The U.S. Pivot to Asia, With Robert D. Blackwill and Richard Fontaine

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is the U.S. pivot to Asia.

With me to discuss U.S. efforts to respond to the rise of China are Robert Blackwill and Richard Fontaine. Bob is the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy here at the Council on Foreign Relations. Before joining the council, he had a distinguished career as a U.S. diplomat. His government positions include serving as U.S. ambassador to India and deputy assistant to the president, and deputy national security advisor for strategic planning under President George W. Bush. Richard is the chief executive officer of CNAS, the Center for a New American Security. He served as president of CNAS and as a senior fellow there previously. Before joining CNAS in 2009, Richard was a foreign policy advisor to Senator John McCain and worked at the State Department on the staff of the National Security Council and on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Bob and Richard are the authors of the new book, Lost Decade: The U.S. Pivot to Asia and the Rise of Chinese Power. Thank you, Bob and Richard, for coming on The President's Inbox.

FONTAINE:
Thank you for having us.

BLACKWILL:
Thanks for having us.

LINDSAY:
Bob and Richard, before we dive into the discussion of the pivot, I want to let listeners know how they can win a free copy of Lost Decade. To do so, listeners should go to cfr.org/giveaway. Let me repeat that, cfr.org/giveaway. There you can find the terms and conditions for the giveaway and register your entry. After that, we will select ten names at random to receive a free copy of Lost Decade. Don't worry if you are still scrambling for a pen to write down this information, you can find a link to the giveaway in the show notes for The President's Inbox on cfr.org.

With those logistics out of the way, Bob and Richard, let's talk about the pivot. Bob, I want to begin with you. There is a saying that the eyes are a window into the soul, and I think the equivalent for books is that titles, or good titles, tell you what a book is about. Your book is titled Lost Decade. Why is that the title?

BLACKWILL:
It's because despite the extraordinary breadth and depth of the proposition of a grand strategic turn to Asia that the Obama-Clinton administration launched in 2011, an aspiration to make Asia first in the nation's strategic priorities, not at the exclusion of other vital national interests in areas including Europe and the Middle East, but to make Asia first, and it was heralded. It was much discussed and it never happened, and we seek to show that this pivot was not happening simultaneous with the astonishing rise of Chinese power. And, the two together left the United States, as we started this decade, in a much weaker position in Asia than when Hillary Clinton gave that speech in 2007 and followed with a article in the popular media. So Lost Decade, we lost our competitive edge with China, and now we're scrambling to try to make up for that.

LINDSAY:
So just to be clear here, Bob, my takeaway is you think the idea of pivoting to Asia, making Asia first among U.S. foreign policy priorities, but not the only foreign policy priority, is the right grand strategy.

BLACKWILL:
Absolutely, and we think that because the threat to our vital national interests is greater now than it was in 2011, and Asia is more important now than in 2011, not least because it's now much clearer than it was in 2011 that China is not going to become a responsible stakeholder in the international system. It seeks instead to overturn U.S. concepts and implementation of world order. So it's more important than ever.

LINDSAY:
Richard, let's dive into some of the details there, and I want to go back to the origins of the idea of the pivot, as Bob just alluded to. When we talk about the pivot, we typically date its origins to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's October 2011 Foreign Policy magazine article. I think it was a very long one, six thousand words or so. Is that where the pivot originated? And, I ask that because I often hear from Republican friends, particularly those who worked in the George W. Bush administration, that they had been worried about Chinese power as well and had already begun some hedging activities. So I'm just trying to understand the origins of the pivot and who really gets the claim credit as being the author of this switch.

FONTAINE:
You can go all the way back to the Clinton administration, if you'd like, to see when the first hedging against the possible downturn in U.S.-China relations might ground the United States in Asia because the decision was made to keep all the American troops in South Korea and Japan without any being withdrawn, unlike what we did after the Cold War in Europe. So some in the Bush administration have talked about a pivot before the pivot, but there really was no pivot during the Bush administration, not least because of the post 9/11 wars.

Barack Obama came in, in 2009, and had a strategic impulse that the United States should focus more on Asia and that it was overweighted in the Middle East. He thought he could end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and get a sort of peace dividend. When you talk to those who were involved in what became kind of the announcement of the pivot in 2011, they didn't seem to be articulating some grand new strategy, grand new departure, but rather trying to summarize the impulses and the activities that had characterized the administration up to that point, but nevertheless, once they did, it started to gain some momentum of its own, both externally, but also internally. And, so increasingly U.S. officials, including the president of the United States, began articulating the focus of U.S. foreign policy along the lines of a pivot or a rebalance to Asia.

LINDSAY:
Now, my recollection, Richard, is when the Hillary Clinton article came out and the administration was very proud of its handiwork, but within a span of a few weeks, all of a sudden they were scrambling because rather than assuring the world that the United States had a grand strategy, it had a north star that it was going after, many countries, particularly in Europe and in the Middle East, worried that the United States was abandoning them and that the pivot led to, on the diplomatic front, a lot of churn. And, we very quickly moved to dumping the term pivot and we began talking about a rebalancing. Walk me through how the announcement of the pivot, how the Hillary Clinton article was received by America's allies outside of the Pacific, and then tell me a little bit about how it was received in capitals like Tokyo and Seoul and Canberra.

FONTAINE:
Well, because it was received as such a consequential pronouncement on U.S. foreign policy because the sum total of the thrust of it was that for the first time in its history, the United States would be a Pacific first power. That had never been the case. We were always a Europe first power, even after Pearl Harbor, and we had a Europe first orientation in World War II. And so naturally, countries read this and said, "Well, what does this mean for us?" So in Europe and the Middle East, they said, "Well, if now Asia comes first, who comes second, who comes third, and what does it mean to come second or third in terms of the balance of attention and resources?" and then-

LINDSAY:
People worry about pecking orders.

FONTAINE:
Of course, of course, and the first line of Secretary Clinton's article refers to winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so there was this notion that there would be a peace dividend, some sort of withdrawal or at least curtailment of the intensity of U.S. engagement in the Middle East and that Europe was quiescent and so could kind of do things on its own, without withdrawing a lot of U.S. assets. And then of course in Asia, the question was, "Well, what should we expect? How do we know that the United States has pivoted? What does this actually mean tangibly? Are we going to see more visits? Are we going to see a trade agreement? Are we going to see more military assets here? What does this all mean and what does this mean for us?" And, there were some hints of that in the article, but those were the big questions. What does it mean to put one region first, and what does it mean for the other regions that now, by necessity, won't be first?

LINDSAY:
Well, Bob, I want to pick up on the questions that Richard just posed and we talk about the pivot. It's very easy to describe it at the forty thousand foot level: we're going to prioritize Asia. But, what did the Obama administration had in mind about the actual tools you would use? I mean, you can think of at least three big buckets. One is military, another is economic, and the third is diplomatic. So just walk me through how the pivot was initially conceived. Was it all about military? Was it all about economics? Some mix of the two? Really just going to more meetings in Asia, which seems to hold more summit meetings and leaders meetings than one can count?

BLACKWILL:
Well, the immediate reaction from the ambassadors of these countries that were affected, probably forty of them or so, these governments that were not consulted before it was announced-

LINDSAY:
Which is not unusual with the U.S. foreign policy, pronounced as we know.

BLACKWILL:
Which is not, sadly, unusual in U.S. foreign policy initiatives. They did, and as a former ambassador, I can speak to this, they did what ambassadors do. They ran into the administration and said, "Holy Toledo, this is a big article, five thousand plus words and so forth. Give us the details," exactly of the kind that you were asking, Jim, and the answer was confusion and abstraction. They had no answers to those details.

LINDSAY:
Why not, Bob? I mean, these are very smart, seasoned people.

BLACKWILL:
Because it was a weak interagency process and-

LINDSAY:
And, what do you mean by interagency people who haven't had the pleasure?

BLACKWILL:
I think history tells us that big foreign policy initiatives work best when the entire government studies them together very carefully, meticulously ask what's likely to happen if we do this and so forth, and we don't always get it right. But, if you think, just to give the listeners an example, there was an equally weak interagency process, government consultative process for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and we got the same kind of chaos and confusion. So these ambassadors reported back to their governments, well, we went in as we are paid to do, and they don't have good answers to any of these questions.

Therefore, each of the agencies over this period interpreted it themselves, slowly over time. And, the fact that there was no good answer to these penetrating questions, certainly not immediately, made the anxiety even greater in the Middle East, where it accelerated the perception that we were going home, which was already there, for sure; in Europe, that the U.S. would not defend Europe through Article 5; and, in addition, in Asia, are the Americans after this initiative, this strategic departure, are they going to try to force us to choose between China and the United States. Which so, all across these regions where vital American national interests were engaged, there was a complete lack of clarity about what the Americans had in mind below forty thousand feet.

LINDSAY:
Right. So, the Obama administration had not prepared the train, so to speak, for this big initiative that he was launching, but obviously, they had to scramble in the aftermath because they got this negative reaction because everybody's going, "What's going on here?" Did the Obama administration come up with answers to those questions? It's going to be 30 percent military, 60 percent diplomatic, 10 percent economic, or something else, or did they just punt that issue of what it meant in practice?

BLACKWILL:
They...over the years at the end of Clinton's final year, and remember that this was a year before she left government and John Kerry-

LINDSAY:
Clinton, by Clinton you mean Hillary Clinton.

BLACKWILL:
Yeah, Hillary Clinton.

LINDSAY:
Just want to make sure we get our Clintons correct.

BLACKWILL:
Yeah, get our Clintons straight. Hillary Clinton, a year before she left office, she accelerated U.S. diplomacy in Asia. If you look at her last year, that was the answer to the diplomacy. She went more often and engaged more intensively. They also then over the next year or two or three began to promote the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a enormous economic trade initiative multilateral that was led by the United States to provide an alternative strategic structure to deal with this tremendous growth in China's economic power.

Militarily, certainly the Pentagon would've liked to have more assets devoted to the Asia-Pacific, but it didn't have the resources. So for example, it said, "We're going to shift, 60 percent of our Navy will be in the Asia-Pacific," and they did. The problem was it was a shrinking navy because of shrinking budgets. So as time went on, even those impulses faltered because John Kerry was not interested in Asia, was on a quest for a two-state solution and for an Iran nuclear agreement, and his successors were equally not focused on Asia. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, the economic trade agreement crashed on the rocks of domestic U.S. politics.

And, then on the military side, there were no greater resources available, and as Richard said earlier, the wars went on. Hillary Clinton said, "The wars are winding down." They went on as we now know for another decade in Afghanistan, and then we pulled troops out of Iraq, only to have to put them back in because of ISIS.

LINDSAY:
The rise of ISIS.

BLACKWILL:
The data shows, the data shows that there was no pivot. Everything faltered for one reason or another, and Joe Biden took office in a difficult situation in which American power and influence in Asia had changed dramatically from 2011, to China's advantage.

LINDSAY:
Richard, I want to pivot, if I may, off of what Bob just said, and maybe ask the question in the reverse order. I take the argument that the pivot did not go as far as its architects envisioned for a whole bunch of reasons partly because the world out there wouldn't let go, partly because of domestic politics. Again, I think it's important we talk about the military. Remember the budget battles over the last dozen years, and sequestration, and the constraints we put on military spending and the like. But, looking at that decade after the Hillary Clinton Foreign Policy article came out, there must have been some progress on the pivot. Where do you think that was?

And I ask that against the backdrop of, if I were to talk to officials in the Trump administration, they would always point to their 2017 national security strategy where they, in their view, threw aside the idealism or naivete of Barack Obama and put the spotlight on this issue of great power competition, a theme that the Biden administration has picked up and run with. So, help me understand to what extent we did make progress with the pivot.

FONTAINE:
I think the first area is actually intellectual along the lines of what you were just describing. I mean, this was one of those rare strategic impulses that the Trump administration adopted without the same language. They didn't talk about pivoting to Asia per se, but they continually talked about having Asia as the primary region in U.S. foreign policy, and they had to try to figure out exactly what that was going to mean, try to protect, for example, the U.S. Navy and Asia for being the last to be cut since the overall Navy was shrinking. So one is intellectual.

Also, you know, the Pentagon, the resources were shrinking available to the Pentagon. They didn't have the peace dividend from Iraq and Afghanistan that you might have expected, but over the course of the pivot commensurate with, I think, a growing realization that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and broader nation building and stabilization operations in the Middle East was not the future of U.S. policy. The Pentagon started to shift itself toward a focus on China as opposed to a focus on how are we going to rebuild Syria, how are we going to rebuild Iraq, how are we going to rebuild Libya, how are we going to rebuild Afghanistan, and things like that.

There was a step up in diplomacy. Again, it was up and down depending on who the personalities were and what kind of events were going on in the world, but you did see some new engagement in the East Asia Summit, for example, more with ASEAN and a bigger focus on Southeast Asia diplomatically than one had seen before, and some of that carried over into the future, but the pivot was one of these kind of strange things when it came out, it got a lot of support. Republicans liked it, Democrats liked it, Congress liked it. As I said, the Trump administration picked it up, and so it was perplexing as we looked at this to say, "Why was something that was seen as so obviously correct as a overall strategic impulse, why didn't it have more ultimate tangible support to show for it?" and that's part of what we've been talking about here.

BLACKWILL:
Can I just add, Jim, to that, and you mentioned it that the Trump administration is to be congratulated for shifting America's focus from the delusion that China was going to be a cooperative member of world order and further American national security objectives to realize China had exactly the opposite intention. By announcing it, it started to shift or took advantage of the shift in strategic sentiment within the U.S., but they didn't shift resources. So it was a rhetorical propulsion, which was to their credit necessary, but then resources were not shifted to Asia.

Just to make the point Richard made, it didn't mean that we were inactive in Asia. Of course, we were active in Asia, but the whole concept of the pivot was that we were going to move resources attention from these other two areas to Asia and it didn't happen.

LINDSAY:
I take your point, Bob, that we have a gap. I think you would describe it as a yawning gap between word and deed. So let me ask you, Richard, why did that happen? Why did, to answer your question, did we have an idea that everyone seemed to coalesce around and applaud but not enact?

FONTAINE:
Well, you can look at what it would've meant had it all unfolded the way as originally intended. So look in the defense sphere. That would've meant much more in the way of military resources for Asia. You could do that in two ways. You could have a bigger slice of the overall pie for Asia maybe by ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but those wars, as we just described, continued to go on. So there wasn't much of a bigger slice for Asia, and then the overall pie was shrinking because the sequestration, the Budget Control Act, the Navy was shrinking. There was just less to go around everywhere in the world. So you didn't see the increase in military resources there.

You look at the economic side. The centerpiece of the economic pivot was the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

LINDSAY:
TPP.

FONTAINE:
TPP, and our dear departed Ash Carter when he was Secretary of Defense famously said that he'd rather have TPP approved than have an aircraft carrier. Was that strategically important? Well, it was left till 2016 to get congressional approval. I got caught up in presidential politics. So by the end of that exercise, the two leading presidential candidates from both the Republican and Democratic side all said they didn't like it anymore, including Hillary Clinton who had championed it and, of course, when Donald Trump came in, he pulled out of TPP immediately upon getting in office. So there goes your economic pillar there.

On the diplomacy side, again, we talked about it had much to do with who happened to be Secretary of State, what events were going on in the world. You went from Hillary Clinton who was intensely interested in diplomacy in Asia to John Kerry who was intensely interested in diplomacy in the Middle East and Rex Tillerson who was disconnected in a lot of ways, and Mike Pompeo who did do Asia but also spent a lot of time on Iran policy and then overtaken by very strange North Korea diplomacy and all of this. You put all that together, you don't have a big diplomatic surge of activity in Asia. Those are your three components. They faltered for different reasons, reasons that don't really have to do with anybody saying, "Well, this is a bad idea," but that was the upshot.

LINDSAY:
Bob, I want to turn our view forward in terms of what U.S. policy should be. I take it from where we started that you believe the pivot to Asia should be the core of American grand strategy. Help me understand what that means in a practical sense because one thing we haven't talked about is what the pivot to Asia is seeking to achieve. We talk about the rise of China in contesting China, but what is it that we're hoping to do? Is it that we are trying to compel the Chinese to do things? Is that we're trying to deter the Chinese from doing stuff? Just help me understand what the standard for success would be of the pivot.

BLACKWILL:
That's a tough question, and it's tough because the Biden administration hasn't been able to articulate yet what our objective is in U.S.-China relations other than the bumper sticker to compete and—

LINDSAY:
And align.

BLACKWILL:
—to cooperate and so forth, which, of course, means really nothing. We think that the ultimate objective is not containing China. We can't contain China given its economic weight and its diplomatic activity and its enormous growth in military strength. What we seek is an equilibrium that protects Western concepts of world order in which the Chinese either choose not to or are not able to overturn Western world order. So that's the objective, and how do you achieve that? It's along the same lines we've been talking. It's a bigger defense budget. It's an energetic trade policy toward Asia, we have no trade policy toward Asia now, and it's intensified diplomacy.

And I think it's right to give the Biden administration considerable credit for their diplomacy since they took office regarding Asia, the AUKUS agreement with the Australians, the Quad intensification revival and intensification, the intensified diplomacy in the South Seas and so forth.

But there is one other dimension of it which we emphasize and I'd like to emphasize now, which is intensified diplomacy with China because while we seek to deter them, as I described, we have an impending crisis with the Chinese that could lead to war, our positions, our current positions toward Taiwan, of course. Unless some compromise formula is found, we are in a downward spiral toward war with China. We can lessen the likelihood of that through deterrence, through strength and deterrence, which with our allies, and we always have to have our allies involved in order to have successful policies, but so far, the two sides, the U.S. and China are rigid in their policies.

I think it was Madeline Albright who said that, former Secretary of State, that in olden days, they had a term for two adversaries lessening their differences to avoid war, and she said in olden days, that term was diplomacy, and we need more diplomacy in order to try in this period ahead to avoid a war with China over Taiwan.

LINDSAY:
Bob, I want to get to the issue of Taiwan because it obviously has great geopolitical importance, but before we get there, Richard, I want to go to the question of what is the argument to be made to people who are skeptical about U.S. engagement, involvement in the world for a grand strategy built around the pivot. I mean, it's no surprise to you if you look at the polls, either a majority or near majority of Republicans are skeptical of an expanded U.S. role in the world. In some sense, they want America to focus on issues at home. There's a great deal of skepticism about the payback, what we get the return in our investment from global leadership.

I mean, we often talk about it, but I think for many Americans who aren't steeped in global affairs, they look and say it seems to cause us nothing but trouble. I think to some extent, President Trump's pitch to his followers builds on and amplifies that message. So what is your argument, Richard, to a voter who's skeptical about what we get for being more involved in the world abroad?

FONTAINE:
Yeah, it really comes down to what kind of world we want to live in and the world we kind of live in is going to be determined in part by the strength of the leading countries and their agendas. When you look at the strength of the United States and China, we've been talking about the huge increase in Chinese power and assertiveness diplomatically, that there's really two reasons for, I would say, maybe the average American to think that a pivot of our foreign policy is the right thing.

One is Asia's promise. If you look at the demographic weight, the economic gravity of Asia, part of the underlying promise of the pivot was that the United States could take better advantage of those things, especially economically. So a pivot that includes greater economic engagement not only could have the benefit of diversifying a country's trade and investment away from China, for example, but also benefiting the United States, and it is obviously true that that is on offer if we choose to seize it.

The other is because the chief competitor of the United States and the only one, the only country in the world with the power and the inclination to upend key elements of this world we live in is China and it's most active in Asia. So what does that mean in practice? Well, China has a view of Asia that includes its own sovereignty over what it would say its core interests are including Taiwan, but also the entirety of the South China Sea, and that means keeping allied ships out and controlling, including those economic resources for itself. That's not good for America in the long run.

China has a view of illiberalism that puts the state over the individual instead of the individual right over the state or the party over the individual. That's not where Americans want to be and don't want to see the expansion of that. We've seen a slide in democracy and a rise of autocracy and illiberalism around the world for now fifteen plus years going. China's on the other side of the ledger and takes activities that, whether by intention or effect, empower autocracy and illiberalism. That's a world that makes it more dangerous for American freedoms to endure.

So those are some of the reasons why Americans should care, I think, about what's going on and the idea that we can just hunker down and let the locals figure everything out in different parts of the world, including Asia, is one that we, in fact, have tried over parts of our history and it hasn't ended terribly well.

LINDSAY:
So Richard, let me ask you a follow-up. If you persuade somebody, yes, the United States should be taking the lead, yes, the United States should pivot to Asia, it should make the investments that you and Bob are calling for, what are they going to have to give up, if anything? I obviously asked that question against the backdrop of the ongoing war in Ukraine. As you know, there are voices out there that are arguing that the United States can either confront China and let go of Ukraine or it can support Ukraine and not have sufficient resources to confront China. So how do you respond to those arguments?

FONTAINE:
At the level of resources, I find this somewhat perplexing because government spending does not seem to be our problem these days. Perhaps the matching of spending to revenue is a problem, but we don't lack for ways to spend more money. The fact that the Congress just conjured $95 billion in an aid package just a few weeks ago I think is emblematic of it. The reality is what is happening in Ukraine and what will or could happen in Asia are intimately linked. If the United States were to say, "Well, we really care about China, and if that means that the Russians overrun Ukraine despite everything we've said and everything we've done up to this point, well, that's just a price we're going to have to pay to focus on the biggest priority," one, this would have shocking repercussions in Asia itself and would embolden China, which is assisting Russia in trying to pursue a successful outcome in Ukraine.

You don't have to take our word for that. Look who's aiding the Ukrainians. Japan: $12 billion to Ukraine. Well, they could say, "We'll use that $12 billion for better stuff at home, fend off the Chinese." They haven't done that. The Taiwanese don't make that argument themselves. So how Ukraine turns out and the Western resolve to resist depredations by the Russians and how long the Russians can last and the price they pay for conquest or attempted conquest, all will have ripple effects in Asia, and the abandonment of Ukraine would be completely missing the forest for the trees.

LINDSAY:
Bob, I want to close by getting back to this question of Taiwan because I think that the future of Taiwan is going to be the big issue and heartily contested issue in U.S.-Chinese relations in the months to come. Your occasional co-author, Philip Zelikow just wrote a piece arguing that the next three years may be the most dangerous just given trends, particularly because the United States is now waking up to the challenge, but it takes a while to have sufficient investment to have the capacity.

How does the United States deal with the potential for the Chinese to forcibly reclaim Taiwan, particularly when it's not likely to do so by having an invasion of Taiwan, but to simply up the pressure on Taiwan, essentially encircle it, essentially strangle Taiwan and put the onus on the United States and its friends, partners, and allies to be the first ones to fire a shot?

BLACKWILL:
Well, the first thing we should do is unblock the arms transfers to Taiwan that are now stuck in the administration. We need to build up deterrence. We need to make it more and more problematical for the PLA to act against Taiwan as it studies its options, but that, as you said, is a longer term endeavor. Second, I think we need to engage the Chinese in a discussion of the kind that was had fifty years ago and develop the One China policy about mutual restraint because that policy, which lasted five decades fashioned by Nixon and Kissinger, kept the peace because both sides evidenced, over time, restraint.

Today, China increasingly pressures Taiwan showing very little restraint, and the United States strengthens its bilateral ties with Taiwan across the board, military, which we support, economic and diplomatic, and we've just had more congressional delegations in Taiwan making promises and so forth. It is this lack of restraint on the two sides that are bringing us down this road, whether it's three years or five years, to an inevitable collision and conflict.

2024 is likely to continue to be quiet because President Biden wants to concentrate on the election and Xi Jinping is having substantial domestic economic challenges, but as you go forward, we're on this road, and in the last days even of his life, Henry Kissinger said, "If we don't get off this road, there's going to be a war." I think all of us would agree every responsible American and every responsible Chinese and every responsible member of the globe would realize that a war between the United States and China would be a global catastrophe, and we're not, at least at the moment, sufficiently engaged in trying to prevent that from happening.

LINDSAY:
On that very sobering note, I will close up The President's Inbox for this week. I wish we had more time. There's obviously a lot more we could discuss on this issue, but I do want to say my guests have been Ambassador Robert Blackwill, the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Richard Fontaine, chief executive officer of CNAS, the Center for a New American Security. They're the authors of the excellent and richly detailed new book, Lost Decade: The U.S. Pivot to Asia and the Rise of Chinese Power. Bob and Richard, thank you for joining me.

FONTAINE:
Thank you.

BLACKWILL:
Thank you for having us.

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, wherever you listen and leave us a review. We love the feedback. You can email us at [email protected]. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page on The President's Inbox on CFR.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Molly McAnany was our recording engineer. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.