I'm Dan Kurtzfelen, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview. in the end an architecture that allows the United States to have the freedom of maneuver it needs to operate to be treated fairly all of those things I think require a census global involvement and staying involved.
Donald Trump's first national security strategy, released at the end of 2017, announced the start of a new era for American foreign policy, one that put great power competition at its center and focused especially on intensifying rivalry with China. For all the dissension and turbulence in American politics since then, that framework for American foreign policy has proved remarkably durable. Nadia Shadla was Deputy National Security Advisor in Trump's first term.
She was the primary author of the National Security Strategy, and it was Shadlow who helped crystallize the return of great power competition as the organizing principle of American strategy. But what it means now for America's greatest challenge is... and whether it still accurately describes Donald Trump's view of the world is an entirely different question.
Shadlow joined me to talk about the second term Trump approach in Ukraine, in Asia, in global trade and more, and laid out a vision of what a successful Trump foreign policy might look like. Nadia thank you so much for joining me I've been looking forward to this conversation. Me too Daniel thank you so much for having me. So you, of course, served as Deputy National Career Advisor during the first Trump administration in 2017 and 2018.
And in that capacity, you helped drive and really crystallize what may be the closest thing to a paradigm shift in U.S. foreign policy in the last couple of decades. the return of great power competition as the organizing principle of U.S. strategy, as it was put in the 2017 National Security Strategy, which you were the principal author of.
How would you summarize that new paradigm that you saw take hold of the first Trump administration? And to what extent has it really persisted across administrations and parties the Biden administration had? a very different view of how you wage a great power competition, but in the basic outlines as you sketch them in 2017, there does seem to be a lot of continuity across administration.
Yeah, I mean, I think at that time in 2017, there were essentially sort of three to five main themes that came together in that strategy. One was that the world was a competitive place. Two was that China was our main strategic competitor and that it was okay to call China out and to describe China as such.
A third theme was that power mattered in the international system and that we were not all necessarily converging toward sort of the happy end state that had been the assumption behind globalization. And fourth, the U.S. could be a catalyst, right, that we weren't going to be able to necessarily do everything, nor should we do everything, but we could catalyze change.
I think those were four themes that come out through that strategy, but they were themes that existed when President Trump was first campaigning for office. They were themes that were in all of his speeches from the time he got into the White House. through the next year.
A lot of times people try to sort of create daylight and I always say, well, Go back to his speeches, look at those speeches, and you'll see that there's actually not much daylight between the national security strategy that emerged and what he was saying and doing during that first year in the White House.
You wrote an essay for foreign affairs in 2020, a few months before the election, called The End of American Illusion. And you wrote in that piece that, and I'm quoting you here, if a Democrat wins the White House, He will likely require convincing that rivalry is an alterable feature of the international system and that it would be a great mistake to return to the premises of a bygone era. You must have been pleasantly surprised by what you saw by the Biden strategy in that regard.
Yeah, I mean, I think the Biden strategy recognized China as a strategic competitor to an arrival and its 2022 strategy stated that clearly. There were two things going on with a lot of visits to China. With Janet Yellen at various times sort of pushing back on the idea that decoupling was something we needed to do in strategic sectors, the messages were pretty confusing at times. Now, having said that, we're seeing confusing messages now too.
Both confusion is bipartisan, right? And the relationship obviously is pretty complex with China. But I do think there was a fundamental difference in the Biden administration in that. They elevated climate and progress on climate to such a degree that I think they were willing to consider and make trade-offs with China in that area. I think a key difference between Republicans and Democrats is
Democrats tend to just have more faith in multilateral processes, right? The more multilateral, the better. And I think Republicans, including me, sort of have a lot more doubt about it. We will come back to the confusion of current U.S. policy or current U.S. strategy in a few minutes. I want to go back to one really interesting feature of the essay you wrote in 2020, which I think tried to kind of flesh out some of the thinking behind the national security strategy. One feature of
thinking in the previous era of foreign policy that you were critical of was this idea that there was kind of an end state, that there would be this kind of liberal evolution in other political systems that would allow us to kind of get past competition and come to a sort of end state of geopolitics. We've had a different version of that end-state debate more recently, which is not so much about our rivals becoming more like us, which was one of the kind of assumptions of 1990s thinking.
It was really about a kind of more aggressive use of American power against rivals. And one very prominent version of this was a piece in our pages by your former colleague, Matt Pottinger, along with Mike Gallagher, Republican congressman.
which they argue that we really need to make it a goal of US policy to change the nature of power in China specifically, to take a much more... proactive and forward-leaning view of American policy in that regard, do you see that as a useful end state or do you kind of come back to this idea that we really have to think of competition as a kind of permanent condition of geopolitics and our policy?
I'm more of the latter. There is no real end state. I think I really like how Richard Nixon formulated his ideas that there's really no such thing as sort of a static piece, right? Your adversary is doing something, you have to do something in return.
My focus has been on, we have an awful lot to do to protect ourselves, to improve our defenses, to deter, to do all the things we need to do. I think there are things We can do on the margins to weaken China, but I'm focusing on the front end of the activities that I mentioned, protecting ourselves, deterring. to the degree we can use alliances in productive ways to contain China or to push back against its global sort of hegemonic ambitions. Those are the things that I focus on.
Another striking feature of competition today that was not quite as prominent or not nearly so prominent If you go back even five or six years, it's how much coordination we've seen among not just Russia and China, but also North Korea and Iran with occasional appearances from other stray rogues like Venezuela or Myanmar or others.
without going down the rabbit hole of whether this is or isn't an axis, and if it is an axis, if it's an axis of upheaval or autocracies or revisionists or whatever else. I'm curious if you... see if the formation of this grouping and the degree of coordination came as a surprise to you? And if so, if it was avoidable, are there kind of mistakes that American policy made that allowed or drove this coalescence?
You know, you noted in a more recent piece of foreign affairs written just before the election that this really does raise new kinds of risks and policy dilemmas for U.S. foreign policy. Well I think it certainly does raise more risk. I think it's an easier proposition that they have. It's easier to sow chaos. It's easier to be disruptive.
coordinating because they're ideologically aligned but they are aligned and wanting to create dilemmas and problems for the united States and our allies and they've done a pretty good job right that cooperation had a material impact on what's happening in the Middle East in terms of Iran and how it's acting and the cooperation frankly between Russia and Iran and then obviously also
in Europe and China and North Korea's assistance to Russia in its prosecution of the war against Ukraine. So we've seen plenty of examples about how this is created. problems for us and also real material problems right like They can produce a ton of ammunition. They can send their poor young soldiers from North Korea to Ukraine to fight and to die. I mean, they can actually do a lot of material things too.
Constant theme over the past few years has been the difficulty that we have had as a country and as the West in producing stuff and getting stuff done and moving quickly on timelines. And all of that has a big impact. That's a different set of problems. I certainly think that those countries have created dilemmas for us, will continue to create dilemmas for us, and I think will continue to complicate sort of war planning and deterrence and all those things that our DOD and defense leaders do.
If you look at U.S. foreign policy over the last seven or eight years, are there things you would do differently in retrospect in order to prevent that formation from becoming such a problem? I don't know how much agency we have to do that prevention right that line of thinking can almost be hubristic right because it's a sense of that we can say we can prevent those relationships from occurring. I mean, it's been quite difficult, right? It was quite difficult to get.
maximum pressure to fundamentally work or change North Korea's trajectory, even though it was a good thing to do. And I think the first Trump administration was the first to really try systematically to impose this maximum pressure regime on North Korea. But it's very hard for us to dictate how other relatively powerful leaders act. I think we can cause problems. We can make things difficult. We can, you know.
if we're creative, create difficulties ourselves for these other powers. And I think we could be much better at that. And that maybe gets me to back where Matt and Mike Gallagher, what they were discussing in their article. There is, I think, a somewhat more sober version of this that you see in parts of the administration that really is shaping the Ukraine debate, at least as it's happening in parts of the administration. And you see people who...
You'll see U.S. support for Ukraine and the war in Ukraine more generally as you know, either a waste or a diversion from where the real focus of US foreign policy needs to be, whether that's a matter of
you know, throwing good money after bad in a hopeless cause or bailing out of Europe that still doesn't spend enough on defense and should spend more. How do you see Ukraine fitting into global competition? This question of... you know, diversion of resources and attention versus credibility and advocates of Ukraine who would say, look, The best outcome is a piece on terms that Ukrainians accept, but second best and certainly better than a piece that is.
favorable to Russia is, you know, if Ukrainians want to continue fighting, then the US spending. $10 billion a year, which is a lot of money. maybe 1% of total U.S. global security spending. That's not such a bad thing if it's tying down Russia and draining Russian power. So you can kind of see this debate coming in various ways. But I'm interested in how you see Ukraine fitting into this global picture, given how parts of the Trump administration seem to see it as a distraction.
I don't think Ukraine is a distraction at all and I think it is hard to make the argument that it is because I think China is looking at what's happening in Ukraine and learning a lot from it. While some might see these theaters as disconnected, I think there's plenty of evidence to show that our adversaries or other countries don't see them as disconnected. American power exerted in a certain way, how allies respond, how the US responds. I think all of that is connected.
Having said that, I think the question now is how do you get to an end state of stability? in the middle of Europe that does not advantage Russia. that allows ukraine to rebuild reconstitute, grow. There was an emerging technology industry there, right? I mean, there was hope in Ukraine as much as, you know, they had internal political problems, of course, and corruption and all of those things. But I think there's an opportunity now.
to rebuild Ukraine in a way that is the best possible Ukraine we can get to. That would be a good outcome. How do you, as you try to understand the twists and turns of Ukraine policy and the relationship between the US and Russia, between the US and Ukraine, and what it means for the war,
Do you see a U.S. strategy emerging? How do you understand the various moves and surprises we've seen in the last 100 days or so? I mean, I think the way the White House is thinking, I don't know, but my sense from reading is that they would like to see an end to the war that's on fair terms to Ukraine that doesn't set up an opportunity for Russia to re-invade Ukraine. I think
President Trump has seen how difficult it is to deal with Putin. And I think Putin has shown his hand in that way. And I think that has created a different set of dynamics in those negotiations. positive i think for ukraine but i think we do learn from the series of events that Every time president Trump says something it elicits a reaction like a huge reaction, right?
Three days later, you might be confronted with a different set of circumstances. So it began with this is all all going to favor Putin. Absolutely. To now we're in a situation where clearly, you know, the White House is talking to Zelensky more. I think there. Lots of discussions going on. There's progress on the mineral steel. It's not perfect but there's progress on it.
So you see a lot of positive dynamics, I think, where early on, what was it, you know, the infamous Oval Office meeting, I think things change pretty quickly, but I think it's incumbent upon us to provide a little bit of context and calm. Sometimes, you know, there's just this always this tendency to rack to every single thing the president says.
without maybe thinking through how something might change in a couple days, a dynamic might change, maybe he's setting conditions for a negotiation, right? I think he sees things much more in terms of bilateral leverage. setting conditions, eliciting reactions just to actually then create a new negotiating stance. So it's pretty dynamic. It's pretty easy to imagine.
a pretty nightmarish scenario from a Ukrainian perspective and from the perspective of the global American interests that you laid out earlier. If you project forward six months or a year, kind of understanding the president and the way he approaches these issues more than most of us do. what's a relatively positive scenario if you look forward a bit? How do you think this may go in a way that will bring a relatively good outcome for Ukraine?
Yeah, I mean, well, first I'll start and say the U.S. never began a support for Ukraine and neither did the Europeans with any statements in 2022 throughout the year, throughout the incrementalism that. characterized our provision of aid European provision of aid I mean it was a constant going back and forth it was constantly played out in the media about which weapons would we provide and which not there was not a prevailing sense of argument about what we wanted the weapons for.
to retake the Donbas? Was it to retake Crimea? Was it to provide a defensive line so that the Russians could not proceed any further? There was never an articulation of an operational concept for what What would the win look like? And as a result, what kinds of weapons packages did you need to make that win most likely? I didn't see that discussion. And it was an uncomfortable one because I don't think people wanted to have the discussion.
the kinds of you know weapons that you would have provided to the ukrainians early on and all at once you can make significant gains and then maybe hold those gains um that's not what happened i think we're not much of a different situation today. I mean, I think We want a Ukraine that can rebuild itself, restore itself economically, become to the degree it can, an economic and technological powerhouse in Europe.
and where russia can't re-attack or re-invade ukraine or continue to take more territory now within that the negotiations about territory about what the ukrainians want to hold on to what they want to retake i think that will come as part of the negotiations but i think in the end Ukraine that can look forward and be a stable, productive country in the heart of Europe.
So let's turn fully to the rather confusing question of what the second term Trump foreign policy really is. We're a little more than 100 days in it, and so it has not fully taken shape, but you can read it in various ways. And one reading of it is that... the president himself, and this very much relates to the work you did in 2017 and 2018 and the pieces you've written for Foreign Affairs.
One reading of Trump is that he doesn't really believe in great power competition that he intuitively buys. you know, that spheres of influence are the natural order of geopolitics and that ultimately, you know, Taiwan is going to be taken over by Beijing, that if Putin wants to swap the Ukraine, there's not much we can do or should do to prevent that and somewhere that the U.S. should.
have similar sway in our own hemisphere, and that a better way of running things is a degree of kind of coordination globally with permissiveness in each power zone geography. Even if it's not quite, you know, a great power concert, it has some resemblance to it. Do you see anything to that description of Trump and how he views the world? And to me, since that's true, is that a useful framework for U.S. foreign policy? Is there any value to that?
I go back and forth I mean I think there are a couple of things that are sort of creating this architecture that the current administration is building one is a reshaping of the global trading system right so i think we can agree on that now i think some people argue that it doesn't make sense or that certain elements of it don't make sense or there isn't an architecture to it i disagree i mean there is right it's a sense that
trade deficits matter i mean you might not agree with it some economists don't agree with it but others do it's a reshaping of a global trading system toward a new type of end state so I specifically think that the constant use of terms like trade war is not helpful because that implies that you're kind of going back to something that was. This is just sort of this tactical series of moves.
And we're going back to something. No, I don't think we are. I think we're going towards something differently. And I think there's so much resistance to it. And so many countries that are frustrated with the president that very few are saying, let's roll up our sleeves. Let's work together. Let's figure out where we want to go. this new architecture of trade I think in terms of overall power I think the president wants a balance of power and that he doesn't want to see
Putin or Xi or other countries take advantage of the United States. So he might not put it that way, but in the end, an architecture that allows the United States to have the freedom of maneuver it needs to operate. to be treated fairly, all of those things I think require a sense of global involvement and staying involved. Again, it's not going to be a win, but it's going to be a constant sense of
keeping the peace, adjusting, pushing back, negotiating when needed, right? The reason I keep going back to Nixon, because I think that period, I've written a piece on that. The period from the 1970s is quite similar. It was about, in Nixon's terms, shared responsibility. He meant he wanted the Allies to do more, that they were rich enough after World War II to do more. peace through strength, which was his phrase, not Reagan's. I learned that. I didn't know that.
And you can see, obviously, Trump ended up using that phrase both in the first national security strategy and now. And third, be open to negotiations with anyone. So in that sense, it's very Trumpy, right? Talking, you know, I think it's absolutely fine. to talk to anyone you want to internationally, North Koreans, Russians, Chinese, but just go in with your eyes wide open and go in with a realistic sense. I think...
It's hard to dismiss the way that Xi sees the world for himself and for the CCP and for China. And so I think at some point... Even if the president and his team want to remain just focused in this hemisphere, they're going to run up against that. And certainly we've seen that already with Panama, right? I actually thought what happened there was very interesting and quite positive.
We spent years and years as a country complaining about Belt Road Initiative and how successful that had been in terms of from China's interests, right? Obviously not local interests, but from the perspective of China. really did nothing effective about it. And then Trump comes in and all of a sudden you have this great, this really interesting new set of dynamics where
The American private sector comes in, changes the dynamics, potentially changes all of those dynamics. But what do you see now? You see China, you see the CCP putting a hold. on that transaction by that Hong Kong-based seller Hutchinson, right?
I think that's really interesting. And I think that also kind of shows, I think, how the White House also sees that in a sense of here's this deal we wanted to make that was, you know, was going along just fine. And all of a sudden it does bump up against what China wants. Can you imagine Trump making a concession on Taiwan in a negotiation with Xi Jinping, really saying, look, you can... do what you want in your own sphere and...
in return, give us concessions on, you know, ports in Panama or other things in the Western Hemisphere, or for the sake of a trade deal. You know, you can imagine that Trump might get frustrated with the Taiwanese the same way he's been frustrated with the Ukrainians at various points. Is that kind of global deal-making part of this formula? I don't know. I mean, I think that strategic ambiguity has been for many, many years the U.S. position vis-a-vis Taiwan.
I actually think that's fine. I think that provides us with leeway. It provides us with flexibility. It creates dilemmas for China because, you know, it creates a sense of uncertainty about what we'll do. And I think Trump is going to continue that. It's pretty hard to have 97% of the leading edge chips being made in Taiwan and basically cutting deals with that, you know, in play. I mean, to essentially. the huge amount of leverage you're giving China, right?
But I think Taiwan, too, needs to increase its defense spending, work with the U.S., all the things that we as a country and the Biden administration was saying as well. i think trump is going to emphasize that too i'm sure he probably already has that's no big insight but i think he's going to take advantage of the strategic ambiguity to the utmost to just keep everyone on their toes which he likes to do We'll be back after a short break.