I'm Dan Kurtz-Valen, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview.
I think if we won other countries on board with our policies,
which we do, spelling out the intent behind them is actually quite important.
There's a near consensus today that U.S.
foreign policy has entered a new era.
But how to define and navigate this new era is much less clear.
How to set priorities, how to understand power, how to reshape strategy.
Richard Fontaine, the CEO of the Center for a New American Security,
has held senior positions across the U.S.
government in the Senate at the State Department and National Security Council as an advisor to John McCain.
There are few people who can offer as informed and comprehensive a view of U.S.
foreign policy,
especially at a moment when the United States is rethinking its own strategic objectives and sometimes struggling to find new ways of pursuing them.
So you bring both pretty deep experience and a broad perspective to a very wide range of issues in U.S.
foreign policy.
And we'll get to a number of those today.
But I want to start the conversation by referring back to a piece you wrote in Foreign Affairs at the start of 2022 on what you saw as the big failing in the Washington conversation about China strategy across both parties.
And I'm going to quote you here after noting the bipartisan shift towards a harder line China policy wrote,
There is, however, a glaring omission in the new China policy and objective.
Competition is merely a description of U.S.-Chinese relations, not an end in itself.