Meet the New Boss, part I
Where Joe Biden is likely to break with Donald Trump's foreign policy, and where he's likely to continue it.
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I want to preface this by saying that even now we still don’t know for certain that Joe Biden is going to be the next president of the United States. Things look much more certain than they did a few days ago, when Daniel Bessner published his look ahead to a Biden administration foreign policy, but they’re not set in stone yet. Multiple outlets have now called the election for Biden, but Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to fight the outcome. That means there could be multiple recounts and/or lawsuits, and while the election looks too far out of Trump’s reach for even an unaccountable Supreme Court to save him, and a lot of Republican rats are jumping ship, it would be irresponsible not to point out that this election isn’t entirely over yet.
This two-part essay for FX subscribers is not going to duplicate Bessner’s excellent look at the big picture of what a Biden foreign policy likely means. Instead we’re going to take a more granular look at some specific issues and how I think Biden is likely to approach them. In this first part we’re going to focus on what I expect Biden to do differently, for better or worse, than Trump. In Part II we’ll look at areas where I suspect he’ll (despite all the campaign rhetoric about how awful Trump’s foreign policy has been) try to build on what Trump has done. We’ll also take a look at a few wild cards that could affect Biden’s foreign policy approach.
To some extent, and this is my last caveat, this is guesswork. As Alex Thurston and I wrote earlier this year in Jacobin, any administration’s foreign policy is as much reactive to events as it is proactive. I might even go further than that and say that over the last two decades US foreign policy has been more reactive than proactive, which is one of the prices of empire. Until Biden takes office it’s impossible to know for sure how his foreign policy will unfold. I’ll be relying to some extent on the same Foreign Affairs essay Bessner cited in his piece, because it’s the clearest distillation of Biden’s foreign policy vision, as well as some of the deliberately vague policy statements on his campaign website. Fortunately, in the case of this particular president-elect, we have an almost 50 year record on which to draw, going back to Biden’s arrival in the US Senate in 1973. That record—mostly pro-military and pro-intervention—will also guide my speculation.
What May Change for the Better
In his Foreign Affairs piece, Biden mentions “authoritarianism” or “authoritarian leaders” on several occasions, and pledges to make “defending against authoritarianism” one of his administration’s chief foreign policy principles. While US presidents have over the decades paid heavy lip service to the idea of opposing authoritarian governments abroad only to maintain close alliances with some of the most repressive regimes in the world, there’s reason to take Biden at his word here—to a point. That’s because, while the US has never held a consistently anti-authoritarian worldview, Trump was consistently more willing to be openly supportive of authoritarian leaders than past presidents. From Vladimir Putin to Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, from Viktor Orbán to Mohammed bin Zayed, from Narendra Modi to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, From Jair Bolsonaro to the Saudi royal family, Trump has relished his friendships with plenty of dictators and would-be dictators over the past four years.
So for Biden to fulfill his campaign pledges on this particular point, all he really has to do is return to pre-Trump US rhetoric about authoritarianism and human rights. It’s probably the simplest foreign policy action he can take, and it’s one that doesn’t require any input from a possibly Republican-controlled (more on that later) Senate. It’s also largely meaningless, because it’s just a return to the more traditional US posture of raging against authoritarianism and human rights violations by Our Enemies while essentially ignoring those things when it comes to Our Friends. DC establishment types will say It Matters when the US speaks out forcefully in favor of human rights and against authoritarianism, and it probably does at the margins, but US actions are more important. Biden’s administration may be more critical of Erdoğan or Mohammed bin Salman in press releases and speeches, but it’s highly unlikely to alter the US alliance posture in the Middle East. Only in one or two cases can we reasonably expect this new anti-authoritarian bent to lead to a material change in US policy—perhaps toward Brazil, where Bolsonaro’s destruction of the Amazon rain forest could become a bigger issue for US policymakers.
Biden also brings a certain amount of stability with him. Whether you’ve found parts of Trump’s foreign policy compelling or not, it’s inarguable that his conduct has been chaotic. Biden will probably not make wild swings in policy after getting off the phone with one of his pals, or after one of his friends on cable news says something that catches his interest. He’s unlikely to make any major policy pronouncements or provocative threats on Twitter. You can argue that Trump’s spontenaity has on some occasions led him (perhaps accidentally) in positive or at least interesting directions (see below), but it’s also been destabilizing, for his own administration but more importantly for the world. On balance I think we’re probably better off without it.
I realize I’m picking some low hanging fruit here, but Trump has set a low bar for Biden in many ways. Another of those has to do with the US relationship with international organizations. The Trump administration’s record here is, to say the least, not good. It’s pulled the US out of the World Health Organization in the middle of a pandemic. It’s taken the US out of the United Nations Human Rights Council. It’s zeroed out US funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency, crippling its ability to care for Palestinian refugees. It’s used the UN Security Council as a vehicle for pursuing its vendetta against Iran to such an extent that, had Trump won reelection, the council itself might have fallen apart, and it was already dysfunctional enough as it was. It’s sanctioned prosecutors at the International Criminal Court, which is really kind of breathtakingly impudent even by US standards.
I think it’s safe to say Biden will repair as many of these breaches as he can, and that’s probably a good thing. These institutions aren’t perfect and often aren’t even good, but they need to be improved, not discarded. To take just the most obvious example, I don’t know how you manage a global pandemic without an international public health organization coordinating the effort. The WHO’s work in this regard can certainly use some scrutiny and probably some major changes, but defunding the WHO and working to get rid of it, especially when there’s no obvious replacement for it, is probably not a great idea.
We can’t really talk about international organizations without talking about NATO, and we can’t talk about NATO without talking about the US relationship with Europe more broadly since they’re closely intertwined. You often hear about how Trump has “alienated” America’s allies, usually alongside the deliberate mislabeling of his foreign policy as “isolationist,” and what is invariably meant is that his relationship with traditional European allies like France and Germany is frayed. He’s railed about NATO, bizarrely fixating on the concept of “dues” and the need for European members to pay “back dues,” even though NATO doesn’t have any “dues.” I don’t want to overstate the importance of making nice with NATO, an organization whose reason for being ceased with the fall of the Soviet Union and that nowadays frequently enhances the worst aspects of US empire in its role as America’s backup singers. But if we can agree that global challenges like climate change and pandemics oblige the US to get along with, for example, China (we’ll get to that in part II), then it is also the case that the US needs to get along with Europe writ large, and particularly the continent’s largest and most influential states. Biden will be a better president for managing the transatlantic relationship, if only because he probably couldn’t be worse.
There’s no greater global crisis looming on the horizon than climate change, and this is another area where Biden will likely be an improvement over Trump—again, to a point. I don’t want to belabor this because Bessner already covered it, but Biden plans to rejoin the Paris agreement and at least acknowledges that climate change is a real thing. He might also pressure Bolsonaro to stop clear-cutting the Amazon. But the Paris agreement is at best a band-aid on a gushing bullet wound, and Biden’s clean energy plan is pablum, promising that the US will be a net zero carbon emitter only long after Biden’s administration has come and gone. Candidate Biden’s repeated insistence that he will not take serious action to end fracking makes it clear that he either doesn’t grasp the seriousness of the threat or isn’t prepared to do what is needed to counter it. And his rhetoric around China (we’ll get to that) makes it hard to envision the kind of US-Chinese cooperation that will be required to truly mitigate the effects of climate change.
Overall Biden’s climate policy is better than Trump’s, but it is nowhere near adequate and it could be argued that the difference between “bad” and “not good enough” on this issue is irrelevant because we’re broiling the planet either way.
Other potential changes for the better:
Refugees: Bessner also covered this. Biden has said he intends to raise the US refugee cap to 125,000 per year, which is again an improvement over where Trump has it. But this is also inadequate both to the size of the global displacement crisis and to the level of US responsibility for creating that crisis. It’s still not enough. And as climate change worsens, the global number of displaced persons is only going to rise.
Latin America: This may be more of a wish than a prediction. But Biden, whose campaign rhetoric about Latin America was straight out of the Cold War era, nevertheless did serve as vice president in an administration that ended the US embargo against Cuba. And among his policy proposals was a plan to invest $4 billion to tackle corruption and poverty in Central America. I think Bessner was right to call this “a pseudo-imperialist band-aid,” but the fact is that Trump has set the bar here incredibly low. His Latin America engagement has amounted to coddling Bolsonaro while heaping misery on the Venezuelan and Cuban peoples, condoning—at least—a right wing putsch in Bolivia, and bullying Central American governments into acting as his personal immigration department. It won’t take much to improve on that. Venezuela in particular, however, may be a different story. We’ll get to that.
Arms Control: Another area where the bar has been set very low, inasmuch as the Trump administration’s approach to arms control was “no thanks.” He withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty and the Open Skies Treaty, both of which were crucial pillars of the modern arms control architecture, and despite recent talk of a breakthrough there’s no real indication he was close to extending New START, the only remaining active treaty limiting the size of the US and Russian nuclear arsenals. Biden has said he would extend New START, which expires in February but can be renewed for up to five years if the US and Russia agree.
What May Change for the Worse
Within minutes after news outlets started calling the race en masse on Saturday, the Washington Post published its first quick take on what Biden’s victory could mean internationally. Originally headlined “As Biden nears victory, world hopes for an end to American isolationism” before somebody wisely decided to change it, the piece does an excellent, if unintentional, job of explaining exactly what could go wrong on Biden’s watch:
Many hope the period of American isolationism and country-first populism under President Trump will give way to an era of renewed U.S. global leadership and embrace of multilateralism to tackle common challenges.
Everything you need to know is contained in that single once sentence paragraph. Donald Trump’s presidency was “isolationist,” even though he only marginally reduced America’s military footprint in a couple of places (Syria, Afghanistan, Germany) and actually expanded it in several other places (Somalia, the Sahel, Iraq, Yemen, Poland). Now we’re hoping, essentially, for a return to pre-Trump notions of the “liberal world order.” Bessner covered this in his piece:
Finally, Biden subscribes to an ahistorically rosy picture of twentieth-century history. As he puts it, “for seventy years, the United States … played a leading role in writing the rules, forging the agreements, and animating the institutions that guide relations among nations and advance collective security and prosperity.” Here, Biden engages in nostalgia for the “liberal international order” that the United States supposedly constructed and led after World War II. Unfortunately, outside of the North Atlantic core of the United Kingdom, France, and West Germany, the liberal international order was neither liberal, international, or an order; rather, it was premised on the domination, exploitation, and, sometimes, invasion, of countries in the Global South. Abandoning the Pollyanna shibboleths of establishment history and confronting the realities of what US “leadership” actually meant for most of the world is crucial if the nation is ever to help chart a positive, democratic, and genuinely global path forward. Biden, it appears, has little interest in doing so.
There are a few places where this return to the comforting familiarity of liberal interventionism could play out right away, and they’re in areas where Trump sort of had the right idea but went about it in the worst possible way. There’s Afghanistan, for example, where Trump had the right idea in opening negotiations with the Taliban, something the United States should have done 15 years ago, but did so in such a way that he incentivized the Taliban to escalate its violence in order to amass more bargaining power. There’s North Korea, where talking to Pyongyang was the right idea. In this case, Trump’s lust for a photo-op caused him to push immediately to a one-on-one summit with Kim Jong-un with no preparation, and his ego caused him to practically cut the South Korean government out of the process altogether when the much smarter approach would have allowed Seoul to take the lead. There’s Syria, where Trump tried twice to remove the US military from a place where it had no right to be in the first place, but did so in such a haphazard way that he cut the legs out from under one of the few genuine US allies in the Middle East, and then walked back the withdrawals anyway.
Biden has repeatedly been critical of Trump’s decision to negotiate with Kim Jong-un in ways that strongly suggest a return to the old US position of North Korean denuclearization as a precursor to diplomacy, which all but ensures no diplomacy because North Korea isn’t going to give up its nuclear weapons. This approach still denies South Korea the ability to chart its own intra-Korean path.
As for Afghanistan and Syria, the picture is a bit more complicated. Biden has said things that suggest he understands the need to end the “forever wars,” but does he understand it in anything other than a rhetorical sense? I’m not sure he does. Biden’s comments on ending the forever wars are almost always followed by some sort of caveat about the continued need to Do Something about terrorism. For Biden that means leaving US soldiers in Syria and Afghanistan indefinitely.
How can he claim to end the wars without really ending them, you ask? I think it’s because Biden holds the only-in-Washington view that placing (or leaving) relatively small detachments of special forces in a country doesn’t really count as a military deployment. This is a convenient fiction, particularly insofar as even a “small” special forces deployment demands keeping a relatively substantial support network in place for those forces. And in Afghanistan, the possibility of any US forces remaining in country indefinitely may be enough to cause the peace process (however unsuccessful it’s been so far) to break down. Which could lead to a redeployment of US forces to Afghanistan. After 19 years it’s time for this roller coaster to end, but I don’t have much confidence in Biden being the one to end it.
The only way to end the Forever War is to repeal the 2001 AUMF and massively defund the Pentagon and the sycophantic industrial complex built up around it. So, yeah, the forever war will never end.