This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser chats with Ali Wyne, senior analyst at the Eurasia Group’s global macro geopolitics practice and author of the brand new book America’s Great Power Opportunity: Revitalizing U.S. Foreign Policy to Meet the Challenges of Strategic Competition. Ali’s book calls on American policymakers to craft a strategy that is guided by confidence and a clear vision of American renewal and emphasizes America’s competitive advantages, rather than being determined by the behavior of our notional competitors, especially China.
2:09 – The framework of great power competition and building a foreign policy that is not dictated by the actions of other great powers
16:13 – The competitive challenges from China and Russia
25:38 – America’s psychological anxiety over China’s rise
39:30 – Eight principles for building a new foreign policy: Principle one – renew America’s competitive advantages
51:35 – Principle two: regard the power of America’s domestic example, not as a supplement to external competitiveness, but as a precondition for it.
56:22 – Principle three: do not use competitive anxiety as a crutch and principle four: frame internal renewal as an explicit objective of U.S. foreign policy, not as a desired byproduct
1:01:19 – Principle five: enlisting allies and partners in affirmative undertakings
1:08:26 – Principle six: appreciate the limits to American unilateral influence
1:13:38 – Principle seven: pursue cooperative opportunities that can temper the destabilizing effects of great power competition
1:17:29 – Principle eight: rebalance toward the Asia Pacific within economic focus
1:20:12 – How Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has affected the framework laid out in Ali’s book
A complete transcript of this interview is available at TheChinaProject.com.
Recommendations:
Ali: The Foreign Affairs essay “Beijing Is Still Playing the Long Game on Taiwan: Why China Isn’t Poised to Invade” by Andrew Nathan
Kaiser: The Swedish TV show Clark on Netflix
