The Pitfalls of 'Ideological Flexibility'

One of the many problems with organizing our foreign policy around great power rivalry is that it becomes a ready-made excuse for every conceivable compromise.

Jeremy Friedman wants to the U.S. be more ideologically “flexible” in its international partnerships to give it an advantage in its rivalries with major powers:

Washington can also be more flexible by no longer framing its competition with China and Russia as a contest between democracy and autocracy. Doing so is unhelpful for building the kind of global coalition that it will take to prevail against both states. Washington should then stop holding summits for democracy. In addition to signaling that U.S. officials do not respect autocratic partners, these meetings require Washington to try to parse which countries count as democracies, leading to charges of hypocrisy. The ultimate result is to drive away nondemocratic allies, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam.

Friedman’s article is a bit strange because the U.S. frequently works with all kinds of regimes when it finds it expedient to do so. He is warning about excessive “ideological rigidity” hampering U.S. foreign policy when our foreign policy is well-known for its opportunism, cynicism, and double standards. The current administration is trying to create a binding security pact with Saudi Arabia and it is using great power rivalry as one of the excuses for doing it. Our government is already eager to use “great power competition” to justify absolutely anything, and it seems clear that the administration doesn’t really believe its own democracy vs. autocracy framing in any case. Friedman is calling for the U.S. to do something that it has been doing for decades.