Even if President Trump manages an upset on Election Day, Joe Biden will have still given Republicans one extraordinary gift: shuffling the worst Republican foreign policy positions and players over into the Democratic Party.
Prior to Trump’s tenure, even Republicans feared how Trump’s famously freewheeling strategy, if you can call it that, and colorful cast of staff surrounding him would affect his foreign policy. The tweets, the temperament, and the trade wars all proved as bad as all expected, but on foreign policy, Trump didn’t just exceed expectations set for him personally, but in fact, rose above many of his post-war predecessors.
For the first time in my life, I’ve now finally lived under a president who started no new wars.
After decades of a bipartisan consensus that Middle East peace rested on placating Palestine and Iran, none other than Jared Kushner realigned the entire axis of power after Trump pulled out of the disastrous Iran nuclear deal. After a quarter century of no new normalization agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbors, the Trump administration brokered three such agreements. Five more are reportedly on the way, including Saudi Arabia, which would only further isolate the now-heavily sanctioned Iran.
Trump also finished the job of reducing ISIS to rubble and weakened Russia’s hand on the world stage by empowering Ukraine and achieving U.S. energy independence. None of this is to mention the economic normalization agreement between Serbia and Kosovo, two regions in sporadic violent conflict for centuries.
Perhaps most consequential in the long run will be Trump’s global campaign against China, which includes successful attempts to bar Huawei from American and British 5G networks and establishing sanctions against China and solidarity with Hong Kong.
Whether Trump wins or loses, the new Republican is no longer the party of reckless interventionism, neither is it one of isolationism. The GOP now becomes the party of foreign policy realism and pragmatism, and Republicans can thank Biden for ensuring that will remain the case for a generation.
Robert Gates said in his memoir that Biden has “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” and it’s not hard to see why.
As a senator, Biden berated Ronald Reagan for his “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” speech and for the defense build-up that secured the end of the Cold War. Biden wrongly opposed the quickly won Gulf War and wrongly supported the disastrous Iraq War. Biden spearheaded the arguably illegal bombing campaign against civilians in Belgrade as a senator and supported the arguably illegal bombing campaign against civilians in Libya as vice president. Biden opposed “the surge” that salvaged the dumb war he supported starting in the first place and then opposed Barack Obama’s successful raid to kill Osama bin Laden.
If Biden were less amiable and Trump’s formerly conservative haters more so, the Democratic foreign policy consensus would likely remain stagnant, and the Republican one would revert to its pre-Trump median. But Trump’s biggest haters were also the GOP’s biggest and most restless hawks.
If Max Boot, Steve Schmidt, Bill Kristol, and the like decided that Trump is so irredeemably awful that they aren’t just opposing him but every other senator, congressman, and policy acting as a bulwark against socialized medicine, taxpayer-funded abortions of fully viable fetuses, and unfettered entitlement spending sending the nation to a debt-induced credit crisis, then fine. Not only does it serve the GOP to expunge bloodthirsty war hawks from power, it is truly telling which straw broke the camel’s back for them.
Unlike many other Republicans, Kristol ardently supported attacks on Serbia (a bombing campaign so misguided that even John Bolton opposed it at the time), and the entire corporate coalition of Never Trump is united in their support for the Iraq War. Rubin and the rest of the future NT coalition also backed Obama’s Libyan intervention, so it should come as no surprise that she should turn her back on a party coalescing around a foreign policy built around pragmatic diplomacy, sanctions, and pointed and limited attacks.
So now the pro-war crew belongs to Biden’s camp. Given the alignment of their foreign policy interests, Biden is happy to accept them. Republicans have many, many sins to atone for, but the Democratic Party just helped the GOP wash its hands of a generation of broken foreign policy, the worst of which has now compounded itself in the agenda across the aisle.
