As geopolitical changes take place worldwide, in great part due to ambiguous and weakened U.S. foreign policy, dangerous alliances are forming that are beginning to upend not just regional balances of power, but America’s superpower status and U.S. national security more generally.
The virulently anti-American nations of Russia, China and Iran have taken advantage of U.S. appeasement, isolationist tendencies and foreign-policy disasters such as the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, and the failure to properly prepare for the invasions of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022 and last month’s coup in Niger. At the same time, these totalitarian states are forming political, economic and military alliances that pose dangerous challenges to the United States.
Or, to put it in pop-culture terms, as historian, academic and Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Russell Mead recently wrote: “Too many Americans still think we are living in Barbie’s world, not Oppenheimer’s.”
Join this discussion of complicated foreign-policy challenges and dangerous geopolitical alliances with Victoria Coates, vice president of the Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at the Heritage Foundation.