This thread will move on , from 'IFs' to the more disaggregated policy areas and the appropriate threads in about a week or so. But it might be worthwhile to try to scan ahead: what will follow from the inauguration onwards. It may not directly affect Britain's place in the world, but will certainly influence our policies.
James Mattis was still a serving USMC general (of the Mad Dog fame from Iraq) when he said this, in a congressional hearing:
“I would start with the State Department budget. Frankly, they need to be as fully funded as Congress believes appropriate, because if you don’t fund the State Department fully then I need to buy more ammunition ultimately. So I think it’s a cost-benefit ratio. The more we put into the State Department’s diplomacy, hopefully the less we have to put into a military budget as we deal with the outcome of apparent American withdrawal from the international scene.”
- Trump, rather famously, has spent the last four years hollowing out the State Dept
I think that naming a career diplomat to lead the CIA (supposedly an outward-looking part of the multitude that is called intelligence institutions, a good half dozen of them in all) also reflects this thinking while paying heed to America’s needs for a better national security set up at home - and a more unbiased aggregator of intelligence - foreign and domestic - sitting on the NSC. The past, massive investment in a new player, called the DHS, seems to have gone too much to the physical side of things. When things have come to the crunch, it seems that it is the other agencies mobilising... physically, accompanied with a frantic effort to fill the intelligence vacuum.
So shifting back to the outward policies and the agencies to execute them, Trump’s America First doctrine was disastrous as for dismantling or loosening alliances, but at the same it reflected an instinctive awareness of the problem of balance between policies domestic and those that are external in their nature
- like weaponising trade, when the 'idea' is to use it as a tool to build domestic prosperity.
- Prosperity that trickles down, too, rather than just boosting the dividends paid by multinationals.
Joe Biden’s incoming administration surely is aware of the need to rebalance the triangle of diplomacy & trade; intelligence & defence (security policies being the interim step there) and finally, lumped together, domestic policies. So that all of these are cohered (a v popular word these days) to yield both peace and prosperity.
- there is no doubt that Russia will continue its pre-eminence in the cyber 'grey zone'
- nor is there any doubt about a rising China bullying other nations, hollowing out their industries ( not a small factor in the rise of Trump-ism... or Brexit, for that matter), and actively exporting authoritarianism. Any reshuffling of US priorities must still find some balance with the ability to pay (avoiding 'imperial overreach') and deeper consultation with allies - so as not to 'go it alone' with the whisk-and-whim policies of late that anyone else, except our Boris, have found difficult so quickly (or at all) to realign with.
On a positive note (to balance what was said in the previous sentence), most of the above sounds much like
the 'stuff' that our Integrated Review is to deal with. Instigated by Boris... perhaps having him in as 'the' apprentice in the FCO was productive
, after all?
- and perhaps, too, the delaying of its publication by a couple of months was not driven just by spending priorities - indeed the financial frame within which to plan was reset
- but also by the need to wait for, and possibly better align with, the policies that are just about to be announced on the other side of the Pond