The Return of Great-Power Diplomacy | Foreign Affairs

I'm starting to feel torn between foreign policy realism and idealism. On the one hand, it is clearly rational to leave our wishes at the door and objectively analyse what works in the world. It also seems 'cool' in a manospheric sense to claim to be strictly realist and Machiavellian. On the other hand, globalism has made me who I am and greatly enhanced my standard of living. If it were not for globalism I would not have access to Dickens, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Melville and the like. I would only have access to Malay folk lores, small-minded nationalism and pettiness, and maybe even folk medicine because this part of the world wouldn't have industralized as rapidly as it did. I am a liberal and I want liberal values to spread across the world, led by a benevolent United States, but since that is no longer the way we are headed anymore, it is no longer productive to yearn for it. The author, A. Wess Mitchell, strikes me as a curious character in foreign policy discourse. He would not be considered mainstream 15 years ago - he repeatedly cautions the US against pressing progressive causes in diplomacy. He says Washington elites made a grave mistake in the 90s by integrating China into world trade and deems them naive for thinking that China would transform into a liberal democracy. The wistfulness of our times is that US foreign policy has swung so much that Mitchell's advice now reflects current US thinking. It's easy to criticize Washington elites in hindsight for fueling the rise of their own existential geopolitical rival. But, what other option was there? You cannot starve the dragon. A talented, hardworking population of a billion people, with thousands of years of uninterrupted history, cannot be subdued for long. The US could not allow China to build ties with the Soviet Union. Better to integrate China, embed it into the rules-based order, and manage it as a predictable, legitimate competitor instead of as a volatile, resentful rogue state. Furthermore it is hard to ignore that there were just so many benefits of trading with China: keeping American inflation and thus US interest rates low for one. With China flooding the world market with cheap goods, America could afford to spend more than its produced for so long: is this not the goal of life? Another point that Mitchell made was that Washington, reeling off about 30 years of negligence due to its status as the world's lone superpower, had sidelined diplomacy as an instrument of strategy. Instead, according to Mitchell, Washington, convinced that history had ended, has used diplomacy only as an instrument of its liberal agenda to build institutions beyond the state and remake the world in America's image. I did not realize, prior to reading Mitchell, that diplomacy is indeed a tool used by equals: a superior does not need to bargain with weaklings. Justice matters only among equals in power. Can diplomatic skills atrophy? If they can, then the US might have some catch-up work to do.