This video is a must-watch. I rarely agree with @brhodes

 But he’s 100% correct here.

He says he’ll “always be haunted” by a comment that Xi Jinping made to Obama in 2016 when referring to Trump: “If an immature leader throws the world into chaos, the world will know who to blame”.

Why does it haunt him? Because in his words “we’ve kind of been dealing with that ever since”.

He mocks Biden’s foreign policy of trying to restore a “Liberal rules-based order with the U.S. at the center of it” (i.e. U.S. primacy) as “designed for the world that doesn’t exist anymore”. Remember Rhodes was Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor, so it’s quite something to hear him say that…

He illustrates this with the contrasting performances of China and the U.S. at APEC in Peru: on one side you had China’s multibillion-dollar port and on the other Blinken’s “few million in diesel engines”. It really illustrates two different worldviews: one stuck in a patronizing past of small-scale ‘aid’, the other focused on serious development partnerships.

In fact when you think about it, Biden and Trump are really two sides of the same coin on foreign policy: their platforms – “Make America Great Again” and “America is Back” – both represent different flavors of nostalgia for a world that structurally cannot exist anymore; we’re in a multipolar world now. As Rhodes says, this leaves the U.S. swinging erratically between two obsolete visions while the rest of the world moves on. The Global South isn’t ‘aligning with China against the West’ as much as it’s choosing predictability and development over chaos and condescension.

He’s right that “there’s opportunity in a rebuild” of America’s foreign policy. In fact there’s no other option, you need to deal with the world as it is: as such the “opportunity” is in adapting, and in not persisting in wishing reality away and fighting windmills.

As for what adapting means, the most important aspect is to understand how a civilization that’s been seeing itself as universal for centuries can come to terms with being one among many, which is what the multipolar world means. How can you be “Western” without insisting everyone else must follow your model? How can you now coexist with non-Western civilizations whilst having sought to dominate the world for so long? How can you rebuild an identity that honors Western traditions without trying to export them as universal truths?

The U.S. doesn’t need a new strategy to ‘compete with China’ – it needs to fundamentally reimagine its role in a world where it’s one civilization among many. This means abandoning both Trump’s aggressive nationalism and Biden’s missionary liberalism in favor of something more humble and realistic.

That’s the real existential challenge facing the U.S. and the West in general, not the “China threat” or “authoritarianism” as you’re always told, but whether we can come to terms with genuine coexistence with other civilizations – not as pupils to be taught or threats to be crushed, but as equal powers pursuing their own paths.

Vir: Arnaud Bertrand via X

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