Interview with Robert Blackwill and Richard Fontaine

CSDS-SWJ STRATEGY DEBRIEFS • 6/2024

Interview with Ambassador Robert Blackwill and Richard Fontaine, by Octavian Manea

29.7.2024

Although the United States’ (US) pivot to the Indo-Pacific benefits from bipartisan consensus and efforts, the pivot has been less than conclusive and it remains at best an unfinished legacy. On the one hand, the pivot may seem like a relatively simple affair: enhance the US’ efforts to meet the strategic challenge posed by China. On the other hand, the pivot has been complicated by Russia’s war on Ukraine and the conflict in the Middle East. This is made even more challenging given the rapprochement between Russia and China, with Beijing providing industrial and technological depth to Moscow, as well as its tacit support for Russia’s military actions. In this regard, the pivot today implies that the US may have to make some unavoidable trade-offs, establishing a prioritisation of interests and alliances.

To debate the past and the future of the US pivot to the Indo-Pacific, Ambassador Robert Blackwill and Richard Fontaine have agreed to discuss their new book, Lost Decade: The US Pivot to Asia and the Rise of Chinese Power, for this Strategy Debrief. Ambassador Blackwill, could you provide an overview of the main arguments in your new book?

Ambassador Blackwill: We would like to make four points at the outset, which we hope will summarise our book. First, that the Obama-Clinton pivot to Asia announced in the fall of 2011 was a radical change in US grand strategy. Throughout its history, the United States had been a Europe-first nation. Now Asia would be America’s first external priority with first claim on US resources and attention. Two, however, this revolution in US grand strategy never happened. Despite the astonishing rise of Chinese power and influence during the 2010s, the US did not pivot to Asia, and did not devote additional resources to meet China’s challenge. Indeed, the United States is in a much weaker position in Asia today in terms of the balance of military power, the economic domain and diplomatic influence than when the pivot was announced in 2011. That is why this was the “Lost Decade”. Three, this US failure to respond in the 2010s to the momentous growth in Chinese power and influence in Asia and beyond, we believe, represents one of the three most critical US foreign policy failures since the end of World War II, along with Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1965 escalation in Vietnam and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And finally, we think it is more important than ever for the US to pivot to Asia.

Our book tells the story of the pivot and the simultaneous rise of Chinese power and assertiveness. It examines the impulse behind the pivot, analyses the challenges that it posed for America’s global presence and commitments, and investigates how it faltered. It looks at responses to the policy from countries in Asia, Europe and the Middle East, and details China’s strategic trajectory. As I said, more than a decade after its announcement, it is very clear that the pivot did not in fact occur. There was no reorientation of attention and resources from the Middle East and Europe to the Indo-Pacific. Military resources in the three theatres remain today broadly similar to 2011. China’s military modernisation has methodically altered the balance of military power in its favour in the waters adjacent to the Chinese mainland, especially in the Taiwan Strait.

The US economic agenda has become ever less ambitious. In more than a decade since the pivot’s announcement, the strategy’s economic component changed radically. At the beginning, US policy sought to harness opportunity through a series of economic agreements with multiple countries crowned by the pan-regional Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Yet virtually all those efforts failed over time, and Washington’s offensive agenda increasingly yielded to a defensive effort focused instead on blunting the national security risk that attended China’s economic activities. In our view, the TPP represented both the pivot’s central initiative and a US strategic failure. And America’s diplomatic engagement has proved inconsistent. The demand for US presence and engagement in the Indo-Pacific is high, but there are doubts about America’s ability to deliver. The pivot was designed in part to deal with rising Chinese power, but China’s power today is greater than ever, with an aggressive foreign policy to match.

Why did the pivot fail?

Ambassador Blackwill: First, Washington persistently underestimated the China challenge. For too long, policymakers retained the belief that the proper combination of incentives and disincentives would induce Beijing to support rather than undermine international order, and that they might even prompt the development of Chinese pluralist structures and practices. As we all know, none of that happened. But it was not until 2017, during the Trump administration, that the United States declared China a strategic competitor.

Second, crises emerged in other places. From the outset, the policy was predicated on an expected peace dividend in Iraq and Afghanistan – two wars Obama was determined to end, and neither, of course, ended. Obama did follow through on his commitment to withdraw US military from Iraq, but in neglecting to leave a residual force that could dampen instability there, the Islamic State established the world’s largest terrorist sanctuary in the emergent vacuum, and US troops had to return to Iraq and went to Syria as well. The pivot also assumed a quiescent Europe where major war was unthinkable. That presumption, of course, was first challenged by the 2014 annexation of Crimea and then by Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. There are a whole series of other issues and events in the world that distracted American policymakers during this period.

Third, the pivot lacked a clear, commonly understood strategic articulation. In interviews for this book, we found officials across administrations defining the pivot differently, unable to agree on its specific objectives, or identify what precisely constituted progress toward its end.

Fourth, no American president put sufficient weight behind the pivot and because that did not happen, there was no uniform administration effort to make the pivot work.

Fifth, by declaring an Asia-first foreign policy, the Obama administration attempted a grand strategic shift in the absence of forcing events or cataclysm. But unlike the period after World War II, where the Red Army stood on the plains of Europe, or after the 9/11 attacks, the pivot followed no visceral alarm.

And finally, the pivot was more than successive administrations could manage. Shifting military assets from Europe and the Middle East, for instance, would have entailed assuming more risk in those regions and potentially undermining US credibility there. Passing the TPP would have put members of Congress in the crosshairs of anti-trade voters at home. Sustaining the Hillary Clinton-era focus on diplomacy in the Pacific would have meant spending less time on peace in the Middle East (the priority under Secretary Kerry), or Russia and Iran (areas of focus under Secretaries Tillerson and Pompeo). Funding greater military resources for the Pacific would have required a bipartisan spending deal. Divesting legacy weapons systems to procure armaments better tailored for China contingencies would have stirred those who support continuing the existing production lines.

All those steps and more would have been best taken years ago, but they proved too hard to get done. All of this, if it had been done, would not have removed the challenge of dealing with the rise of Chinese power, but it certainly would have put us in a better place than we are now.

What happened with the pivot under the current Biden Administration?

Richard Fontaine: Our book shows that despite real efforts across both the Obama and the Trump administrations, the pivot to Asia at least as originally conceived failed to achieve many of its aspirations economically, militarily and diplomatically. And that took place across a decade in which China made major gains in all of these areas. But we conclude that the pivot was the right strategic impulse back in 2011 and it remains the right approach today. Asia, of course, today is even more important to the US than it was a decade ago when the Biden administration came in. It took some concrete steps early on to sort of revive the pivot without using precisely that language. It clearly identified China as its top priority, the Indo-Pacific as the region deserving of the greatest attention and resources from the US.

Its early strategic guidance and its national security strategy offered a raft of actions and proposals to try to affect those kinds of changes. But it has run up against some of the same issues as its predecessors: competing crises in Europe and the Middle East, a limited defence budget, a domestic aversion to multilateral trade agreements. And the Biden administration’s belated effort to pivot to Asia has some real accomplishments, especially in the areas of military posture and in diplomacy. But it is incomplete and has run into some of the same difficulties that have plagued efforts in the past.

What should the US pivot look like in the second half of the 2020s?

Richard Fontaine: We think that if you draw on some of the lessons from the past decade plus, there are some strategic principles that should outline and guide a present-day pivot to Asia. So first, Washington should articulate a positive vision for its own ambitions, particularly in the region where countries are worried about being caught between the United States and China. The US is not just competing against China. It is working toward the preservation and the extension of core international values that serve many other countries well. It is not just America first. Second, Washington should endorse America’s global role in addition to devoting new diplomatic, economic and military resources to Asia. The US has not and should not become or try to become a regional power focused on Asia to the exclusion of its interests and commitments in other regions, especially in Europe and the Middle East.

The answer to the challenge of China is not to abandon Ukraine or Israel, or get out completely from the Middle East and Europe to better focus on China, but rather to tailor our engagement in those areas in a way that better reflects what it is we are trying to achieve. That means that third, we must calculate some difficult and inevitable trade-offs. We need a more subtle prioritisation of regions and issues and a policy process that considers the relevant importance of multiple crises and opportunities. This is not just a broad “do more in Asia” kind of mantra. The test should be whether a particular set of resources will provide greater value in Asia or in some other region. The debate about whether to limit aid to Ukraine to better resource Taiwan or the US military in the western Pacific is a contemporary test.

And then finally, the hardest thing of all, we should to the greatest degree possible, pursue domestic unity around these things. This is especially true given our elections this year and the kind of deadlocks we have seen in Congress. But competition with China at least has the potential to bring our political leaders together rather than driving them apart.

What are some concrete ways to fulfil the strategic principles you just described?

Richard Fontaine: First, continue to strengthen the US alliances in the Indo-Pacific. In this sense, the Biden administration has made some important strides. They are key comparative advantages for the United States.

Two, it is essential to have a trade policy again at some point. We should join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) or some modified version of it while we derisk economic ties with China. If that is a domestic political bridge too far, then crafting a regional digital trade agreement or even a set of bilateral digital trade agreements would be a step in the right direction. But we have essentially hit rock bottom on our trade policy. So almost anything is up from here.

Third, we need to increase the US defence budget and thereby boost US military assets and our power projection in Asia and deterrence in Asia. We cannot just move things around, although we will need to do some of that from theatre to theatre. The 2.7% of GDP the US is spending on defence in 2024 matches the level in 1999, which was the height of the peace dividend after the Cold War. Resources are going to have to grow. We can also shift some military resources from the Middle East to Asia. For more than a decade, we have had the perception that the US is withdrawing from the Middle East, which is always news to those who say, well, the Fifth Fleet is still in Bahrain. We still have five air bases there. The level of troops is still quite high. It has been the worst of all worlds because we have had this deep and costly engagement in the region. But we have also fuelled the flames of abandonment. It is more about performance in the region, what we do with the resources we have, than the total military footprint. The ability to move some military resources to Asia and then surge into the Middle East, when necessary, is at hand.

And then in terms of Europe, troop levels have gone up by more than 30,000 since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Those are mostly on a reassurance mission. Some naval forces could be shifted as the war starts to draw down in 2025 from Europe to the Indo-Pacific. Russia’s power is weaker than when it started. Europe’s power will be stronger than when it started, and that provides new opportunities.

We do need to make European allies central in our China strategy. We reject the idea that the Europeans should just take care of Europe and stay out of Asia, and we should take care of Asia and stay out of Europe and have an overall global division of labour where the allies just do their own thing. The European sentiment toward China is changing quite quickly. You see this in NATO pronouncements and much more, but certainly at a minimum on some of the big economic and technology issues that are at the heart of competition with China. Europe is incredibly important.

All of these things are within our power. The United States has the power, the geography, the economy, the technology, the alliances and the values to pivot to Asia and effectively deal with its commitments and interests in Europe and the Middle East. And it is our hope that we can get on with it.

You are suggesting an increase in the US defence budget. However, there seems to be little enthusiasm among the American people, especially within the American Congress, for more defence spending. Do you have a strategy about how that can be changed to meet the demands you have laid out

Ambassador Blackwill: Terrific question and observation, and maybe even an understatement with respect to the public’s and the Congress’s appetite for increased defence spending. It may not happen. But we should have a debate about it because our national interests are suffering from inadequate defence spending over a very long period. How would we change the public sentiment and the Congress’s view? I think first and foremost – this seems obvious, but I think it’s preeminent – the president has to take the lead. The president must try to persuade the American people, as presidents have been known to do in the past, that this is required for America’s freedom, prosperity and peace. So if our president in 2025 is unwilling to do that, our position in Asia is likely to continue to erode. The same is true of our complete lack of economic policy in a region which has enormous value for global economic development.

The pivot was described as a revolution, but ultimately failed. One factor in the failure was a lack of attention and follow-up in diplomatic efforts. Has the overarching American grand strategy reached its limitations in dealing with revolutionary changes and the multitude of crises that have arisen during the same period?

Richard Fontaine: I do not think so, certainly not in terms of capabilities. If you look at the percentage of GDP we are spending on defence or the fact that our economic policy is really a function of will, not capability or capacity. It gets back to what was said before: if you look at big shifts in US foreign policy, it often takes a major crisis to prompt them. And one would like to think that you can get out ahead of a major crisis by anticipating what would be necessary if there were a crisis, or potentially to dampen that kind of crisis and make policy shifts. That is what the 2011 pivot to Asia was promising and something that we are promising now. Whether we can do it, ultimately, I think is a matter of will, not whether we have the underlying resources, alliances and ability to do it.

Ambassador Blackwill: I suppose that in an existential sense one might say, “Are we going to have to have a war with China over Taiwan before we have one of these dramatic shifts in US grand strategy?”. We hope that we can have this shift which strengthens defence and deterrence in Asia while meeting our vital national interests elsewhere without such a war. And perhaps uniquely, the pivot does not require this catastrophic event to remind us of our national interests.

What role do you expect Europe to play in the pivot? Are you confident that Europe will do it?

Richard Fontaine: Europe has an incredibly important role to play in the economic and technological aspects of this. We are talking about derisking economic relations with China, which after all is a European concept. I also think it has a military role to play, not because the resources that Europe would deploy to Asia are going to be so overwhelming. But deterrence in Asia is going to be greater the more countries that are involved in the enterprise. And so even without vast quantities of military resources in the area, their involvement (France, Britain, Germany) can be important.

China has a global strategy, economically, diplomatically, geopolitically. Would it be wiser in terms of resource allocation to compete with China for influence across the “Global South” rather than to significantly increase the US’ presence in Asia?

Richard Fontaine: I worry that if we define the whole world as our venue of competition and Chinese influence anywhere is bad, and must be resisted maximally everywhere, then we will set ourselves up for failure. Chinese military power, for example, is most acute and most relevant in the western Pacific, not across the “Global South”, and it becomes attenuated the further from the western Pacific you get. That is where we worry about it the most. And that is one of the reasons why a military pivot to Asia rather than a military pivot to South America makes sense.

On the economic side, it depends on what you are talking about. But if one of the goals is to limit Chinese influence such that Southeast Asia is less dependent on China to the degree that is possible, or at least Chinese political influence and geopolitical influence is limited, then southeast Asia matters, and the Pacific Islands matter more than some countries in sub-Saharan Africa from the American perspective. You have to set priorities based on what it is that we are interested in and what it is we are worried about.

There is a mismatch between the record of failure and incompetence that you lay out and the recommendations. The optimism of your recommendations is at odds with the demonstrated strategic, political and general incapacity of the US to get its ducks in a row. What you are essentially hoping for is a “Zeitenwende” for the US with regard to China, but without the war that would provoke it. But the war itself that could provoke it in Taiwan would be one of the greatest catastrophes of the 21^st  century. The recommendations sound very sensible, but they fly in the face of the US government’s record of being unable to shoot straight for over a generation.

Ambassador Blackwill: One does not have to have a perfect solution to America’s geopolitical challenges, it just has tohave the best one you can think of. I do not think one can begin to deal with the world by saying, for example, restraint is the answer everywhere because we are so incompetent. There were periods during the Cold War when I used to say in speeches that we and the Soviets were competing for premier incompetence, and it would go back and forth for a while, for one would be in the lead of incompetence, the other would take over. But we really do not have a choice if we avoid being competent, being strategic – for whatever reason, and you are certainly right, that we have had trouble shooting straight – our country is going to be more and more at risk. And not just our country, but the West is going to be more and more at risk.

The other thing I would address is that we cannot have a binary choice between dealing with the “Global South” and strengthening our power and influence in Asia. Both are required. This idea, that we have “either/or” solutions to virtually everything that we are addressing, seems now more and more prevalent – either we have to try to cultivate the Third World, or we have to build up our power and influence in Asia. In my experience in government, in senior policy roles, there are very few issues which lend themselves to such extreme binary solutions. The US, in its leadership role, has to be able to do more than one thing at a time.

Richard Fontaine: If we end up with a full-scale war with China, we both lose. The whole world loses. So our number one priority is to deter and to avoid a war with China. I do think there is more of a case for optimism in some areas than you allow. Some of the things the US has done since the beginning of the Biden administration on alliances, on military posture, on derisking economic ties, on building up domestic sources of strength in particular technology areas, those would not have been possible even a few years ago. Largely, it is because they are seen as necessary to deal effectively with China. It has not taken a war. Is it insufficient? Yes, but at least it is some steps in the right direction.

Ambassador Blackwill: If I can add: once former national security advisor McGeorge Bundy observed that “if we guard our toothbrushes and diamonds with equal zeal, we will probably lose fewer toothbrushes and more diamonds”.

In 2012, at the conclusion of the Defence Strategic Review, the Obama administration estimated that approximately 60% of the US Navy’s focus was on the Atlantic, Middle East and Mediterranean regions, with 40% in the Indo-Pacific. At that time, they stated that this balance would gradually change over time. Has that balance shifted today?

Richard Fontaine: The Obama administration did announce that henceforth that we would have 60% of the US Navy in the Indo-Pacific. But the navy was shrinking at the time. In real terms, if you count up the number of actual vessels, it did not actually increase; it just protected Asia from a decrease. In our interviews, the Trump administration – particularly Matt Pottinger – was actually very open about this. They said, we wanted to try to cut Asia last in terms of the shrinking navy. That was the objective as opposed to a numerical increase. And of course, this happened over a period of time where China’s navy was just exploding. There is a chart in our book that shows 20 years ago China had about 150 less ships than the US. In the next few years, it will have more than 150 more ships than the US. That is the backdrop there. The administration did fulfil its stated commitment, but it was with a shrinking navy.

If the European countries invest more in defence, it could be argued that this increases the options for the US to move some of its resources from Europe to Asia. What would be a proper division of military resources that European countries should divide between Europe itself and the US, given that at the moment European resources are limited and still depend very heavily on US military support in our security relations with Russia?

Ambassador Blackwill: There is great emphasis in the US on Europe doing more for its own defence. Our book calls for that too, but we also observe that in that context, the organisational sociology of the US is also going to have to change. As the Europeans do more over time, they are obviously going to want to have a greater role in alliance decision-making. This will be very hard for US institutions to accept instantaneously. So if the policy prescriptions in our book are realised, at least to some degree, our grip on the NATO apparatus is going to weaken. Not deterrence and not our commitment to Article 5 and the defence of our European partners, but to accept that part of the pivot to Asia is going to mean greater European influence on these decisions of European security. I did not start speaking in French in order to make that point, but I do think Macron, to some degree, has the future on his side if the pivot actually occurs in the way we would like.

There are regional concerns in Asia about the political risk posed by the US. Washington has been seen retreating from agreements it either helped create or created itself. How can the US restore confidence and reassure others about its commitments, especially with a fragmented domestic political scene expected to persist?

Ambassador Blackwill: The question of trust is crucial. The US lost the trust of its allies and friends over time, a day at a time, and an episode at a time. We will only regain that trust a day at a time and an episode at a time, and it will not happen quickly. But I do not think that we Americans have a genetic disability to have competent policies. Perhaps it is nurture and not nature. So I think it is possible. I have worked in administrations which I think historians will believe have been more competent on geopolitics, and I have worked in ones that have the opposite record. I am not a pessimist in this regard. We will have to see. I agree entirely that the record in the past, especially in the recent past, is not sterling. But every day is a new day. If you are a policymaker, you simply cannot give up. You cannot give up. You have to continue to try. But then it is back to the president as the leader: what is his vision of the US and the world? Who does he hire and what are their views of the world? And so forth. So we have the chance to be more competent. And I hope we will be. And I believe that trust will grow as we are more competent and steadfast and loyal to our friends and allies.

What would be the implication of a second Trump term for US foreign policy?

Richard Fontaine: It is worth pointing out that on Asia policy and China policy, there has been a huge amount of continuity from Trump to Biden, much more than one might expect. The Biden China policy and the Biden Asia policy is much closer to Trump’s than it is to Obama’s, even though all of these people, including Joe Biden himself, worked in the Obama administration. All the Trump tariffs are in place and have been increased; all the export controls have been increased; the identification of China as a strategic competitor rather than some country we can engage and get to be a responsible stakeholder has remained.

There are two big differences: one, Biden does not seem to have Trump’s confidence in his own personal ability to woo Xi Jinping and cut some sort of deal; two, Trump was obviously fixated on the trade deficit in a way that Biden has not and so Trump raised the purchase agreements with China to be the top priority. I think if Trump comes back, we will see this fixation on the trade deficit again, and these efforts to get the Chinese to buy more soybeans and even a willingness potentially to trade other strategic things for purchase agreements. Overall, I think you will see a lot of continuity if there is another Trump term. But it will be unpredictable.

How do you see the broader strategic legacy of the third offset strategy? We have this tendency to equate the third offset just with a technology-centric kind of strategy. But in reality, it was more of a construct about strategic posturing and re-posturing and about developing new operational concepts. Did we make any progress also from this perspective, not just moving assets around, but really developing effective operational concepts?

Richard Fontaine: The first accomplishment of the third offset was at the intellectual level. The US military had been configured for counter-terrorism and stabilisation operations across the greater Middle East, not for conventional warfare in the western Pacific. In this context, the third offset was a way to transform the thinking behind US military objectives. And then, of course, the concepts for how it would attain those objectives, which was the infusion of technology, different kinds of systems and configurations.

The actual shift in that direction, at the intellectual level, is there. At the operational concept level, a lot of it has taken place, but I do not think all of it. You still have this question of F-35s flying off of carriers into the fight and whether that is realistic or not. And then at the level of budgets I think that they are lagging even further behind.

Overall, things are moving in the right direction. The US military has come a long way since the first announcement of the third offset, but there is certainly a lot further to go, and particularly in the operational concept and budget spheres.

Ambassador Blackwill: Let me make one final point, which is an encompassing one. It draws on an observation that Robert Gates has made recently. As we look forward, and as the US either pivots seriously to Asia or does not, one thing that would prevent the pivot is a war someplace else. And as Bob Gates says, if he had only one piece of advice to a president looking forward, it would be do not start a war that you are not going to win. We have voices now in the US which favour escalatory US steps in Ukraine and escalatory US steps regarding Iran. The one way we could be sure there is no pivot is if we go to war someplace else.

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