America Can’t Escape the Multipolar Order

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Emma, thank you so much for doing this.

EMMA ASHFORD

Glad to be here.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So I want to start with some comments that [U.S.] Secretary of State Marco Rubio made earlier this year about multipolarity. This is not a word you typically hear from American secretaries of state. It’s something that has come up in your writing for many years, but not usually in official discourse. Rubio said, and I’m quoting him here, this was in an interview with Megyn Kelly, “It’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power…. That was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi–great powers in different parts of the planet.” Were you surprised to hear the secretary of state talking about multipolarity? And to what extent did you, as you have followed his analysis, his understanding of the geopolitical landscape, do you think he has it right or wrong?

EMMA ASHFORD

I actually think it’s really funny that you picked out that quote in particular, because I’ve spent much of the last few months giving book talks on my book about multipolarity, and actually, I start the talk with that quote from Marco Rubio, and then I make the people listening to the talk guess who said it without telling them. And the most common responses are that that quote was said by [American political scientist] John Mearsheimer, [Russian President] Vladimir Putin, [Chinese leader] Xi Jinping. It comes up a lot. Almost no one ever gets it right, and I think that’s because, as you suggest, it’s a very strange thing to hear an American secretary of state not just imply that unipolarity is over, but maybe imply that America is not the indispensable nation anymore, that we’re entering a period of multipolarity. I do think that diagnosis is broadly correct, but the notion that American policymakers would accept it, that was the part to me that was very surprising.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I think it’s worth focusing a little bit on the analysis. There’s a broad sense that the unipolar moment, as the piece by Charles Krauthammer in our pages in the early 1990s put it, is over. That’s been a kind of staple of this kind of conversation for some time. But when you look at some of the hard metrics of power, and you’ve noted this in your pieces, when you look at some of those metrics, it’s not entirely clear that American power, whether it’s measured as a percentage of GDP, a percentage of the global economy, or a percentage of overall military spending, whether it’s really diminished that much.

And when you look at the Trump foreign policy thus far, I think you can read it in a couple of ways. In some ways, [U.S. President Donald Trump] is very much a product of a sense of a changing international system. It’s a sense that multipolarity is a reality, but so much of what he’s managed to do is about this kind of incredibly aggressive, unilateral use of American power, and he’s been able to get away with it in part because of America’s position. So make the case that this is, in fact, a shift toward multipolarity. And if you can engage with some of the arguments you might hear from Steve Brooks and William Wohlforth in our pages, there are plenty of others who make the case that I think is less conventional now.

EMMA ASHFORD

Yeah. Look, I mean, I think you guys did that great package of essays, I think it was last year at this point, on what polarity looks like going forward. The most controversial, I think, was the piece from Bill Wohlforth, which suggested that we’re not even leaving unipolarity. My sense is that there are very few folks that actually believe that part of it, and the disagreement is much more about what kind of world we’re entering. So is it bipolar? Is it multipolar? And I think that’s for a couple of reasons. I mean, on the one hand, you’re absolutely correct that American power has not declined much in absolute terms, but there is this relative decline—I’m going to say “hypothesis”—but this is a fact, right? So other countries are rising to meet us. The margin between us and the next most capable power—in this case, China—has shrunk substantially from where it was even five or ten years ago. So we’re not declining in relative terms. We’re still very powerful, but other states are becoming more powerful. And so that, I think for me, is why I would reject the unipolarity hypothesis and move in the direction of one of the other two.

Now, I do think the debate about whether this is a U.S.-Chinese bipolar competition or one in which there are multiple powers available, I think that’s a much more debatable proposition. I tend to come down on the side of unbalanced multipolarity, and that’s just because I think that [there are] two important states, the United States and China, but lots of middle powers, regional powers that really impact world affairs. To me, that says multipolarity, but there are folks who I think make very plausible arguments about bipolarity as well.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I was struck that Trump, after his meeting with Xi Jinping, referred to a U.S.-Chinese G-2. I doubt that they’re talking in the Situation Room in this administration about multipolarity and bipolarity, but it did suggest that there’s a difference in assumptions between Rubio and his boss.

EMMA ASHFORD

Yeah. I mean, look, the polarity debate is an incredibly academic debate. But if we look at the ways policymakers in this administration or the last administration were thinking about it, you can see the Trump administration talking about great-power competition, spheres of influence, all of these things that suggest competition between multiple parties in a world system of some kind, and the Biden folks, I think, talking much more about this U.S.-Chinese competition. So implicitly, they have this model, even if they’re not using our academic terms.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I was struck, in going back to a piece that you wrote in 2021 called “Strategies of Restraint.”—at that moment, this was the 25th anniversary of 9/11, kind of end of an era of American foreign policy characterized, above all, by failed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq especially. You had a sense in that essay that restraint, which is in some ways a response to multipolarity as you see it, was having a moment, that there had been broader acceptance of the limits of American power. That was something that Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, wrote about in our pages before the administration, and there seemed to be a general sense that America had overreached in both the post–Cold War period more broadly, and in the post-9/11 era specifically. The subsequent years of the Biden administration did not, I imagine, conform to the hopes that you had in that moment.

How did you read the Biden foreign policy? I mean, you were writing, obviously, in the first few months. How did you read the next few years and why, to the extent that it did, subvert some of the hopes you had for a restraint era in American foreign policy? Why do you think it turned out that way?

EMMA ASHFORD

Yeah. I mean, look, I actually still think that restraint is having a moment. I think there [are] a couple of reasons for that. One is the one that was true back in 2021, which is, we had seen significant failures of U.S. foreign policy in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere that percolated through to the American people and, I think, helped contribute to things like Trump’s first election. But there’s this other part of it, which is that I think it’s also becoming visible, even to policymakers, even to foreign policy elites, that America is increasingly facing a world of constraints and competition. Right? So even if it were not for those failures during this unipolar moment, we would probably [have] to be thinking about reforming our foreign policy in some way in any case.

I think with the Biden folks, I think they started out pretty friendly to this notion that they could reshape U.S. foreign policy, that some restraint might be in order, and we do see them carry that out, particularly with the withdrawal from Afghanistan. I think then the war in Ukraine happens, and they pivot pretty hard toward a sort of great-power competition and back to this indispensable-nation moment. But I don’t think that subverted the popular demand or even the need among foreign policy elites to try and think of some new strategy in this world.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Those few months that you’re describing, from the American withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 to the beginning of the war in Ukraine six months later, more or less, is a really fascinating one. The withdrawal from Afghanistan, as you know, is seen as the kind of triumph of restraint-minded thinking. It’s also perceived, and you can of course debate this, but it’s perceived as one of the great failures of the foreign policy of the Biden administration, and Ukraine was this moment when it seemed to get its groove back a little bit. The political consequences of embracing restraint did not seem to be aligned with the analysis you’re offering here, that there is this political demand for it, and Ukraine, for much of the subsequent two years, was quite popular as a policy and seen as a success.

EMMA ASHFORD

Yeah. The politics of getting to restraint are always really difficult, and we saw that in the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which you cannot find that many people who believe that getting out of Afghanistan itself was a strategic mistake. What everyone will tell you is, it was probably the right thing to get out, but we did it in a bad way. And so, whether or not that’s an accurate diagnosis, I do think that there are political risks to a president who pulls back in any way from an existing commitment, because if something goes wrong, you are the one that is going to look bad. But I think the pressures in favor of a more restrained foreign policy are still there.

These days, it’s less about the “war on terror” and it’s more about other things. So if we consider Ukraine, you’re right. It was very popular in the first year, year and a half, that it was ongoing, but public support has declined pretty precipitously for further support and further spending when it comes to Ukraine. So the pressures are still there on politicians to take these steps, even if politically it’s hard to do.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

The American policy in Ukraine can be read in a variety of ways. On the one hand, you had very full-throated support for Ukraine after Putin invaded and lots of gauzy speeches from President Biden and senior Biden officials about the defense of the free world and standing up for democracy and everything else. At the same time, the administration was quite attuned to risks of escalation, obviously kept American troops out of Ukraine, was not willing to get directly involved. If you were going to go back to 2022 and craft a restraint-minded approach to Ukraine, how much would it differ from what the Biden administration did?

EMMA ASHFORD

Honestly, not very much. Like a number of other folks in this sort of restraint community on the progressive side of the aisle, I supported the Biden administration’s approach in Ukraine. I think arming other countries to help them defend themselves against aggression is a way in which we can thread that needle between direct intervention and abandoning them.

The main difference, however, that I would make is, I do think at a certain point in Ukraine, we started, or the Biden administration started to get swept along by this notion of triumphalism, the idea that we started out saying, “Well, we’re going to prevent Ukraine from falling to Russia.” We did that. “We’re going to help Ukraine to reclaim some land. We’re going to help it get to the best possible position at the negotiating table.” And then at some point, it became, “Well, we can’t negotiate until Ukraine is in a better position. We can’t think about any concessions or Russia will try this again.” The goalposts shifted, again, in a way that, to me, is quite analogous to how they shifted in parts of the war on terror, from regime change to nation building and onward. And so, for me, that is where I would diverge quite strongly, I think, from the Biden administration is there were several points a couple of months into the war, about 18 months into the war, where I see windows for negotiation that could potentially have ended things rather than simply continuing, you know, “We are going to do this forever” until something radically changes.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You write in your new piece, which is called “Making Multipolarity Work,” that, I’m quoting you here, “Polarity is a description of the distribution of power in the international system rather than something states get to choose.” And you note that there are a variety of possible responses to it in terms of policy or strategy. One of them that seems to have at least some purchase on the mind of Donald Trump and others around him is a kind of spheres-of-influence approach, accepting that there are other powers that have their own interests and their own views of how things should unfold in the region around them. We should more or less say that China gets to decide how East Asia works, and Russia gets to exert some degree of influence over Ukraine and other states on the eastern edge of Europe. Do you see that as both an accurate description of how Trump sees the world and how they’re approaching the world? And do you think there’s anything to that? Do you think we should give spheres of influence another look?

EMMA ASHFORD

Yeah. I mean, look, I think Trump is certainly not steeped in classical [international relations] literature, but I think he has an intuitive understanding of how power works in the world. And in doing so, I think he accepts that there are other countries that have power and influence in various places in the world, and where the United States either can’t necessarily change the state of affairs or can’t do it at a low enough cost to be reasonable. And so, I mean, if he is sort of a realist, he’s a crude realist, but it’s there. I think the spheres-of-influence notion is thus appealing to him not because he thinks we should give parts of the world to Russia or China, but I think because he recognizes the fact that spheres of influence emerge pretty naturally when great powers compete, right? We all like to think of Yalta and dividing up Europe and all of these things, but actually, in practice, a sphere of influence is what we did on Ukraine. It is saying, “Well, we have some interest in seeing that Ukraine remains a free state, but we’re not willing to go and actually fight Russia there to do it,” right? That’s saying that Russia gets some power over its neighbors that we can’t control.

And at the same time, it doesn’t necessarily mean, or it doesn’t show that spheres of influence give that other power unfettered control, right? The Ukrainians fought back. If you look at things like the Winter War in Finland in 1939, the Finns managed to fight the Soviet Union to a standstill. I can’t imagine that Taiwan would be very different. So, again, I think with Donald Trump, this is all very intuitive. But for me, it does fit a model of how the world tends to work in practice. We have interests; they’re limited. And we need to figure out where those limits are.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And, of course, we seem to be applying spheres-of-influence thinking quite directly to the Western Hemisphere at this point.

EMMA ASHFORD

It’s true. And the one place America has never declaimed the notion of spheres of influence is the Western Hemisphere, right? We’ve always said the Monroe Doctrine applied even when presidents were sort of at the height of their post–Cold War American democratic order speaking. They always said the Western Hemisphere was different. Latin America was different. And so, Donald Trump may be focusing on the region more explicitly, and he’s certainly using military force more than some previous presidents. But even if you just look at his immediate predecessors, I mean, George W. Bush’s administration was implicated in a coup in Venezuela. Bill Clinton invaded Haiti. So we’ve always had this sort of special status for the Western Hemisphere that says that we get more influence there than anyone else does.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

As you watch what’s happening in the waters around Venezuela with the strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats, do you see this escalating toward regime change in Venezuela to some kind of more forceful American operation?

EMMA ASHFORD

We don’t have the assets in place right now to actually engage in some sort of large-scale regime change. It’s mostly naval and air assets that are there right now. I’m inclined to believe that this is mostly a show of force, but I wouldn’t necessarily say there’s no chance of some sort of targeted strike on [Venezuelan President] Nicolás Maduro.

I do think, again, the Trump administration, for all that I’m seeing, that the man himself tends to have some intuitive understanding of international relations. I also think he’s very prone to sort of using military force without thinking about it, or threatening the use of military force and then sort of backing down from it, and I think this is what we’re seeing in Venezuela. They’re trying to get concessions out of the regime. If they don’t get those concessions, it’s possible they’ll take military action.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Although it would cut against the “America first” elements of Trump’s foreign policy in pretty profound ways, you can just as easily imagine him declaring victory after dropping a few bombs on Venezuela airstrips or something and then walking away and leaving it there, I suppose.

EMMA ASHFORD

Yeah. I mean, I think the strikes on Iran are just really telling in this case. We saw basically factions within the Republican Party pushing for, “Well, now we’re going for full regime change in Iran.” And then the part that’s more traditionally Trump’s base saying, “No, you shouldn’t be bombing them at all.” And Trump actually threaded the needle in the middle. He did very quick strikes and then backed straight off and said he was willing to open talks. So, again, I don’t think that he’s going to be all in on regime change in Venezuela, but it is entirely possible we slide into something because he’s willing to use military force in this way.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let me go back to the most recent piece you wrote, “Making Multipolarity Work.” You seem quite torn in that piece, on the one hand, as you watch American foreign policy in the first ten months or so of the Trump administration. You appreciate the acceptance of this multipolar reality, as you see it, and you see some moves in the right direction, but you also argue that there’s a right response to that diagnosis and a wrong response. What would the right response be, and to what extent do you fear that the Trump foreign policy is hastening us toward a multipolar world in the wrong way, the way that you think will not be advantageous to U.S. interests?

EMMA ASHFORD

Yeah. I mean, so let me, I guess, make three points here, and maybe we can pick up on some of them a little more. So one is that I think the Biden administration had a strategy that was almost explicitly resigned to reject multipolarity, that by the end of the term, they were actively engaged in this project of trying to stitch together an alliance of advanced industrial democracies on the one side and an axis of autocracies on the other to try and make this back into a more bipolar competition. And if you look at the essays written by folks like Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi in Foreign Affairs recently, you can see that kind of thinking. So I think that’s incredibly problematic.

When it comes to the Trump administration, I think they have a strategy that is better suited to multipolarity, and I see some, what I would consider to be, very positive steps toward a strategy that is more effective in a multipolar world. And I’ll point to just one area here, which is burden shifting, military burden shifting. So they’ve put a lot of pressure on European allies to spend more, to provide more capabilities, even on Asian allies, and they’re talking about moving U.S. forces around the world to prioritize Asia better. So for me, that seems like a much more rational approach to how we might go about dealing with a multipolar world.

But the final point I’ll make here is that I think this is not present across all areas of the Trump administration’s policymaking. And the area where they have been perhaps most problematic is in the economic space, where we’re seeing economic pressure, not just the traditional even sanctions or export-controls tool, but massive tariffs placed on friends and foes alike in ways that I think are very deleterious to U.S. actual economic performance, and that also win us no friends, right? In a multipolar world, we have to be willing to not just work with other states but offer them things so that they will work with us sometimes and vice versa. And what I see from the Trump administration is basically this very unilateral approach that sort of take, take, takes from the world where we can, and I’m kind of worried that backs us into a corner where no one wants to work with us.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

If I go back to the Biden administration strategies and the way they’ve been articulated in Foreign Affairs and elsewhere, one of the assumptions is that there is not just the reality of growing Chinese power and the challenge that flows to America and its allies from that power, but also growing coordination, especially since the start of the war in Ukraine, between Russia and China. And then you throw Iran and North Korea, perhaps Venezuela, into the mix, and a couple of others, and that it’s not exactly a new Cold War world, although some certainly describe it that way, but it does seem like you have growing coordination in whatever you want to call that axis, whether it’s axis of upheaval or autocracies or anything else.

And then on the other hand, growing interest from not just traditional American allies, but also partners who are interested in growing security relationships with the United States, including new members of NATO, which certainly would have been a surprise if we’d predicted that four or five years ago; India, which until the recent spat with Donald Trump certainly was escalating its defense cooperation with the United States in striking ways; other players in East Asia. There does seem to be something to that way of understanding the system. What do you think that gets wrong, I mean, both on the ally side, but also on that axis side?

EMMA ASHFORD

I actually think it’s the same problem on both sides as a diagnosis, which is to say that there’s a grain of truth to this. And in addition to the United States and others trying to build up more connections, let’s say, on critical minerals or something like that among democracies, we have seen Russia and China coming together, being pushed together, let’s be honest, by the war in Ukraine and the sanctions fallout. But on both sides, what I’m also struck by is the limits of these partnerships, right? We still see European states, even the Germans, they’re having this active debate about how much they want to trade with China while they’re working with the United States on security issues. The Indians [are] very much playing both sides, siding with the United States on security, buying Russian oil.

And then the same thing applies to this axis of whatever we’re going to call it, growing trade ties between Russia and China, but limits to not just the integration of this as a whole bloc, right? There [are] very strong ties between each member of this axis, but together, they don’t really come together. They’re all bilateral relationships. And again, limits to it, right? Beijing doesn’t want to buy that much more Russian oil because they fear being dependent. And I will tell you that people in Moscow do not like being a junior partner to Beijing. So on both sides, I see limits to how aligned these groups can be in a more multipolar world.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

If you are correct that there is less real substance to the bonds between the members of that axis, whatever we call it, what’s the right American strategy for encouraging tensions, encouraging separation between them over time?

EMMA ASHFORD

Well, I mean, for a start off, it would be resisting pushing them together more, right? This has been an argument since the start of the war in Ukraine, but actually a much longer running argument in the sanctions literature, is, if you push states like Iran or Venezuela out to the margins where the only states they can trade with or work with are other sanctioned autocracies, then you’re necessarily forcing other states to basically build networks that maybe can get around your sanctions that you don’t actually want.

So for one example here: the sanctions on Russia after Ukraine that have led to the creation of this shadow tanker fleet that is no longer insured or recorded in London and so cannot be sanctioned as easily. So now, we may think that’s a fair tradeoff in exchange for the sanctions related to the war in Ukraine, but I think there’s a number of other more marginal areas where we might start to think about ways that we could inject some friction into this.

And I think Venezuela, given that we’re talking about it a lot right now, is a perfect example. This administration’s policy actually started with [Special Presidential Envoy Richard Grenell] going out, talking to the Maduro government about ways to get more Venezuelan oil back on the market, which would make sanctions against Russia more effective, et cetera. And instead, we appear to have pivoted back to regime change in Venezuela. But there [are] ways in which we can prevent these countries pooling together. And to me, that seems like a more effective approach than trying to build up an alliance against them.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You’ve surely spent a lot of time talking to officials in allied governments as they try to grapple with the consequence of this moment and navigate their own way forward. You noted that commitments at least to spend more on defense have been quite striking over the last several months, with NATO allies pledging to go up to five percent, although that’s clever accounting. It’s not entirely a reflection of true defense spending, but it is still fairly remarkable. And you see, as you noted, these increases in defense spending in East Asia, or at least commitments so far. Do you think the allies are handling this well? How do you assess strategic discussions that are happening in allied capitals at this moment?

EMMA ASHFORD

I think we’re seeing some of the same dynamics we saw under Trump one, which is to say a refusal to quite believe that this is happening and a hope that if they just hold on long enough, that America will snap back to the norm. Where I do see the big difference is that I think this is now not the entirety of the debate in allied capitals. I think there’s a lot more awareness of the political currents, the different factions here in Washington, even within the administration, and the different ways that U.S. foreign policy could go. And I think also what I see is a much more willingness from U.S. allies to consider hedging against some of these shifts.

So back in 2017 and 2018, when European states talked about burden shifting, they really genuinely had no fear that the United States was going to pull back from Europe. I think now they are talking about contingency planning, and they are, I think, genuinely dialing up their spending and looking for ways to improve burden shifting, maybe not as far as I would like, but I do think that willingness is there. So whether it is the way the Trump administration has approached this, or I think to be honest, the fact he got elected again at all, that is driving this, I do think the Trump administration is getting a better response from allies to this this time around.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Do you anticipate that more allies or at least American partners will opt to acquire nuclear weapons of their own in the coming decade or two? And if so, would that be a good thing in terms of burden shifting?

EMMA ASHFORD

Look, I think this is one of the biggest concerns about a strategy of additional burden sharing, like I talk about in the book. It’s the fact that there are some states that are still relatively insecure, and that even if they build up their own defense, they may not be able to entirely defend themselves. What makes me fairly confident that this is not going to be a catastrophic explosion of proliferation is that the places where this is being discussed are relatively limited. They’re mostly in friendly or mostly friendly states at the moment, and I think there are very few places, genuinely—South Korea, maybe Poland—where nuclear proliferation seems like an attractive option that doesn’t have so many downsides. And even there, I think there are ways of ameliorating some of those concerns. Right?

In Poland, for example, the French and the German nuclear umbrella could be extended to cover other members of NATO and the European Union. I tend to think that would be a pretty credible nuclear umbrella because of the way these countries are stitched together economically and politically. South Korea is a more interesting case, and I think in part because of the North Korean nuclear dynamics, right? Whether any nuclear umbrella could ever be fully credible in that case, I think, is pretty questionable, and this is why we see the South Koreans already debating it, even though America is still present. But again, I mean, outside of those cases, maybe Ukraine? I struggle to see the countries where they would be willing to take the hit of obtaining a nuclear weapon just to be a little more secure, and there’s a lot that can be done in the conventional defense space. So I am still fairly willing to make that tradeoff: a little nuclear proliferation, if we’re frank, in exchange for a lower risk of great-power and nuclear competition. To me, that seems like a fairly worthwhile tradeoff.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And from an American perspective, it would not necessarily be a terrible thing, as you see it, to have a nuclear South Korea and a nuclear Poland.

EMMA ASHFORD

Look, in the post–Cold War period, our policy emphasized heavily preventing any nuclear proliferation, friendly or otherwise. And during the Cold War, we also worked to prevent friendly proliferation. But during the Cold War, I think we were also much more cognizant of the risks of actually coming into conflict with the Soviet Union. So you see these places where U.S. policymakers declined to intervene, Hungary, 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, because of the potential risk of nuclear exchange, even though potentially in some of these cases there would have been a risk of proliferation. So I think we probably just have to get back to accepting that some proliferation risk is the cost of doing business in this world of competing great powers.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

One of the most striking arenas for burden shifting in the last ten months has been Ukraine, where the Europeans have taken on a much greater role as American support has diminished, American support in a variety of ways. Early in this administration, there was a lot of talk from Europeans about pretty expansive security guarantees for Ukraine as part of the formula for ending the war. European troops on the ground in Ukraine were thought to be one possible component of that. You’ve argued against a European reassurance force of that kind being a meaningful part of this. How do you see the debate over security guarantees now? And as you look at the path to ending the war in Ukraine, do you see any other ways forward, given how both Trump’s diplomacy and some of the European efforts seem to have not fundamentally changed the dynamic on the ground?

EMMA ASHFORD

I might be in favor of European security guarantees if I thought they would actually work, if I thought that a force existed that could do what the Europeans are promising, and it doesn’t. And so, what we’ve seen over the last almost a year at this point is European states making consistent promises that they will defend Ukraine, that they will send a force, that they will engage in cease-fire monitoring, that they’ll provide tripwire forces. And then over time, those just getting walked back. “The force won’t be 200,000 troops. It’ll be 40,000. No, it’ll be 10,000. It will be placed on the Dnieper River. No, it’ll be placed back by Lviv.” And it basically turns out that European states have neither the capacity nor the willingness to send these forces. And instead, what this coalition of the willing has become is, in many ways, an impediment to peace, the idea that Ukraine cannot enter any kind of negotiation until an external guarantor of its own security appears.

For me, and I think I’ve written this in Foreign Affairs and elsewhere, Ukraine is the only possible guarantor of its own security, because what we have proven in the last three years is that there is no country that’s willing to step up and actually fight in Ukraine. Plenty of countries [are] willing to send arms, to send people, to do training, to send money. That’s what we can promise, and that’s what European states can commit. And so, I mean, again, I just think external security guarantees are a bit of a red herring here. And in some ways, they’re a useful tool for those who don’t want to move toward negotiations.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

My sense is that Trump himself and many people around him expected that their diplomacy with Vladimir Putin really would result in a cease-fire in Ukraine, that they would give him Crimea, give him de facto possession of eastern Ukraine, give him a few other concessions on security arrangements for Ukraine, and that that would be enough to stop the war. They seem to have been a bit surprised that Putin did not take it. Do you see another path to a cease-fire, or if the kind of coalition-of-the-willing approach is not the right one, what is the way of getting to peace?

EMMA ASHFORD

I applaud the Trump administration’s willingness to lean in on peace negotiations and talking to everybody to see what deal we could get, whether it’s Hamas, whether it’s Russia. I think that’s really laudable. I think there’s also common flaws across pretty much all of his peacemaking processes, and it is that he is very unaware of the details, and so are many of his key negotiators, particularly [special envoy] Steve Witkoff, that they are not willing to trust, to process, or to bring in experts, whether it’s from the U.S. government or elsewhere, and that they tend to focus very much on the handshake agreement, “We’re going to stop the fighting now,” and then lose interest.

And I think for all of those reasons, it’s somewhat understandable that Moscow has not been hugely receptive to these overtures. Right? You have a Trump administration saying, “Well, we’ll focus on territorial issues, but we won’t talk about NATO accession for Ukraine. We won’t talk about arms for Ukraine afterwards. We’ll just talk about dividing the country.” And I think the Russians don’t know whether they can trust Trump, and they also correctly assess that a cease-fire is where he’ll lose interest in all of this. And so, they’re trying to fight while they talk and see what more they can get from him. And to be honest, in Ukraine, as in some of these other peace negotiations, I think there’s still plenty of prospects for getting to a deal, but it would require this administration to actually change its mode of operation. I’m a little skeptical that they’re going to do that.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And what would that deal look like?

EMMA ASHFORD

I think the contours of a deal in Ukraine have actually been clear since, I mean, let’s say, May 2022, right? It would be some de facto division of territory with monitoring along a line of control. It would be a Ukraine that can mostly arm itself with some key restrictions, probably on long-range strikes. It would probably involve some commitment for Ukraine not to join NATO, but the Russians have suggested that European Union accession and being tied into European markets is acceptable. And it would probably involve, if we’re frank, the seizure of those Russian assets legally, in this case, in order to pay some reparations to Ukraine, and then the Russians would call it something different.

But, I mean, again, all of those parts of this deal have been very visible for a long time now. And really, what the fighting is over now is where the exact line of control will fall. And I think more importantly, can you actually trust, secure, monitor that cease-fire? Who can actually make this come together? And I think that’s where we keep falling down.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

It doesn’t seem at this moment that either Russia or Ukraine is particularly interested in that deal though.

EMMA ASHFORD

I think the Ukrainians are aware that they’re losing and that they’re going to come out of this worse off. I think that’s really unfortunate, because there were times when they were in better negotiating positions. I think the Russians are not insensible to the fact that they’re suffering economic problems, that this can’t go on forever. But I also think they assess that there are maybe years, certainly months, before those things become such a significant problem that they have to seriously consider peace. So for them, continuing to fight while seeing what comes of this . . . I mean, again, I don’t agree with it. I think they probably would do better to settle, but I can see why they come to that conclusion.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let me turn to China, which we’ve talked about a couple of times, but is in some ways the biggest and most challenging topic in this set of questions. You noted in your earlier piece that for the restrainer crowd, China has been a source of some disagreement, that there are different kinds of approaches that you hear from some of the major figures in that crowd. You have acknowledged that competition with China is a reality of American foreign policy and the international system at this point. Is there a way to prioritize competition that doesn’t fall into the errors of the Biden administration, in your view? What’s the right way of crafting that strategy given the realities of the challenges to U.S. interests?

EMMA ASHFORD

Yeah, it’s a difficult problem. I talk in the book about [how] the United States needs to pull back from Europe and the Middle East in order to focus on the Indo-Pacific. “Prioritizer” is now the common term for this. But one of the problems with that approach and one of the risks of that approach is that you lean in too far in the Indo-Pacific. And in particular, you flood the zone with troops and ships and air patrols, and you end up accidentally stumbling into a conflict with China.

And so I think the Biden administration never made it quite that far, but we can see moments where they started to worry that their policies, I think particularly some of the export controls, had become so sort of draconian that they were prompting a response from Beijing, and there were concerns that tensions were getting a little bit out of control. I think, particularly, we all laughed about the incidents with the spy balloons, but you can see after that, I think, an attempt to sort of calm tensions with China from the administration.

So for me, focusing on the Indo-Pacific is not about sending a bunch more stuff or militarizing the region substantially. It’s about rationalizing our existing presence so it focuses on the right areas. So less South Korea, more Philippines, would be one example. It’s about leaning in economically, and I think this might be the most difficult part of the argument that I make because everybody hates trade now. But regional states want better economic ties with the United States. Again, there were all these conversations early in the Biden administration about friend-shoring, about trying to bring critical minerals from other parts of Asia. There was talk about IPEF, the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. And in the Biden administration, that all came to nothing, largely because of protectionism. I actually think that would be something to do in practice that could really improve our standing in the region.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

How do you think Taiwan fits into this set of challenges? There are, I think, others in the restrainer crowd who are not exactly willing to give up Taiwan, to accept the reality of control by Beijing in the near future, but trying to grapple with the consequences in refashioning strategy to at least account for that possibility. A piece by Jennifer Kavanagh and Stephen Wertheim in our pages is one example of an effort to do that. Do you see that as the right approach to Taiwan, rather than what still strikes me as the mainstream approach in American foreign policy of kind of kicking the can down the road indefinitely and hoping that a solution gets easier for reasons we can’t quite anticipate at this point?

EMMA ASHFORD

Oh, come on. That’s all of U.S. foreign policy. We do that on everything. Look, look, I mean, you’re absolutely right. I mean, I think there’s always an element of the Taiwan question. That is because of the fact that we embrace strategic ambiguity. Nobody wants to actually come out and say anything different, because doing so could undermine that ambiguity. So that’s one aspect of the problem.

But I do think that folks within the restraint community, for the most part, come down on Taiwan as Taiwan should defend itself, right? We should be pushing for Taiwan to build, buy, purchase the capabilities that it would need to make itself indigestible for China to swallow. Now, the Taiwanese have not necessarily taken the steps that they would need to if that were the case, and that concerns me a lot, but I think there are folks in the restraint community that might not want to defend the Philippines, might not want to defend Japan. I absolutely would, but I think there’s a fair amount of agreement on Taiwan. And in large part, that’s because Taiwan is, if not indefensible, then certainly indefensible at a reasonable cost to the United States.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let me shift to your first book, which is about oil and foreign policy, or oil and strategy. It’s striking that we’re at this moment in which control over resources and control over supply chains seems to be one of the major weapons of competition. The rare earths versus chips, I suppose, is the key example here. As you reflect on the history of energy in foreign policy and energy in geopolitics, how does that allow you to understand the moment we’re in now, and how do you think rare earths and tech competition will play out similarly or differently to competition over energy in the past?

EMMA ASHFORD

Yeah. I mean, look, I am actually somewhat of a skeptic on the rare-earths notion, and that’s because they’re not rare. They’re found everywhere. As people, I think, are starting to talk about more, this is a processing problem, and it is one that we could actually solve with a fairly moderate investment here in the United States or in friendly states.

Energy, though, is a much more interesting question even today. If you’d asked me five years ago, I would not have called the United States abandoning a green transition and going for sort of global energy dominance the way that this administration does, but there’s an interesting theory here that the United States is capable of remaining a hydrocarbon power, an oil and gas superpower, in ways that other states are not for quite some significant period of time going forward. The energy marketplace, the energy landscape has changed pretty dramatically, even from our assumptions of five years ago.

The other place that I’ll point to where this actually becomes quite interesting is we’ve seen this really strong interaction over the last couple of years between U.S. sanctions policy and energy prices; in effect, the limits of where the United States can use sanctions without actively harming global energy markets. And this is because we have, simultaneously, sanctions on Russia, Iran, Venezuela, right? We’ve got all these big energy exporters, and we’re starting to talk about tradeoffs.

And so, to me, this is interesting. We have all of these flows of energy moving through either gray markets or going through places like the Gulf for reprocessing, going through Turkey, even though we’re sort of talking up here at a level about global geopolitics. In practice, the economics of global energy flows, those already look really multipolar, really flexible, and with lots of states sort of hedging their bets and working around either U.S. sanctions or oil exporters they don’t want to deal with.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I want to close by getting a bit meta. You’ve been a critic at various points of the state of conversation—or state of debate—in the American foreign policy establishment. You wrote a piece for us several years ago called “Build a Better Blob” about creating a better kind of conversation, a more diverse conversation. How do you assess the state of that debate right now as you look at both this moment and the Trump administration, but also step back and look at the way that that debate has developed over the last few years?

EMMA ASHFORD

I still see significant debate and contestation within the foreign policy community. And I think if anything, it is more diverse than it used to be. Right? If we had been having this conversation five years ago, this would have been a story about an old bipartisan consensus and folks mostly on the more restrained or realist side challenging that consensus.

Now, to my mind, this entire debate has broken open. We have lots of different camps. We’ve got the sort of Biden postliberal internationalists who want to build global alliances, the Trump “America first” folks. They’re very Jacksonian, very focused on power. But there’s also the progressives over on the left side of the Democratic Party who have all these universalist notions. They’re anticorruption. They’re prodemocracy, but they don’t want to use military force to do it. And all of these voices are talking about slightly different things.

So, I mean, look, to me, the debate has, if anything, become more vibrant over the last few years. I do not think, however, that we have achieved anything approaching a new consensus yet. I can see the Republican Party trending in one direction, and I think they’re a little more settled on the direction of their foreign policy, which, even post-Trump, I think is going to be much more nationalist, militaristic, but probably not as forward-leaning. On the Democratic side of the aisle, though, I don’t see a consensus emerging anytime soon. There’s a lot of debate about whether Biden was right or wrong to keep America in this indispensable-moment mode, and I think they’re going to be fighting over that for quite some time.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

If you had the influence or the power to shape that new consensus, what would it look like? What would it entail if you were able to decide what it is?

EMMA ASHFORD

The argument that I make in the back half of my new book is for something, I ended up calling it “realist internationalism,” but for a—again—more restrained but more realist approach. So do less in Europe. Do less in the Middle East. Lean in a bit in the Indo-Pacific. Lean in economically. But importantly, policymakers need to start thinking about interests in a much narrower way, right? So focusing very much on American security, American prosperity, rather than necessarily saying it’s all about alliances. It’s all about protecting everybody in the world. We need to get more narrowly focused, and that sounds a little bit like “America first” and the Trump administration to me. In some areas, I would definitely agree that it is.

I think the Democrats also need to move in that direction, because I think they’re certainly not going to embrace a bunch of migration restrictions. They’re not going to become nationalists. But I do think that even the Democratic electorate wants a foreign policy that works for Americans. If you remember that report the Carnegie Endowment put out before the Biden administration, “Foreign Policy for the Middle Class,” with Jake Sullivan, this is, I think, what the American public wants. And so, I think a stable new consensus would be a more interests-driven, pragmatic, nationalist foreign policy. Whether I get it or not, I think that’s anyone’s guess.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

It does make me think back to a piece that Rebecca Lissner and Mira Rapp-Hooper wrote in our pages six or so months ago, making the case for what they call a zero-based foreign policy. They were both relatively senior officials in the Biden administration, and I think would probably themselves fall into the postliberal internationalist camp that you were describing. But they argue in that piece that we should go back, policy area by policy area, and really scrutinize to what extent existing policies in fact align with American interests or not. If you were going to zero out two or three major elements of policy, what would those be?

EMMA ASHFORD

Yeah. No, I mean, I think they’re absolutely right, because I think the Trump administration, I mean, clearly, they like to destroy things. They do not so much like to build new things. So whatever the next administration is, whether it’s a Vance or an [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] presidency, they’re going to have a lot of scope to reinvent things.

I mean, look, for me, I think the most important things policymakers could focus on right now are burden shifting, particularly in Europe. I think that’s going to take time if it’s done well. It’s going to take ten to 15 years. We should have started ten years ago. We need to start now. So for me, that’s a really important one.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And does that mean all American troops out, that we’re still part of NATO? What does that look like? What is the ideal outcome of burden shifting?

EMMA ASHFORD

Yeah, so I would advocate for a phased program of transition over ten to 15 years where we start by removing the most easily replaceable things. That’s infantry mechanized divisions, that kind of stuff, and we end up 12 to 15 years out talking about removing long-range strikes. But the end result would be an America that’s still in NATO, but NATO is fundamentally Europeanized in the forces that are actually on the ground for deterrence and fighting. And I think that’s a sustainable policy because I think European states can do it if they’re given the incentive. So that’s one area where I would really prioritize.

And then the other one that we’ve talked about a little bit already, but is on the economic side. I mean, to some extent, if we’re talking about what the next administration would do in three years, it’s not really helpful for me to say, “Stop antagonizing everybody and destroying the global trading system” right now. But I do genuinely worry about the damage that is being done there. If, by the end of this administration, we are living in a tariff-first world where there are no default free-trade mechanisms between states, I think that would be a really bad outcome for us, and a new administration would have to think about how you build new institutions for economic engagement. That would be extremely difficult.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Emma, thank you so much for doing this. Your most recent piece is called “Making Multipolarity Work.” It draws from the book that you published recently called First Among Equals, and that follows on a series of fascinating pieces you’ve done for Foreign Affairs over the past few years. So thank you for all of those.

EMMA ASHFORD

No, thanks again for giving me the opportunity.