Haley and the Debilitating Obsession with 'Strength'

It says a lot about Haley’s foreign policy views that one of her biggest complaints about Trump’s China policy is that he was occasionally too diplomatic.

I wrote about Nikki Haley’s China speech at the American Enterprise Institute this week:

At one point in her speech, she called Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Beijing a “gold-plated invitation for more Chinese aggression.” She later tried to walk this back a little during the questions, saying that she objected to the way that the Biden administration was doing things, but it’s hard to see what kind of diplomatic engagement with China she would support other than issuing threats and ultimatums. 

Obviously I didn’t like or agree with the speech. One of the things I found most annoying was Haley’s obsession with saying that strength was the answer to everything. As I say later in the column, “As she sees it, the only things that matter are strength and showing strength. Anything less opens the door to aggression.” It’s not just that this is a crude and simplistic way of thinking about relations with a major power rival. It rules out the possibility of substantive cooperation even when it would be in the best interests of both parties to do so out of a childish fear of appearing “weak.” It also leaves the U.S. at a disadvantage because it ignores other tools of statecraft that are often much more effective in securing American interests than bluster, threats, and shows of force. This same obsession with strength has led the U.S. down some very treacherous paths to wars that it could have avoided and left the U.S. weaker than it was before.