As Central Intelligence Agency director William Burns has been understandably circumspect in making public statements, on or off the record, his article last week in Foreign Affairs made news. The FA promotional material stressed Burns’s reflections on how the CIA is adjusting, and must adjust, to the times. News coverage of his article focused on Ukraine, Russia, and Iran. In SIG’s view, however, the most interesting passages were on “middle powers” vis-à-vis US-China relations.
“In this volatile, divided world,” Burns wrote, “the weight of the ‘hedging middle’ is growing. Democracies and autocracies, developed economies and developing ones, and countries across the global South are increasingly intent on diversifying their relationships to maximize their options. They see little benefit and plenty of risk in sticking to monogamous geopolitical relationships with either the United States or China.” Unlike many in the US intelligence community, Burns does not go on to say that states will need to choose which side they are on. He simply accepts the situation as a reality that the US must accept and address rather than hope to reverse.
To be fair to the reporters linked above, Burns’s passage on the “hedging middle” was not new and therefore not really news. Somewhat surprisingly, the passage and indeed much of the FA article had already been published in July of last year in the Washington Post, an opinion piece that was itself adapted from remarks that Burns had made earlier that month at the Ditchley Foundation. Even the somewhat off-kilter metaphor of open geopolitical marriage survived from the earlier speech.
Still, Burns’s acceptance of the legitimacy of middle powers keeping their options open is important to register. It is one thing to say, as Burns has been saying for a number of years, that the days of US hegemony are over. It is quite another to draw from this the conclusion that the US just has to make do with autocracies or democracies, as the case may be. Indeed, that implication runs counter, at least in spirit, to President Biden’s “summits for democracy” policy.
Burns’s vision is probably close to what Biden actually thinks about alliances and democratic values, as distinct from what he sometimes says. After all, Biden would have had opportunities, in eight years as vice president, to push the Obama administration toward an explicitly values-based or activist foreign policy. But Biden, who was the youngest member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the mid-1970s and left it as chairman in 2009 when he entered the White House, tended to come down on the pragmatist side as vice president and has kept to that path as president.
This was a departure from the Clinton-era Democratic Party. It emerged in the Obama administration. Obama’s antagonism toward the foreign-policy “blob” normalized a pattern of public idealism atop policies of taking “the world as it is,” a phrase that gave top Obama foreign-policy advisor Ben Rhodes the title of his memoir. The pattern has continued under Biden and solidified into a doctrine, or at least an idea, of how to deal with “middle powers.”
It's hard to know where the idea originated, but one can easily imagine Burns playing a major role. The son of a general who was very active in policy-making, Burns was the most celebrated professional diplomat of his generation. Of the Biden national-security triumvirate of Blinken-Burns-Sullivan, Burns was the only one with many years of experience dealing directly with foreign friends and adversaries. This made him unique among CIA directors, and his unusual para-diplomatic assignments under Biden, along with his being given cabinet status, have reinforced his unique position. So do his singular personal qualities. As anyone who has met him will attest, he is an almost extravagantly modest person, starkly different in that respect from many of his predecessors. (A collection of oral histories about Burns’s State career captures this and similar qualities in the words of his contemporaries.) He has a mesmeric ability to inspire trust among enemies as well as friends. His personality and professional practice alike suit him to accepting and dealing with a “hedging middle.”
This could soon have domestic political consequences. It has often been noted that Biden’s China policy continued Trump’s China policy, and as a result has enjoyed a bipartisan support otherwise almost absent from US politics. Biden has even taken the approach to new lengths with his adoption of a China-focused industrial policy and a much more extensive program of techno-containment than Trump had attempted. The trade deficit with China has shrunk to the level of 2003, and US tech companies are benefitting from government encouragement while China’s tech sector is still struggling to adjust to Xi Jinping’s much more heavily interventionist policies. But the Biden administration has not stressed either the Trumpian “business” approach, which emphasized that China was an unfair competitor, or the values approach, which was more an appeal by Trump’s advisors for a moral confrontation with Chinese Communism. Both of these can be expected to form the core of the Trump campaign’s attempt to differentiate its China policy from Biden’s. It is hard to imagine a second Trump administration displaying any tolerance for a hedging middle constantly weighing its options. As before, nations will probably be pressured to make a choice between the US and China.
Between now and November, the Biden administration will likely stick with its policy of trying not to force other countries to choose between the US and China or between democracy and autocracy. The policy has the public endorsement of Burns and Sullivan, and a bit less enthusiastically of Secretary of State Blinken. It is definitely an investor-friendly policy and, in its way, globalization-friendly during a period of anti-globalization still under the shadow of Trump’s successful appeal to economic nationalism. But it might not be permanent, and investors will want to do some hedging of their own in preparation.