US foreign policy finds itself in a structural bind

STORM LAKE, Iowa — At Synod School last week, Bill Davnie, a member of the Presbytery of the Twin Cities Area who spent 30 years with the State Department, spent an evening looking at world affairs and answering questions. About 60 people attended.

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Davnie put in five years in ministry ahead of a long State Department career that took him around the world.

He traced the nation’s foreign policy back to the Second World War, noting that for decades a rules-based international order prevailed. That system relied on organizations including the United Nations, International Monetary Fund and World Bank to “link countries together,” he said.

After the fall of the Soviet Union — Davnie was then serving in Moscow and witnessed it firsthand — “we thought we’d won,” he said. One magazine’s cover story was “The Cold War is over, and the winner is China.”

“We thought we would have a peace dividend,” he said. “The 1990s seemed great, but then we got to 9/11.” That turned the nation’s foreign policy “into the global war on terror, which turned out to be a disaster,” he said. “You can’t extinguish terrorism, because terrorism is a technique.”

In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq “against the views of the powers that be,” with the exception of Tony Blair, the prime minister of Great Britain. “That dominated our foreign policy,” Davnie said. China continued to grow. The post-Soviet Union nations joined China and Central Asian countries to form the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, “kind of a NATO, but not quite,” according to Davnie.

BRIC nations — Brazil, Russia, India and China, while recently adding Indonesia —have joined as “a meaningful chunk of the world’s population and economy,” he said.

“Yet we still continued to act like we ran things,” he said. “That’s the structural bind we’re in. We are not in the old structure and we don’t yet have a new structure.” He cited these words from former presidential advisor Fiona Hill: “The unipolar American world is long gone and we are seeing its last moments. This fact cannot be fully acknowledged here in the U.S. or anywhere else. This is one of those turning points.”

For the last 500 years, the world has been run by 1/8 of its population. “That era is clearly over,” Davnie said. “The power center is moving. It’s a big psychological shot to realize we don’t run all this anymore.” Davnie noted this observation from Thucydides: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”

The United States still has, by far, the strongest military force in the world. “With a really big hammer, you look for a nail,” Davnie said. “If you have a powerful tool, you’re going to want to do something with it.”

He touched on reactions to tariffs and other policies imposed by President Trump on countries including Brazil and Canada, where Prime Minister Mark Carney has united Canadians who are opposed to American policies. “They are more together than they’ve been for a long time, and it’s happening with other countries,” Davnie said.

The U.S. is still an important world power, of course. It has 800 military deployments of military personnel around the world. “We are important,” Davnie said, “but we aren’t dominant.”

During a question-and-answer session following his talk, Davnie said the U.S. still accounts for 43% of global arms sales. “We have lots of good stuff, and people want to buy it,” he said. “But we are telling Europe to stand on their own two feet so we can move over to Asia.” Countries like Italy, he said, have “meaningful defense industries,” and other nations may turn to them instead of the United States.

Asked about the Trump administration’s sharp cuts to the State Department, Davnie said that “any organization is subject to reorganization.” But the State Department hasn’t been fully staffed for the last 15 years or longer, he said.

“A quirk of diplomatic missions is the number of foreign service diplomats is probably 10%” of the personnel in any country. “The rest are military, Defense and Commerce Department people — not State Department officers who do negotiating and communicating with other countries.”

Each summer, the Synod of Lakes and Prairies puts on Synod School at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa.