George Packer: Buttigieg looks to Truman, not Obama, on foreign policy

By contrast, whether you agree with them or not, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have been crystal clear in what they see wrong in the Obama years. They believe the former president tolerated a rigged global economy, did not pay enough attention to oligarchic authoritarianism, and set the defense budget far too high. There is a centrist critique too: Obama was too complacent about the trajectory of world politics, did not take geopolitical competition seriously enough, and proved too risk-averse. Buttigieg seemed to want to have it both ways—to be the candidate of change within his party without ever quite explaining what that meant.

The closest he came was on China—the most impressive part of his speech, along with the passage on climate change—admirably warning of the rise of techno-authoritarianism and condemning reeducation camps in Xinjiang. Buttigieg seems genuinely offended and worried by China’s challenge to liberal values. He told The Atlantic’s George Packer that China seeks “the perfection of dictatorship,” that “it’s not wrong to perceive a real challenge from China,” and that the Trump administration’s orientation on China is not completely incorrect. In other recent interviews, he has spoken about the China challenge, and he tweeted about the anniversary of Tiananmen and Hong Kong, so this has been building for a while.

But even on China, there were missed opportunities. He did not say, as former Obama-administration officials have written, that successive administrations have gotten China wrong in important ways—this would have allowed him to make the case for a break with Obama. Although he implied as much, he stopped short of explicitly stating that the United States is in a geopolitical competition. He said nothing about his affirmative vision for the Asia-Pacific, the key geopolitical element of any China policy. He spoke about improving domestic competitiveness, but Warren has gone further in calling for an industrial policy to invest in key technologies where the Chinese mercantilist system may have an edge. The China frame has a lot of potential as a political message, but Buttigieg will need to do more to explicitly link his foreign policy to his economic agenda.

Peter Beinart: Democrats are avoiding the China question

International economics may be where Buttigieg is most vulnerable. He promised to take the concerns of the middle class into account. However, he also said that “globalization is not going away,” and that the way to deal with its challenges is to harness the potential of global markets, support immigration, and leverage the education system.

It was all a bit mid-2000s. There was no suggestion that the United States and like-minded countries could change the patterns of globalization if they so desired. Trade was mentioned only in passing. We were left none the wiser as to whether Buttigieg supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership or the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership or the World Trade Organization. He did call for updating international institutions, but that was a line that could have been—and indeed was—uttered by Obama in 2007. Then it was fresh. Now, without details and with adverse shifts in Brazil, China, and Russia, it sounds clichéd.