Bret Stephens
Opinion

There’s a buzz around Rahm Emanuel — the former Bill Clinton adviser, former Illinois congressman, former chief of staff to President Barack Obama, former mayor of Chicago — possibly becoming the next head of the Democratic National Committee. The progressive left despises his pragmatism and liberal centrism. He has a reputation for abrasiveness. And his current job, as ambassador to Japan, has traditionally served as a posting for high-level political has-beens like Walter Mondale and Howard Baker.

But he also has a gift for constructing winning coalitions with difficult, unexpected partners.

More on that in a moment. When I met him for breakfast this week at a New York City hotel, what he wanted to talk about is a looming crisis in Asia. “What started as two wars in two theaters is now one war in two separate theaters,” he said of the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. “We need to ensure that it does not expand into a third theater.”

How soon might that happen? I mention 2027, a year that’s often seen as China’s target date for reunification with Taiwan, if necessary by force.

“I think it’s actually 2025,” he said.

What Emanuel has in mind are Asia’s other flashpoints, including along the 38th parallel that divides North and South Korea, where Russia is “poking” Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader, “to do something” and where South Korea’s president briefly declared martial law, and also in the South China Sea, where China and the Philippines are coming to blows over Beijing’s illegal maritime claims. Unlike with Taipei, to which America’s obligations are deliberately ambiguous, with Manila and Seoul our defense commitments are ironclad.

That could mean war for the United States on multiple unexpected fronts. Emanuel’s tenure as ambassador was distinguished by his role in engineering two historic rapprochements — last year between Japan and South Korea and this year between Japan and the Philippines — that, along with the AUKUS defense pact with Britain and Australia, form part of a broad diplomatic effort by the Biden administration to contain China.

The Chinese, Emanuel said, “have a theory of the case in the Indo-Pacific. We have a theory of the case. Their attempt is to isolate Australia, isolate the Philippines and put all the pressure on that country,” often through abusive trade practices. “Our job is to flip the script and isolate China through their actions.”

That seems like a tall order now that Donald Trump is returning to Washington promising to impose exactly the kinds of abusive trade practices that drive allies and potential allies away. That topic provides an opening for me to change the subject to how Democrats might repair their fortunes.

“I was waiting,” he wisecracks. “I knew that was foreplay.”

Emanuel recognizes the anti-incumbent mood along with missed messaging chances by Kamala Harris’ campaign. But there was a larger mistake by Democrats, he said, many years in the making. In 2006, when as a congressman Emanuel was recruiting veterans to help flip Congress to the Democrats, the party was “anti-Washington, anti-establishment.” It opposed the war in Iraq, and it later channeled some of the outrage Americans felt toward the bankers who never paid a price for the 2008 financial crisis. (Emanuel, who had his own stint in investment banking, said he argued for “Old Testament justice” for those bankers when he was in the Obama White House.)

Then came the pandemic. “In COVID, the Democrats put on the outfit of the establishment. ‘We’re going to close schools, you’re going to close these jobs, you listen to the scientists, listen to the science,’” he said. “As both a child of a doctor and a brother of a doctor, sometimes you need a second opinion.”

So how do Democrats reclaim their old advantages?

“From ’68 to ’88, a 20-year run, you had ‘law and order,’ ‘welfare queens,’ Willie Horton — that was the Republican message,” Emanuel recalls. “Bill Clinton comes around and takes the equation of crime, immigration, drugs, welfare, the whole basket of cultural issues, and gets them off the table.” All of these required Clinton to pick at least as many fights with his party’s left as he picked against Republicans, and even now there are parts of the Democratic Party that are still sore about it.

“As I always say to the left, what part of the peace and prosperity were you most upset with?” he asked. “Which part did you hate? Was it the income growth, the employment growth, the drop in welfare rolls, the drop in crime, the fact that America was respected around the world, peace in the Middle East? Which part did you hate most?”

Emanuel doesn’t think it’s impossible for Democrats to repeat Clinton’s feat, though whether it will take one bad election or more remains to be seen. As in his views about the geopolitics of Asia, where Chinese blundering and bullying should play to America’s advantage, so too in domestic politics. Trump “is going to turn the Oval Office into eBay,” he predicts. It will be the Democrats’ challenge to illuminate the fact. The trick in both cases is not to undermine your own side as you try to defeat the other.

“I think Democrats prefer losing and being morally right to winning,” he said. “Me, I’m not into moral victory speeches. I’m into winning.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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