Biden’s ‘Coalitions of the Willing’ Foreign-Policy Doctrine | The Islamic State Never Went Away | The Chipmaking World Hedges Its Taiwan Bets, and more

The strategy represents a significant shift from the traditional tenets of the Democratic Party’s foreign policy. In the Obama era, Washington focused on pushing major foreign-policy initiatives through the U.N. system or other major multilateral blocs—such as the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya that first relied on a U.N. Security Council green light or President Barack Obama’s emphasis on tackling climate change through major U.N. confabs.
Instead, Team Biden is increasingly relying on smaller, fit-for-purpose “coalitions of the willing” to advance specific policy agendas on major crises.

The Chipmaking World Hedges Its Taiwan Bets  (Rishi Iyengar, Foreign Policy)
For months, if not years, governments and industries that rely on semiconductors have worried about the possibility of China invading Taiwan. The island, after all, makes about 92 percent of the most advanced computer chips that now run practically every aspect of our lives, and any disruption to its chipmaking ability would quickly have cascading effects. 
Last week, the world served up a grim reminder that China is not the only threat when a 7.4-magnitude earthquake hit Taiwan’s eastern coast—the biggest quake that the island had experienced in a quarter century. As it stands, the damage was relatively contained, and the island’s major semiconductor factories—including those of industry giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC)—were back up and running around 24 hours later. 
“Apart from certain production lines in areas that experienced greater seismic impact, equipment in Taiwan fabs have largely been fully recovered as of April 5,” the company said in a statement emailed to Foreign Policy, adding that more than 70 percent of the recovery took place within 10 hours of the earthquake. 
TSMC has spent years preparing for exactly this scenario. “TSMC has a long-established enterprise risk management system in place to minimize the potential disruption,” the company said, adding that its factories are designed with earthquake prevention in mind and that it conducts regular “disaster drills” among its workforce to ensure that they can get their facilities back up and running quickly. 
For Taiwan, the quake may have been more of a blip than a blow. But for government and chip industry bigwigs—particularly in the United States—it was yet another warning about the need to dial back dependence on the island. 

The Islamic State Never Went Away  (Colin P. Clarke, Foreign Policy)
With the recent Moscow concert venue attack that killed more than 140 people, the Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K) surprised many who may have believed that the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, was a problem of the past.
In fact, the Islamic State never went anywhere. According to the Global Terrorism Index, an annual publication from the Institute for Economics & Peace that attempts to measure the impact of terrorism worldwide, the Islamic State “remained the deadliest terrorist group globally for the ninth consecutive year, recording both the highest number of attacks and deaths from terrorism.” Islamic State attacks earlier this year, in Iran and Turkey, underscore this dynamic.
At its peak, the Islamic State controlled territory in the Middle East that was equal to approximately half the size of Great Britain. It attracted tens of thousands of foreign fighters from dozens of countries worldwide. At the time, it seemed that the Islamic State was ubiquitous, but an aggressive U.S.-led counterterrorism campaign referred to as the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS helped usurp the organization’s control of large swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria—particularly the group’s strongholds in Mosul and Raqqa, respectively. There was widespread optimism that the scourge of the Islamic State could be defeated once and for all.
But the Islamic State was well prepared for this inevitability. Part of the Islamic State’s strategy was to expand globally, developing a worldwide network of franchise groups, affiliates, and branches that could carry out its mission in different regions. This campaign succeeded. After its rise and fall in the heart of the Middle East, the Islamic State’s center of gravity has shifted to parts of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Now that the Islamic State is perceived as more of an African and South Asian problem, countering the group has dropped significantly on the international community’s agenda. In the West, particularly in the United States, the national security establishment is focused instead on the rise of China, the war in Ukraine, fallout from the Israel-Hamas war, and the proliferation of emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence.
When global terrorism appears to fade, it is typically in response to counterterrorism pressure.
But terrorism is a tactic. It never actually goes away, and it endures because it is versatile—an asymmetric tool of non-state actors, or the preferred response of states sponsoring proxy groups.

Strategic Rulemaking for Economic Security and Statecraft  (Adam Chan and David Rader, Lawfare)
In the era of strategic competition with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), U.S. policymakers are largely united in expressing the need for a whole-of-government response to economic and technological challenges. Despite this bipartisan imperative, a mandate to address economic statecraft is entirely absent from the mission of numerous federal government agencies and offices—from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the Department of Labor—that could play a major role in America’s response to the PRC’s activities. Thus, the question of how to fully leverage the president’s entire Cabinet to meet economic statecraft imperatives or respond using the entire executive branch remains an enduring challenge.
The answer to this question, however, might lie with a little-known government agency: the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA).

Peak Economic Security? The Securitization of U.S.-China Economic Relations and Rethinking Resilience  (Matt Ferchen, Lawfare)
While the United States and China used to see economic interdependence as a pillar of stability in their relationship, they now increasingly view their trade and investment ties through the lens of economic security. That is, leaders in both countries are concerned that commercial dependencies on the other will expose them to unwanted influence or competition. Specific measures are needed to reduce those dependencies, the thinking goes, as well as to shore up their own sources of economic leverage over each other or third countries. In the U.S., leaders and policymakers have expanded, strengthened, and refined the government’s already substantial economic security toolkit. In China, meanwhile, President Xi Jinping has uprooted a decades-long prioritization of economic development and growth by instead emphasizing the overriding importance of security. This expanding focus in the U.S. and China on the risks of economic interdependence has also been mirrored by countries and businesses from Asia to Europe and beyond, most prominently via Japan’s Economic Security Promotion Act of 2022 and the EU’s Economic Security Strategy of 2023. 
Yet the growing centrality of security as a feature of international economic relations is also fueling concerns about the costs of over-securitization and calls for alternative approaches to fostering economic resilience by some analysts in the U.S. and China as well as by countries caught in the middle of expanding U.S.-China economic security rivalry. In response, any coherent and long-term effort to reset and reimagine U.S. economic leadership on the world stage needs to better articulate and signal the scope and aims of America’s approach to economic security toward China. For such an effort at a new era of international economic leadership to succeed, the U.S. should demonstrate to its allies, partners, and countries in the Global South that its economic security strategy does not just rely on the use of coercive economic measures but also presents a positive vision of sustainable interdependence, one that includes China.

Operationalizing a Doctrine for U.S. Economic Statecraft  (Alex Zerden and Leland Smith, War on the Rocks)
The opening salvos of the U.S. response to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine came from an unlikely place. As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky pleaded for ammunition, Commerce and Treasury Department officials rapidly deployed extensive and novel economic weapons against Russia. In Washington, these measures represent the elements of economic statecraft, an important but largely undefined concept. Since at least 2011, senior government officials have used the concept of economic statecraft to explain the tools of U.S. economic power for foreign policy and national security purposes. These include economic sanctions, inbound and outbound investment review, export controls, economic diplomacy, and direct and indirect financial assistance. Expanded use of tariffs and export controls under the Trump administration demonstrated the toolkit available to policymakers that created a nascent bipartisan consensus during the Biden administration.
Major changes occurred under Biden as well. The administration prioritized U.S. industrial policy and other forms of domestic investments to complement mostly extraterritorial, national security-focused actions. Policy pronouncements like National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s April 2023 Brookings Institution speech on renewing American economic leadership provided an important high-level framing for international economic policy. More recently before returning to the Biden administration, Deputy National Security Advisor Daleep Singh articulated a “positive vision” of economic statecraft that lays down “principles, rules, and a code of conduct” to anchor elements of what may become an administration doctrine.
However, more work is required to implement these concepts and focus on economic tools deployed for national security (as opposed to economic) purposes. U.S. agencies currently lack the resources, staffing, and organizational design to accomplish this mandate. For fiscal year 2024, the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence requested $244 million and the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security requested $222 million. Despite the greater emphasis placed on strategic competition and technological advancement in recent National Security Strategies and National Defense Strategies, these two agencies’ requests were less than 0.06 percent of the Department of Defense’s request of $842 billion. For the cost of about six V-22 Osprey aircraft (that the department grounded last year) or less than the cost of Strategic Command’s recently announced cost overrun, the relevant Treasury and Commerce offices could double in size.
Right now, Washington expects too much from its civilian economic statecraft workforce without sufficiently resourcing them. They receive a fraction of the Department of Defense’s appropriations yet the Treasury, Commerce, and State Departments are expected to perform as co-equal departments. With more resources, economic statecraft practitioners can import Department of Defense best practices around doctrine, planning, joint force structure, and training, but these first require more resources.