My last few posts discuss the need for U.S. leadership in world affairs. We are the strongest country in the world, economically and militarily, and we should step up and take this responsibility more seriously.  No other country can do it nearly as well as we can.

How are we lacking, and what do we need to do differently?  The AEI scholar, Kori Schake, gives the answer in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs.  We should always:

• Promote American security and economic power while supporting the expansion of democracy around the world. This means maintaining a strong military, cooperating with allies to advance shared interests, and advocating free trade while ensuring fair international competition for U.S. companies.
• The world is growing more dangerous, and foreign policy bears directly on the state of our domestic economy. The Biden administration works from the theory that U.S. foreign policy has failed the middle class and needs to be repaired through market protections and government subsidies.  This approach has stoked inflation, distorted markets, stunted trade, and frustrated U.S. allies.
• A majority of Americans, in both political parties, believe their country should provide better leadership, invest in military power, promote international trade, support freedom and democracy, and stand with Ukraine until it wins its war against Russian aggression. Americans are reluctant internationalists, but internationalists all the same.
• The guiding principle of U.S. policy toward China should be to force or motivate it to become a more responsible economic and geopolitical stakeholder – to play by international rules. Washington should long ago have tightened restrictions on U.S. funding for Chinese military technologies.
• The problem with U.S. strategy toward globalization in the past 20 years has not been that Washington allowed too much trade but that it permitted trade that did not establish reciprocity – trade that did not create a level playing field. Trade deficits with China cost the U.S. 3.7 million jobs between 2001, when China was admitted to the WTO, and 2018.  Three-fourths of these lost jobs – 2.8 million – were in manufacturing.
• Little unites Americans more strongly than the belief that the U.S. military should be strong. More adequate funding for defense will necessarily require entitlement reform, especially for Social Security and Medicare.  Entitlements now constitute 63% of federal spending, up from 19% in 1970.  The federal debt stands at $34 trillion.  By 2025 or 2026, interest payments on that debt will exceed defense spending.
• The failure to protect the U.S. southern border and therefore, to properly regulate immigration, is leading the U.S. to neglect its current biggest geopolitical opportunity: consolidating North American cooperation. U.S. politicians do not worry enough about the downside of Mexico sinking into criminality, especially with unregulated trade in illegal drugs.

Conclusion.  Rejoining the Trans-Pacific Partnership, negotiating and securing the ratification of other trade treaties, increasing defense spending while reforming entitlements and reducing the national debt, securing the U.S. – Mexican border, and aiding countries fighting to preserve their liberty: these are the major goals we should strive for in foreign policy.  Americans support a strong role for the U.S. as world leader, both for the country’s sake and for their own individual safety and prosperity.

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