How Will US Foreign Policy Change If Trump Loses?

Foreign policy usually takes a back seat in US elections, but that could change in 2020 given the Soleimani strike and the high-profile trade war, Chatham House's Lindsay Newman suggests ...

View this email in your browser  Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good   January 20, 2020 How Will US Foreign Policy Change If Trump Loses? Foreign policy usually takes a back seat in US elections, but that could change in 2020 given the Soleimani strike and the high-profile trade war, Chatham House's Lindsay Newman suggests. As she points out, The New York Times calculated in November that Democratic candidates had (at that point) spent more time debating foreign policy than any other topic besides health care. At Politico Magazine, Charles Sykes offers one playbook for campaigning against Trump's foreign policies—play up his dangerousness and damage to America's global standing, and argue he puts his own interest before the country's. But in a New York Review of Books essay, Jessica T. Mathews writes that top Democratic candidates have some work to do. Joe Biden's foreign policy proposals can be grand but contradictory, Elizabeth Warren's detailed but unlikely, and Bernie Sanders's broadly lacking, Mathews argues. If he loses in 2020, Trump will leave behind a weakened international system after a series of seismic, post-Cold War developments reshaped the world (globalization, China's rise, the proliferation of terrorism, the arrival of the digital age, and the return of populism, e.g.), and Democratic candidates need to formulate more rigorous responses, Mathews writes. Given the popularity of leftism, and the strength of Warren and Sanders, Thomas Meaney writes in a Foreign Policy essay that it's time to consider what US foreign policy could look like under a socialist (or social-democrat) president. Such a president would want to "democratize U.S. foreign policy" by returning war-making power to Congress, "reduce the size of the U.S. military footprint, discipline and nationalize the defense industry, and use U.S. economic power to achieve egalitarian and environmental ends"—while de-prioritizing America's longstanding aim of promoting capitalism, Meaney writes. China's Brain-Drain Reversal After seeing many go abroad, China is witnessing a "homecoming" of its scientists, writes Bloomberg's Adam Minter. "According to a recent study in the journal Science and Public Policy, it's been happening for a while," he writes. "The number of Chinese scientists who departed the U.S. for China in 2017 was 69% higher than 2010 departures." The cause: "decades-long investments in scientific education, research and facilities" like a massive, $180-million telescope, which Minter details as an example. The US is still the world's scientific "superpower," Minter writes, but China's progress is a reminder that things can change. 'Global Britain' Faces a Delicate Balancing Act The promise of free-trade deals made Brexit sound appealing, Rana Mitter writes in The Guardian, but the new "Global Britain" touted by Brexiteers faces complicated geopolitics on that front. The UK will have to figure out how to approach trade with China, which could affect relations with the US: Given a provision in the USMCA trade deal between the US, Mexico, and Canada, the US could pull out of a deal with the UK if it cuts one with China, while the question of whether to buy Huawei's 5G network technology also looms. The UK's approach to China will also affect how it deals with Europe, where various countries may align more closely with, or more forcefully against, Beijing. The UK "may soon be forced into difficult choices," and balancing these interests will require "immensely skilled diplomacy," Mitter writes. For Developing Countries, Is Oil No Longer a Path to Success? Some developing countries are finding oil just as the world is getting ready to burn less of it, Amy Myers Jaffe writes for Foreign Affairs—and the ill timing means they can't get (as) rich from the discoveries. As global warming prompts a worldwide effort to cut emissions—and concerns that oil will become less profitable as the world seeks to limit fossil fuel consumption—oil companies are prioritizing projects that can start generating oil quickly, Jaffe writes. At the same time, oil prices are kept lower today in an energy market flooded with natural gas and ever-cheaper renewables; institutions like the World Bank (not to mention investment giant BlackRock), meanwhile, have soured on fossil-fuel investments. "As a result, Suriname, Guyana, Mauritania, Mozambique, and a handful of other developing countries with recent fossil fuel finds are in a desperate race against time," Jaffe writes. unsubscribe from this list  Copyright © 2020 Cable News Network, Inc. A WarnerMedia Company., All rights reserved. Our mailing address is: Cable News Network, Inc. A WarnerMedia Company. One CNN Center Atlanta, GA 30303 What did you like about today's Global Briefing? What did we miss? Let us know what you think: GlobalBriefing@cnn.com Sign up to get updates on your favorite CNN Original Series, special CNN news coverage and other newsletters.