Addressing the nation on Thursday, Joe Biden presented a passionate case that he should become the next president. Unfortunately, when it came to the national security element of Biden’s speech, major questions remained unanswered. There was a lot of rhetoric here, and very little of substance.
That matters, because the 2021-2025 world will not conform to Biden’s rosy rhetoric of rebuilt alliances and restrained adversaries. As President Barack Obama belatedly learned, the pursuit of national security and the advance of American values requires both hard work and hard choices. Here are five big foreign policy questions Biden didn’t address on Thursday.
1) How will he deter or defeat China while cutting defense spending?
China poses the preeminent global threat to the United States and to the U.S.-led liberal international order. Xi Jinping aims to lead the world into a new era of feudal mercantilism that sees China enthroned atop us all. But when it comes to his plan to confront or at least constrain China, Biden offered little beyond platitudes about standing up to dictators. True, President Trump offers insufficient detail on his own policy philosophy toward China. But at least we know that Trump’s policy is focused on restraining China’s global agenda. All we have from Biden is vague words. We need to hear more. And we need to know how standing up for global order, and for exceptional allies such as Australia, can be done on the cheap.
2) How will he improve the Iran nuclear deal?
Biden says that he’ll re-enter America into the Iran nuclear deal. OK, but where’s his plan to improve that deal? Nowhere to be found.
That’s a big problem. The 2015 agreement was fatally flawed for three reasons: It had a finite timetable, it failed to address Iran’s ballistic missile program (which is absolutely focused on delivering nuclear warheads against external targets), and it provided a terribly weak inspections protocol. These issues need to be addressed. And now, as Iran’s economy is imploding, gives us the leverage to fix the deal. Simply saying “we’re back!” will do nothing but provide a financial and political bailout out to an ardent American enemy that aims to implement a second Holocaust. It will also encourage already rising Saudi moves toward nuclear proliferation. These are hardly the ingredients for regional stability. As I say, Biden needs to offer more than silly Obama-style “it’s my way or the war way” sound bites here.
3) How will he ensure all nations live up to their climate change commitments?
Biden says that he’ll restore America’s commitment to the Paris climate accord. Fine, many people support that approach, as do the vast majority of our closest allies. But it is deceptive, as Biden claimed on Thursday, to suggest that the green economy can create “millions of good, well-paying,” economically productive new jobs. It is equally absurd to assert that closing loopholes can pay for all this. The reality, as attested by California’s present blackouts and the data on green jobs (when government subsidies are factored out), is that green policies are more complicated than simple “Carbon bad!” pronouncements. Excessive regulation drives up energy bills. Bans on fracking empower Vladimir Putin. And I’m sorry, China must be called out when, as now, it signs up to ambitious carbon reduction agreements, then systematically opens hundreds of new dirty coal plants. Again, Biden must provide more details.
4) How will he get America’s allies to spend more on defense and act more concertedly in defense of the international order?
NATO is the world’s most successful alliance and a great servant of American interests and security. Trump does America and our allies no favors when he questions the Article Five mutual defense stipulation that sits at the heart of this treaty. America cannot succeed without allies. But Biden should have learned from his eight years in the Obama White House that America must sometimes speak as plainly to allies as they speak to us.
It is intolerable, for example, that Germany and France, two of our closest allies, continue to spend less than 2% of their gross domestic products on defense spending. It is outrageous that Germany supports Russia’s Nord Stream II energy pipeline — singularly designed as it is, to advance the Kremlin’s energy blackmail policy. How will Biden get Chancellor Angela Merkel or her successor to get serious about the common defense of NATO? He either needs to answer that question, or he needs to stop saying that he’ll get tough on Putin.
5) How will he handle the UFO issue?
Strange objects are flying around in our airspace and swimming below the surface of our waters. For whatever reason, they appear to have a particular interest in our nuclear platforms, especially our nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. Trump has spoken more openly about this subject than any of his predecessors. But what would a Biden presidency mean, here? Would it bring more secrecy? Or more disclosure, such as that which Sen. Marco Rubio is offering?
A couple of months before people go to vote, Biden needs to offer more detail as to how he would better protect the nation.
