The U.S. need for foreign policy narratives

Perspective | The U.S. need for foreign policy narratives

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Secretary of State Antony Blinken introduces President Biden for remarks to State Department staffers on Feb. 4. (Evan Vucci/AP)

Feb. 24, 2021 at 9:00 p.m. GMT+9

Narratives matter. At least that is what Manjari Chatterjee Miller convinced me is true after reading her trenchant just-released book, “Why Nations Rise: Narratives and the Path to Great Power.” According to Chatterjee Miller, states that accumulate material power are not seen as rising unless they also engage with existing great-power norms and try to shape their own narratives through “idea advocacy” to achieve internal and external legitimacy.

Chatterjee Miller’s book focuses on rising powers, but it sure seems as if countries perceived to be in relative decline need to cast about for new narratives as well. The Trump administration embraced the notion of “great-power competition” as its lens to navigate world politics, focusing on Russia and China. That narrative, however, did not prove terrifically enlightening. The United States did not effectively defend its interests against either country, unless alienating allies, inviting serious hacks and perpetrating a costly, ineffectual trade war counts. Donald Trump himself was all over the map on this topic, memorably contradicting his own National Security Strategy when he announced it.

There are nascent signs that the Biden administration might continue the great-power competition rubric in its approach toward Moscow and Beijing. That would be a mistake. As Daniel Nexon argued last week in Foreign Affairs, “great-power competition is not a coherent framework for U.S. foreign policy. Treating it as a guiding principle of American grand strategy risks confusing means and ends, wasting limited resources on illusory threats, and undermining cooperation on immediate security challenges, such as climate change and nuclear nonproliferation.”

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So if great-power competition is not the conceptual answer, what is? Longtime readers of Spoiler Alerts might remember that I have been somewhat pessimistic on this front. In recent years, I have argued that the U.S. ability to articulate coherent grand narratives has eroded badly since the days of containment.

The latest issue of Foreign Affairs features an essay by outgoing editor Gideon Rose that offers some light in a dark tunnel. He suggests that neither liberalism nor realism, nor any other approach, has provided a full explanation for how the world works. At the same time, he pushes back against the argument that Ron Krebs, Randall Schweller and I made last year about the end of grand strategic narratives: “Drezner, Krebs, and Schweller are correct when they argue that simplistic road maps are not very helpful in dealing with today’s complex international landscape. ... but that is not an argument for throwing the maps away. It is an argument for figuring out how to use two bad maps simultaneously.” In other words, policymakers must be able to intuit when a particular narrative applies.

I hope Rose is correct; in the past he has been. As Foreign Policy’s Jonathan Tepperman recently observed, “The country has developed a remarkable mechanism for self-correction, a history of ensuring that, after every one of its disastrous bouts of inattention (think the interwar period) or destructive Jacksonian rage (think the aftermath of 9/11), the national pendulum swings back to the middle.”

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To be right this time, however, will require three things to be true. The first is for conservatives in the public sphere to stop promoting bogus, badly reasoned apocalyptic “Flight 93″ narratives. Defining America’s principal adversaries as internal rather than external is a surefire recipe for continued policy incoherence and, you know, civil war.

The second is for scholars to follow Nexon’s lead and continue to act as good public intellectuals, swatting away bad narratives with compelling logic and offering more counter-narratives in their stead. I have faith in my fellow international relations scholars — they have become much better at policy engagement than is commonly believed.

The third is for the Biden administration’s national security team to have the skill and will to pay attention to what those outside the executive branch are saying. Having worked in the executive branch, I am painfully aware of how challenging that last task can be. That does not make it any less necessary.