Richard Fontaine

And so, you know, for example, I think it's a priority to deal with the global swing states in a way that would ultimately benefit the kind of world that the United States would like to see unfold.

But that involves making choices, right?

Is China the greatest long term challenge to the United States?

I think it is.

But Iran is this, at least whether it was before or not, is this acute security challenge right now.

There's a finite number of military and diplomatic resources to go around.

And some of those right now are coming from the Indo-Pacific, where China is most active, to the Middle East, where China is less so, but Iran is more so.

And so this question of setting the priorities among US foreign policy objectives sort of hangs over all of the news that we read these days and then these long-term aspirations, the likes of which we're talking about today.

Well, the first takeaway is that we're living in a deeply contested geopolitical environment.

I mean, this is probably pretty obvious, but the world has a rough block that is relatively politically liberal that one might call the West broadly defined and another one that is relatively illiberal that one might call the axis of upheaval in Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.

And the contest between the views of the one and the other are going to shape the future of international order.

And so the stakes are quite high in this.

And the second takeaway is that in that contest over the future of international order, there are six countries that are likely to bear disproportionate weight on what the answer ends up being.

Brazil, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey.

All of those are multi-aligned states.

They all play dominant roles in their region.

They're all determined to maintain ties simultaneously with the US, China, and Russia.

They all seek to reform existing rules and institutions.

And together, their weight can help to sway the future of international order.

And then the third takeaway is, therefore, the US should have as one of its foreign policy priorities, engaging those six countries, encouraging these six countries to choose policies that reflect our own preferences and the core principles of the world that we would like to see, as opposed to the world that we would not like to see.