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The 'damaging our relationship with our allies' line most describes what has happened in Europe, and to a lesser extent, the Anglosphere.
Jeremy Stern got to the heart of some of these differences in a piece earlier this year https://palladiummag.com/2020/09/04/americas-new-post-western-foreign-policy/
Susan Rice's NSC was seen as the source of many of these disliked* tendencies of Obama administration foreign policy: a fp approach anchored on Europe perspectives and values, a consuming focus on middle eastern events that drained attention and
[*with our Asian allies]
[*with our Asian allies]
material away from stated commitments to Asia, a high-handed, holier-than-thou diplomatic tone, and above all else, an Asia policy that privileged Chinese viewpoints and concerns over those of our treaty allies.
This last one is important, because Susan Rice was personally
This last one is important, because Susan Rice was personally
responsible for the tenor and content and US-China relations in the Obama days--or at least in her autobiography she claims she was the Principal in charge of the bilateral relationship, as only she at the NSC could provide the sort of cross-domain coordination this relationship
demanded. That framing (see pg. 433 of her memoir) shows why many politicians and diplomats in Asia detest her: The Taiwanese and Australians knew that in a relationship where everything is cross-linked, their interests will always be traded out for
the sake of what Rice calls "expanded cooperation" somewhere else; the Japanese, for their part, must bear the humiliating 2nd class spot, wondering always why they--though America's most important ally, the hub on which US foreign policy depends and as key to
financial and macroeconomic coordination as the Chinese--don't command the attention of any of the Principals and are not consulted when the wide-ranging bilateral negotiations with the Chinese over *everything* begin. Obama hardly spoke to Putin without hearing Merkel's take;
the Japanese were never given that sort of input to American China strategy, and Susan Rice takes credit for being the point-woman of that strategy. And what did that strategy get them (or us?)
She devotes 10 pages of her book to the US-China relationship (out of 482, Japan gets a few scattered sentences and paragraphs; Australia and India is given the same but fewer; Taiwan, Thailand, and Singapore do not appear in the index at all), the majority of that devoted to a
discussion of the cyber-agreement, an agreement which never had any enforcement mechanism built in and was abandoned by the Chinese not long after Rice left office. Democrats today largely agree that Obama's second term response to China was feckless, not taking the seriousness
of the challenge posed by the PRC nor its authoritarian designs seriously enough. Susan Rice owns all of that. Is it any wonder that our Asian allies shudder to see her name floated about as the next Secretary of State? There are dozens of competent candidates Biden
might choose for this position--must he really go back to someone responsible for what are now generally seen as the worst aspects of the Obama era foreign policy? One who consistently privileged China over our Asian allies, and Europe and the ME over Asia?
P.S. Just some data about how Trump privileged Japan in a way no previous administration had: https://www.the-american-interest.com/2020/04/10/the-virtues-of-a-confrontational-china-strategy/
