lot of ways the pivot was. And so I think in one of the lines of the book, we say, you know, in some ways the pivot was ahead of its time because it anticipated what would be necessary to absorb the benefits of engagement with Asia and deal with a rising China that had not yet fully settled into the policymaking community.
So winding back to the early Obama years, you argue that to have a strategy like the pivot work, you have to have a clear articulation of what your theory of the case is. And there wasn't a real theory of the case. In fact, I think it's fair to say the Obama administration was very, very divided.
over the nature of China, the nature of international relations itself. You had liberal idealists, you had realists like Hillary. Tell us a bit about the origin of the pivot and how much those divided views about China and about the world impaired it. And also, I'm curious, you don't say a lot about this in the book, but how much did the... You guys have all worked, as I have, on political campaigns. How much did the Obama campaign, frankly, mess up their strategic logic? How much were they drinking their own bathwater?
So what was the sort of intellectual ferment or lack thereof in 2009, 10, 11 that either hurt or...
impaired the ability to articulate what the pivot was? Because you rightly point out that was one of the big problems. There was no clear articulation of what the point was. Well, the origin of the pivot was threefold, perhaps. At the stratospheric level, it was Barack Obama who was interested in Asia for obvious autobiographical reasons.
Hillary Clinton was also interested in Asia at her level, although, of course, the Secretary of State has to worry about the globe. So our old friend Kurt Campbell, who is a supreme policy entrepreneur, began first thinking and then arguing for this concept.
that the United States should, for the first time in its history, put Asia at the top of its agenda, not at the expense of vital national interests elsewhere, but it's clearly number one.
And he wrote most of the article that 5,000 words plus that Secretary Clinton published in Foreign Policy Magazine. And that article did lay out, 5,000 words, a concept of the pivot. But it was importantly based on her conviction that the wars in the Middle East were winding down. And of course, we know they didn't.
But the second was there was virtually no interagency process behind the pivot. And we all know, being vets of the gladiatorial combat in government, that without that, either people oppose it after the fact or everybody has a different definition of it. And as we did the interviews, we found that everybody had a different opinion.
definition of what the pivot was. And the folks who were dutifully working on Asia, many of them friends of ours and good people and smart and committed, they went on doing their work. And we never argue in the book that diplomacy to Asia stopped.
It, of course, didn't. But what did not happen was a reallocation of resources from the Middle East, from Europe, and from CONUS. And as the decade progressed, our rhetoric got better on the threat that China increasingly posed to vital U.S. national interests. But our actions did not match our rhetoric all the way through the 2010s.
Richard, would it be too cynical or just a little bit cynical to argue that the pivot had a political purpose, the pivot and then the rebalance statement when President Obama was in Australia? And that is to give some cover for doing what a lot of people really wanted to do, which is get out of the Middle East. In other words, it was never really about Asia. It was about trying to extract the U.S. from the Middle East. Or is that too cynical by far?
So cynical, Mike Green. I think that's probably too cynical because as I recall, and you may recall as well, given our service in a particularly unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama ran saying that he would withdraw all troops from Iraq, that he was going to withdraw one or two brigades every month until they were all gone. And that was sort of irrespective of
Asia, although it was sort of countered even then that we were wasting a huge opportunity with this diversion of resources to the sands of the Middle East. And then, of course, at the beginning of his administration, tried to surge troops in Afghanistan with an aim of ending that war successfully.
So there were multiple grounds on which President Obama wanted to be done with what was seen, I think, by many of the administration as a tremendous diversion of resources for very little show for it in the Middle East. And Asia had much greater promise.
That's when you were working on Ralph Nader's campaign? Yeah, and we got him right up to 1%. It was great. A pivotal role in John McCain's campaign. So, Bob, if you could invent a time machine and reinvent yourself as a Democratic advisor to the newly inaugurated Barack Obama campaign,
How would you have run the process to come up with a pivot? It was on the fly. It was articulated in an article by the Secretary of State that was not coordinated with other parts of the government. The NSC meeting sort of came after the announcements and all that, as you describe in the book. But if you could have invented a better process, what would it have looked like? Like Eisenhower's solarium exercise or one of the lessons should be processed in this as well. The instinct was clearly right. You say that.
The instinct was right. The energy was right. Kurt deserves huge credit in particular. But the process was, everyone admits, not up to the task. So what would you have done? Well, let me perhaps rely on a little bit of history. I was working for Henry Kissinger. And in 1973, after this enormous U.S. preoccupation with Vietnam...
He decided that the United States had to again return to Europe and our allies as a principal preoccupation. He gave a speech in 1973, and it was as always with Henry being written to the very end. So I was there as the most junior possible person. And we heard, Winston Lord and I heard him say, and so next year,
Next year will be the year of Europe in American foreign policy. And so he finished the speech, came off. This is not apocryphal. And Wynne said, Henry, what are the elements of the year of Europe? And he said, over to you.
So this was very much what we're talking about in that spirit. And the year of Europe had a very difficult year. I won't go into it all. And of course, 73 war happened and all the rest. But it was essentially a failure. And the lesson, the broader lesson for the listeners is that if initiatives are not effective
integrated across agencies and so forth. When did they really ever work? So what to do instead? You have to be, you said this, Mike, you have to be honest. If there had been an interagency process, there may never have been a pivot because there was so much controversy inside the administration about it. But put that aside, what might've been different? Well, the president,
at the time, and his successors never, ever identified themselves with this notion in any leadership way.
And so the first thing I'd say is the president, as W did with the war on terror, would have had to go out and persuade the American people of the arguments of why this pivot was taking place. Second, there was no consultation with the allies, another tried and true truism of American foreign policy. And so the ambassadors in Washington said,
were shocked when the foreign policy article came out. They ran in to see their favorite NSC staffer and State Department staffer and said, well, if Asia's number one, who's number two? And what does it mean to be number two? And who's number three? And there were no answers.
So second, then they would have talked to the allies, reassured the Europeans, told the Middle Easterners who are already increasingly sure that America was going home that we weren't. And we try to demonstrate in the book that we didn't, but they thought we did. So we had during this period the worst of both worlds. We didn't pivot, but the Europeans and the Middle Easterners thought we did.
And the more astute Europeans were realizing that this was not happening to any degree. Ironically, the country that knew surest that there was no pivot was China, because they have 400 research institutes who only keep track of when Mike Green in office is tying his shoes.
So it was the worst of both worlds. And I end with Harold Brown's line about the Soviet Union. He famously said, when we build, they build. And when we don't build, they build. And so the Chinese, knowing there was no pivot, knowing there was no military buildup, pretended that there was.
and justified their astonishing military buildup partly on that basis. Richard, it's a really interesting question whether something as controversial as the pivot, because it was at the time, now it's a no-brainer, could have happened with an interagency process or with consultation with allies, because you know the European allies, Middle Eastern allies, would have strongly opposed it, leaked it to the New York Times. And yet, in your book, you describe how influential Japan's strategy was, especially,
in adding some real discipline to what evolved from the pivot. Australia, Korea came a bit later, but even Europe now and NATO is pivoting. So Richard, tell us a bit about your conclusion on allies and partners. This strategy doesn't work without them. It's a little bit hard to imagine a process that would have been fully inclusive at the beginning. You spent a lot of time at allies. What's your takeaway from the whole decade, lost decade experience? Well, Japan was remarkable in the transformation process
that it had both in its understanding of Asian security and economic dynamics, and also its own role in all of this. So as one might remember, if you take TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, which was widely labeled not only the economic centerpiece of the pivot, but the very centerpiece of the pivot after the United States got out of it after having
sort of talked to Japan about its great merits and helped to bring Japan in, Tokyo took the lead and finished that itself. At the intellectual level, it was Japan that sort of came up with this concept of a free and open Indo-Pacific, which was later adopted, of course, by the United States itself. Mike, as you write in your book, and if you've talked about
And Japan was out in front of and still is out in some ways out in front of the United States in figuring out what its objectives are and its China policy. The United States is pretty good at identifying what we don't want to see in China. We don't want China to dominate the South China Sea. We don't want them to invade Taiwan. We don't want to repress the Uyghurs. We don't want to do this. We don't do that.
Japan has kind of an overall approach, I think, Mike, that you've articulated, which is they want to be safe from Chinese security threats and they want to get rich in the Chinese trade and investment market. I mean, whether that can be carried off that way is maybe a separate question. Australia, similarly. I mean, Australia was out in front talking privately and then publicly about the deterioration of the military balance in the Indo-Pacific.
several years before that was sort of commonly talked about in Washington. They put things in their defense white paper. They really made clear that the future of the Australian armed forces was not going to be in the, you know, going along with America into the mountains of Afghanistan or something like that, but rather for the first time, at least since Vietnam, much closer to their own neighborhood, given China's rise. So the
The allies not only played critical roles as allies, but they played canaries in the coal mine a little bit about sensing the changing dynamics in the region well before that was consensus in Washington. It's winter here in Australia and I'm losing my voice. So I'm going to do one more. Turn it over to Jude.
to sort of wrap this up. It's a great book, by the way, before I finish and really enjoyed reading it in different iterations. A Thousand Footnotes is no exaggeration. It was by more than Providence. There's a lot of data. So the controversy about the pivot we've talked about is the controversy about pivoting away from Europe or pivoting away from the Middle East. But there was another tension, which is...
pivoting to what in Asia? And you had this other idea, which was controversial, which President Obama did not personally weigh in on either, which was the new model of great power relations, the idea of a bipolar condominium with China. How much of the strategy was actually a debate about
China versus Japan or what kind of pivot we were going to do? Because a lot of Obama administration officials would say we did pivot. We had strategic reassurance with China. We had the strategic and economic dialogues. I think it was by the end. So how much of it was actually the controversy about what is it
that would secure American interests in Asia. If you look at the documents of the Obama administration, aside from the interviews we had with the principals, you will find one after another that says, one says there are five pillars to the pivot. The next one says there are three pillars to the pivot. The next one says there are six and a half and so forth.
It's like Monty Python and the Spanish Inquisition. Yeah, exactly. And so I would summarize it like this, and I'm anxious to hear how Richard, indeed you two, would answer it, but I'd summarize it like this. That when the pivot was announced, there was still a hope among many, and I would even say a majority, that
that China could be enticed to become a responsible stakeholder. People criticized Bob Zoellick incorrectly because, of course, he didn't say they were. He said, this is our objective, and we hope that they'll move in that direction, but there's no guarantee.
So that hope was evident in a rough consensus that would be the major objective of U.S. policy and that we would hedge against the possibility it wouldn't and didn't happen.
The problem was that as the 2010s proceeded, we kept until really the expression in 2017 of the Trump administration, we kept hoping a transition which was more congenial while the data got worse and worse. The hedging never matched the reaching out, the attempt to bring them in to our concept of world order transition.
Steve Hadley has said in public that they misjudged Xi Jinping. And I once said to him, I think that you're too self-critical.
Because I don't think that when he took office, there was a vast amount of analysts who saw where he was going to take China. But we were really slow to recognize where he was taking China. So her speech was, and I hope this comes out in the book, and Richard started with this, her speech was as much about the promise of Asia as
as it was about dealing with China. And I think if you parse it, it's more about the promise of Asia, because those office holders did not realize where China was headed. Richard, Bob anticipated, indeed pulled the rug out much of my next question, which was about Steve Hadley's self-flagellation over misreading Xi.
And I'll make a comment and then ask a question. And the comment is, I think if Bob was just saying, I think we're sometimes too critical about quote unquote missing Xi Jinping. I was living in China at the time. Most of my Chinese friends who were classified in the elite ended up misreading Xi Jinping. And indeed, I think much of the political system in China misread Xi because if they'd known
the ambitious leader he was going to turn out to be who favored purges of the PLA, the security services, they wouldn't have assented to his rise. But I do want to ask this question about where the particular leader and leadership style of Xi Jinping fits into the equation of both the lost decade, but most importantly, strategy going forward. Is it counterfactual? Do you think we should have been on the same trajectory
And with a different type of leader than Xi Jinping, a sort of a Hu Jintao 2.0. In other words, is this the system or is this the man as you look back at this last decade?
I think Xi Jinping has intensified and made more assertive or aggressive some of the things that the system previously had produced and would produce if there was someone else. So we talk a lot for very obvious reasons about Chinese military power. Well, Xi Jinping didn't build the military power.
I mean, built some of the military, but didn't build the military. I mean, this goes back to Hu Jintao and Zhang Zemin and military investments and things that occurred to the Chinese leadership in the PLA after the 1991 Gulf War and so forth. So even if you had a different leader, you'd have a stronger Chinese military.
its economic gravity would have probably been on a similar trajectory irrespective of, you know, it might actually have more economic gravity if there wasn't Xi Jinping repressing parts of his own economy, particularly on the tech economy. But it's the use of that power. And there you see that Xi Jinping did kind of two things. One,
upended any notion that responsible stakeholderdom was a near-term realistic objective, because not only was China under Xi not becoming a responsible stakeholder, it was going the other direction. It was offering alternatives to regional and global order, trying to upend areas that it didn't like. And then, of course, domestically,
For a long time, there had been the notion that through trade and information flows and the growth of the middle class and deep engagement with China, you would see the domestic liberalization, maybe even one day the democratization of China. And of course, under Xi Jinping, that has also gone in the other direction. So it is more repressive as...
at home under Xi than it was under Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin. So from a policy point of view, and particularly in capitals like Washington and Tokyo, I think Xi and his actions have been almost decisive in helping to produce the consensus that has emerged that the old way of engaging China and the things we previously hoped for were no longer realistic if they ever were.
Final question for, I'd be curious to hear both of your thoughts on this, which is about the intersection of your recommended forward-looking strategy, which is at the back end of the book, which I think many of these are recommendations which would have wholehearted support of the DC foreign policy establishment, but appear to be at odds with where we see US domestic politics going. Rejoining CPTPP, I think you'd get a 90% approval rate
Certainly within the seven square blocks of where CNAS and CFR and CSIS are, but maybe if you went further afield, the support ratio would drop. Really intensifying engagement with allies and partners. So map this recommended strategy of a pivot
over the next 10 years with where you see the realities of domestic politics, either in a Trump administration or a Biden administration or a 2028 administration, how likely is it that we're going to be able to bring this about? I would say on trade policy in particular, the one thing we know is that each president will be in his second term, which
at least broader politically, would make a trade agreement, whether it's CPTPP or stepping stones to it like digital trade agreements, whether they're bilateral or regional or sectoral trade agreements possible. Now, you still need a president who wants to do it. But if you look historically, presidents are freer in their second term to pursue those kinds of things in their first term.
And of course, 2016 was the turning point for something like TPP proved to be politically impossible just a year before in 2015, trade promotion authority passed the Congress. So, yes, a lot of political water under the bridge since then. But these things do go kind of up and down. I think at a broader level, there are things that recently were politically impossible that now are possible.
So just a few years ago, you could not have conjured $50 billion in taxpayer money for the semiconductor industry. But the presumption that that's necessary to compete effectively with China has made it politically realistic. You go a few years further back and you couldn't have had a Build Act and a DFC supported by both Republicans and Democrats. But you can now because people believe that it's necessary to rise politically.
up to the China challenge. And so even if the domestic politics of some of these things are not totally popular. So that's allowed us to do some things that are previously impossible, but it's not yet brought us to do the hardest things.
The hardest things would include trade policy. They would include a strategic immigration policy that keeps the best, brightest workers in the United States contributing to an innovation economy so they don't go to China or some other country. It would include significant changes in our force structure, the things we buy, how we buy them, and it would include a big increase in the defense budget. So far, with the possible exception of the latter, when Congress seems to be active on that right now,
That is not been possible. But the pattern has been that as the growing sensitivity to the China challenge continues to increase, that's making it possible to break through some of the domestic opposition of things. So watch this space, I suppose.
Well, everybody is right to say how hard this is. A friend of ours, I won't say who, which who we all know said, oh, those are all terrific recommendations and they're all delusional. So I said, all right, what instead?
But he had finished his intervention, his one-liner. I just say two things about this, because I think Richard has given good examples of what may have seemed delusional a few years ago. As the architect and principal manager of our revival so far, Xi Jinping is helping us to get closer to doing some of these things.
But to some degree, this is a test of how serious a country we are.
We know the implications of this continual slide away from our leadership role in Asia and the world, the tilting balance of power in all of its dimensions toward China. And we know China's objective, which is to replace us as the most important nation in Asia and beyond. So we know what the challenge is.
But will we do it? Are we serious enough as a country to do it? I came across recently a Churchillian theorem. He said, the United States always is slow in reacting to far-reaching foreign dangers, but never too slow.
Well, let's see whether we are too slow this time in which eventually, and it's not a decade out,
If we don't respond adequately to China, it's going to start changing the character of the lives of ordinary American citizens. Well, Richard, Bob, great words to end on. Richard, a note of optimism that was what was once politically impossible can become possible with some leadership courage and a sprinkling on top of Xi Jinping's overplaying of his hand. And Bob, throwing down the gauntlet and the challenge for leadership, political leadership.
to expend the political capital necessary to make these changes in the interest of U.S. national security. So again, congratulations to both of you. A book that, agree with it, disagree with it, everyone's going to have to wrestle with and read and debate and argue with to be serious in this space, which I think is the mark of what everyone writing books in Asia policy aspires to. So you've achieved that in spades. So congratulations to you. And thanks to both of you for giving your 400th book talk in the last week alone.
Thanks, Jude. Thank you, Mike. Thanks. Thanks for having us. For more on strategy and the Asia program's work, visit the CSIS website at csis.org and click on the Asia program page. And for more on the U.S. Studies Center in Sydney, please visit ussc.edu.au.