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| Image: Flickr User - Ash Carter |
By Mercy A. Kuo and Angelica O. Tang
Insight from Richard Fontaine
The Rebalance authors Mercy Kuo and Angie Tang regularly engage subject-matter experts, policy practitioners and strategic thinkers across the globe for their diverse insights into the U.S. rebalance to Asia. This conversation with Richard Fontaine – President of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), former Senior Advisor and Senior Fellow at CNAS from 2009-2012, previously foreign policy advisor to Senator John McCain and at the State Department, National Security Council and Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and co-author of An Intensified Approach to Combating Islamic State – is the 31st in “The Rebalance Insight Series.”
As U.S. presidential candidates attempt to articulate a vision of U.S. global leadership, how should the next U.S. president frame the future of U.S. foreign policy?
The next president will inherit a world in significant turmoil. In addition to the crises that plague regions as disparate as the Middle East and the Korean peninsula, the rules-based international order is fraying in disconcerting ways. That order, which has for seven decades served our country – and the world – so well, needs to be supported and extended. The next president should articulate how America and its partners will bolster international order and how they will pursue great power peace, open trade, the expansion of freedom and democracy, and other key goals.
All of this will require American resources and actions. The next administration will need to extend the nation’s military edge and improve the economy on which a robust defense depends. It will need to pursue free trade and other open economic arrangements. It must shape norms and set priorities for international action, preserve regional balances of power, prevent vacuums of power from emerging, and stop transnational threats like terrorism.
The next U.S. president will need to demonstrate – to Americans and the world – that we are not retreating from the world but seizing its opportunities, and acting not merely in pursuit of narrowly construed national interests but on behalf of a greater good.
Read the full story at The Diplomat