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https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/american-conversations-secretary>
"On February 4, 2021, in a speech at the State Department, President Joe Biden
talked about the importance of diplomacy and the different actions he had taken
in the two weeks since taking office. Then he said: “There’s no longer a bright
line between foreign and domestic policy. Every action we take in our conduct
abroad, we must take with American working families in mind. Advancing a
foreign policy for the middle class demands urgent focus on our
domestic…economic renewal.”
The speech made me sit up and take notice. The popular division of foreign
policy and domestic policy is relatively recent, and the president seemed to be
at least nodding to a more traditional vision. At the same time, it was not
clear to me exactly what the underlying theory behind his statement might be
and how that theory might translate to policy.
I began to pay close attention to the State Department—especially its focus on
the Indo-Pacific region and Africa—and to watch Vice President Kamala Harris’s
many trips to those regions and to Latin America. As she and others met with
their counterparts in other countries, it was possible to see a new kind of
U.S. foreign policy taking shape based primarily on creating communities
centered around a shared interest, but I still was not clear on what the
administration meant by integrating foreign and domestic affairs.
Then, on September 13, 2023, Secretary of State Antony Blinken delivered
remarks to the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. In his
speech, titled “The Power and Purpose of American Diplomacy in a New Era,”
Blinken argued that the world is witnessing the end of the Cold War era and
must find a new approach to foreign policy.
The end of the Cold War, he said, had promised greater peace and stability,
international cooperation, economic trade, political liberalization and human
rights. Some of that had happened, but the era had also, unexpectedly, seen the
rise of authoritarianism.
The huge scale of modern problems like the climate crisis, mass human
displacement and migration, and food insecurity had made international
cooperation more complex, while people were losing faith in the post–World War
II international order in which institutions like the United Nations, the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization provided a framework of rules through which countries could work
out differences without resorting to war.
That order had systematic flaws that exacerbated wealth inequality, Blinken
said, noting that in the forty years between 1980 and 2020 the richest .1
percent accumulated the same amount of wealth as the poorest fifty percent.
That disparity fueled distrust of international systems and political
polarization.
Those tensions, in turn, threaten the survival of democracies. They are
“[c]hallenged from the inside by elected leaders who exploit resentments and
stoke fears; erode independent judiciaries and the media; enrich cronies; crack
down on civil society and political opposition. And,” Blinken said, they are
“challenged from the outside, by autocrats who spread disinformation, who
weaponize corruption, who meddle in elections.”
A few weeks ago, I got the chance to sit down with Secretary of State Blinken
and ask him to explain both the theory and the details of what the
administration means when they set out to protect democracy both at home and
abroad through a new foreign policy.
I’ll be posting the video from that interview in two sections. Here is the
first."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
