Josh Paul, a former director in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs at the State Department, is a senior advisor at DAWN.
"Every hearing is a China hearing," we would remind ourselves, while preparing for the next Congressional engagement, whatever its explicit focus. This was the mantra in the State Department for many months before I resigned from its Bureau of Political-Military Affairs over my disagreement with the provision of arms to Israel that have killed and maimed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, and have terrorized and traumatized millions more in the past four months.
U.S. foreign policy often seems incapable of handling more than one big idea at a time. As such, it's important we get it right. Today's big idea in Washington foreign policy circles is "strategic competition"—the notion that we are re-entering an era of great-power competition and relative American decline, particularly in the context of the rise of the People's Republic of China (PRC). As an organizing principle, that seems both broadly correct yet significantly off-target in one key way.
There is no doubt that the PRC, with its rapidly expanding nuclear arsenal and clear designs on the self-determination of the people on Taiwan, is a competitor to the United States.[1] But what makes Washington's competition with Beijing strategic is not the military capabilities brought to bear by the People's Liberation Army. America's strategic competitor is not a single country; rather, it is a template. One promulgated from Beijing, true, but not unique to it—a template that proposes that a nation can embrace capitalism and all the benefits it offers while rejecting the complexity—and accountability—of democracy. This is a strategic competition not between alliances of nations, but between systems of values, between democracy and autocracy.
I raise this competition, and its frequent misframing by the very American government obsessed with it, not as a means of avoiding talking about U.S. policy toward the Middle East, but precisely as a means of explaining it—and of explaining why it is not only so bad, but so inflexible.
We, as Americans, must ask, what is the point of all of these partnerships if by investing in them, we lose ourselves?
- Josh Paul
To see how American concerns about the PRC inform, and even drive, U.S. policies in the Middle East, one need look no further than the conflict in Gaza, which was initiated in its current iteration by Hamas with its attack on Israel on Oct. 7. Hamas launched that attack because, among other factors, it apparently feared an impending grand bargain brokered by the Biden administration that included the normalization of Saudi-Israel relations, which would have perhaps permanently removed the Palestinian cause from the region's diplomatic agenda.
Israel's desire for normalization with its near-neighbors is easy to comprehend and ultimately in the regional interest. But what possessed the Biden administration to pursue a course of action, and a diplomatic vision, inherently consistent with that of the Trump administration, which had set in motion Israel's normalization with more of the Arab world while sidelining the Palestinians?
The Biden administration looks at the world as a complex network of alliances and partnerships through which U.S. foreign policy interests can be pursued. It sees its competition with the Chinese government—and, to a lesser extent, Russia—not as being about values, per se, but about those relationships. In that framing, support for Western values is not an objective of the U.S., but rather one of many tools that takes its place alongside military assistance, development assistance and diplomatic cooperation, depending on the relevant circumstances.
In the Middle East, the U.S. sees a PRC that is making inroads not in terms of the spread of its capitalist-autocratic template, but through its diplomatic, economic and military footprint. The media has reported on several instances of this expanding PRC reach in the Middle East, ranging from efforts by a Chinese company to open a port in Haifa, Israel, to increased PRC arms exports to the region, to the potential, according to public reports, for a real PRC military presence in the United Arab Emirates. The argument the U.S. continues to make to its partners across the region is that China's interests are transactional, while the U.S. is a real partner—an ally, even—that will have their back, for instance in the event of conflict with Iran. Faced with mounting skepticism, the White House has been going all-in to convince the region that its presence will be enduring. A potential U.S.-Saudi defense treaty (part of the grand bargain with Israel and Saudi Arabia), the thinking goes, would lock in not only a U.S. military presence but also American influence for generations to come—and, as importantly, lock out the PRC.
Because the Biden administration is thinking about competition with the PRC primarily within this framing of alliances, it has increasingly become more sanguine about dealing with regimes with abysmal human rights records. An administration that promised to "put human rights at the center of U.S. foreign policy" has, instead, been willing to lower its voice on issues such as political prisoners, migrant worker rights, public surveillance and free speech, in order to maintain and enhance its relationships. This has been most marked in Washington's relationship with Saudi Arabia, a country that has boomeranged in the administration's thinking from being a "global pariah," as candidate Joe Biden pledged to make it during the Democratic presidential primaries, to a potential American treaty ally, the first in the entire Middle East—a status not even accorded to Israel. Such significant swings in U.S. foreign policy, which ultimately undermine, rather than strengthen, trust in the U.S., are the result of the increasingly single-minded focus in Washington on strategic competition, rather than a foreign policy grounded in regional realities. One of those realities, I would argue, is that Saudi Arabia should be, for the U.S., neither a pariah nor a close ally, just an important but difficult partner.
When it comes to U.S. support for Israel in its onslaught against Gaza, multiple factors come into play. One is that the U.S. has, over the past three decades, essentially let the muscles of American leverage atrophy. It is unable to summon even the muscle memory at this point to put any pressure on Israel, due in large part to a distortion of the U.S. political debate over Israel, a state of affairs that mostly reflects the role that organized financing and lobbying, rather than voter preferences, have played in the electoral process.
But amid the excuses offered for the steadfastness of U.S. support to a partner engaged in atrocity after atrocity against Palestinians, the only one I heard while in government that was at least mildly compelling was this: Israel is the country to which we have expressed the strongest and most public commitment, repeatedly calling our support for it "ironclad." How would it look to other nations we seek to partner with if we turn our back on them in their hour of need?
One can turn this argument on its head, given the mass-slaughter of Palestinian children, and ask what message it sends to other nations if we prize the image of our own loyalty over our values and arguably over the actual long-term interests of our partners? But I think we, as Americans, must also ask, what is the point of all of these partnerships if by investing in them, we lose ourselves?
This is first and foremost a moral question for the American public to consider, but it is one with profound foreign policy implications. During the Cold War, American values were frequently sacrificed on the altar of perceived strategic necessity.[2] The Soviet Union, however, was a totalitarian system whose objectives, since Lenin, had been to foment global revolution. That is not the case with the PRC, which in all likelihood could not care less what system of government the U.S. maintains. Rather, its template of autocratic capitalism is advanced not by a push, but by a pull—by its natural attractiveness to autocrats around the world who seek the stability of successful domestic economies, and are tired of being "lectured" by the West, whose support for democratization they see as a threat to their regimes.
In this context, it makes no sense to build alliances with regimes whose interests run fundamentally contrary to individual rights and other Western values. No matter what agreements they are willing to sign with Washington, when push comes to shove, they will not be in America's corner, and the harm they do to populations under their control is fundamentally contrary to the American interest. The opening for the U.S. in this context is more often through its soft power, and through its engagement with global publics, including at the sub-national level, not in fist-bumps with tyrants.[3] But that opening exists only if we lead with our values, and demonstrate an adherence to them.
To see how American concerns about the People's Republic of China inform, and even drive, U.S. policies in the Middle East, one need look no further than the conflict in Gaza.
- Josh Paul
Advancing Western values, such as privacy, individual rights, pluralism and egalitarianism, are not important only because of the context of strategic competition. We face in the coming decades immense challenges that will come at a scale and at a pace unlike any humanity has previously experienced, from artificial intelligence, to pandemics, to new biotechnologies such as those that enable the development of genetically selective weapons, to unforeseen risks generated by the inherent instability of global complexity. Autocratic countries are inherently less transparent and more likely to utilize emerging technologies to advance narrow regime interests over the public good—and to lose control of them, or transfer them to non-state actors. If the U.S. approaches these challenges in a world through which it applies a selective morality driven by narrow political interests—one that contributes to a less transparent, less collaborative, more divided world—we will fail to meet these challenges, with cataclysmic consequences.
In Washington, administrations will argue, as the Biden administration has in the context of Israel, that America can best address concerns about the actions of other nations through a tight embrace. But the track record in recent months from Gaza is that this embrace draws the U.S. into complicity, rather than drawing the partner into compliance. For America, the relationship is the key objective, but for Israel in this case, its own objective is a narrow, self-interested policy outcome for which the relationship with the U.S. is simply an enabling tool.
The result has been real and lasting damage, including to those relationships the Biden administration has been trying so hard to lock in across the Middle East. Biden's "ironclad" support for Israel's war in Gaza has not only opened new spaces for its strategic competitors to advance in the region, it also undermined America's credibility and ability to rally the Global South in support of causes and objectives that are in the American interest. It has even potentially put the U.S. at odds with the very postwar, rules-based order it has been striving to uphold for generations, for instance through its growing opposition to proceedings against Israel at the International Court of Justice and, potentially, the International Criminal Court. One must ask whether support for Israel is worth undermining the credibility of international law, and what consequences doing so will have for the future of global stability—not to mention, strategic competition.
Israel's devastation of Gaza will—or at least should—weigh on America's conscience for many years to come. From it, we can draw several lessons both about the errors in American foreign policy perspectives, and about how they can be addressed going forward.
First, it is an America that places its values secondary to its foreign partnerships that paved the way for this catastrophe—both by providing Israel with a free hand in Gaza (and continuing to enable its atrocities), and by trying to advance strategic collaboration in the region without a care for the implications of that effort on the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people.
Second, the misplaced focus within the framing of strategic competition—indeed, a deep misunderstanding of what that very real competition actually entails—has undermined America's own immediate objectives. It has also wreaked havoc on the system of international law on which America relies to sustain some degree of global stability, peace and cooperation within what it calls the "rules-based international order."
And, third, in the context of that strategic competition, there is no way to compete on the terms that America is currently choosing. Yes, our weapons are (for now) better; our investments more transparent, our economy more predictable. But all of those come with strings attached—rightly so—that provide disincentives over the long term compared to the no-questions-asked transactionalism on offer from other major powers like the PRC and Russia.
The U.S. relationship with Israel is certainly a thing unto itself, a unique product of American politics and contemporary history that, thankfully, is not immediately replicable in other contexts where the U.S. is partnered with serial human rights violators. But like two planets orbiting each other near a black hole, that relationship is increasingly being drawn into the influence of the overwhelming gravity with which Washington views strategic competition.
There may be some good news here: American policy does shift over time to reflect American interests. Having been unmoored and undirected in its hegemonic moment, a return to an era where overriding concerns are re-shaping American global priorities will inevitably lead the U.S. to re-evaluate the specific importance of its relationship with Israel and its support for the right-wing policies of its current government. This would be good news not only for U.S. interests, but for Israel as well. Israel has become so reliant on the tightness of that American embrace that it has ignored the cold and isolated environ it inhabits, abandoning any real efforts toward the long-term security only a lasting peace with the Palestinians can provide.
But this is not a given. And both from a foreign policy perspective, as well as in terms of what it means to be American, a path that is defined by the means, rather than the ends, will not be one marked by peace or good conscience—and Gaza will not by any means be the last, nor perhaps even worst, rupturing of American credibility on the global stage. A foreign policy that is defined by what it is against rather than what it is for is a foreign policy doomed not only to failure, but to disgrace all the way down.
