It’s hard to pin down the shape of a future administration’s foreign policy, especially so when the administration is still in the late larval stages, as Joe Biden’s currently is. Still, a picture is emerging: We’re aware of the core views of the aspiring commander in chief, hear the tenor of the rhetoric emerging from among his chief advisers, and know this group’s judgment on the legacy of the administration it hopes to replace.
One challenge to the clarity of that picture is that Biden himself has been scattershot on foreign policy over a lengthy career in government: Biden served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for more than a quarter-century until he became Barack Obama’s vice president in 2009. Without cherry-picking contradictions from a foreign policy record that spans nearly five decades of government service, it’s impossible not to notice that Biden has pivoted frequently and seems to lack core convictions beyond what has agitated him most recently.
Biden was hawkish on Bosnia after a trip there in 1993, co-sponsoring a bill that ultimately forced President Bill Clinton to take action in 1995 to stem the bloodshed of the Yugoslav Wars. And he supported Clinton’s bombing of Serbia during the Kosovo war in 1999 that helped give birth to the Albanian-majority nation. But he was skittish on George H.W. Bush’s intervention in Iraq, while supporting George W. Bush’s decision to invade a bit more than a decade later. By 2006, Biden had properly soured on that decision and was advocating an ill-conceived “Bosnia plan” for Iraq, a kind of federalist soft partition along ethnic lines.
He was arguing, like most Democratic contenders for the presidency in 2008, that Afghanistan was the good and winnable war, before he turned on it, too, as Obama’s vice president. This clearly made him some enemies in the Obama administration, many of whom are still sniping at him today. Some never forgave his early naivete. “I wish I could say Biden was a student of history and understood how problematic nation-building would be in Afghanistan,” an unidentified former top Obama Pentagon official told the Washington Post earlier this year. “That’s not Biden. He has gut instincts.” Others, such as the late Richard Holbrooke, were dismayed by Biden’s apparent callousness — especially when contrasted with his interventionist instincts in Bosnia. There’s a gripping exchange recorded in Holbrooke’s diaries that’s worth quoting at length:
When I mentioned the women’s issue, Biden erupted. Almost rising from his chair, he said, “I am not sending my boy back there to risk his life on behalf of women’s rights, it just won’t work, that’s not what they’re there for.” [. . .] He said it ain’t going to happen, he said I don’t understand politics, he said we’re facing a debacle politically, he said we’re going to lose the presidency in 2012 if unemployment remains high, and Afghanistan was the other issue that could pull us down and we have to be on our way out, that we had to do what we did in Vietnam. This shocked me and I commented immediately that I thought we had a certain obligation to the people who had trusted us. He said, “Fuck that, we don’t have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger got away with it.”
What’s striking is not the substance of Biden’s foreign policy stances, but rather that they are so often grounded in a keen sense of what the public will bear. In 1995, Americans had become fed up with seeing bloody body parts beamed into their living rooms from massacres in Sarajevo. By 2011, they had had enough of body bags coming back from Bagram Air Base. Though often fêted among Democrats as a seasoned foreign policy hand, he is perhaps more accurately described as someone who has been guided by a horse sense of voters’ wavering commitments. This is an admirable talent for a politician in a representative democracy, but not the mark of a strategic visionary or a bold leader.
With the possible exceptions of Richard Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower, presidents rarely take office with a fully formed vision of the world. This is not necessarily a mark against them, but their choice of advisers therefore matters a lot. As it currently stands, the apparatus churning out policy papers remains massive and opaque to the outside world, though top advisers such as Jake Sullivan, Antony Blinken, and Ely Ratner have been slowly filling in the broad outlines (set out in a boilerplate article in Foreign Affairs earlier this year) of what a Biden foreign policy will look like.
One heartening aspect of the Biden team’s approach is how heavily it is refracted through what it sees as the overwhelming challenge posed by a rising China. Anyone worried that the Bidenites were unserious about Beijing can rest assured: That is not the case. Still, the focus on China is of a very different quality than that of the Trump administration. Latching on to the inherent ambiguities of the term “strategic competition” cited in the 2017 National Security Strategy as a cornerstone of the emerging world order, Biden’s team seems intent on reshaping how the term is used. Whereas President Trump’s people broadly see competition as a zero-sum contest, the Bidenites correctly note that the kind of “victory” that greeted the United States and its allies with the collapse of the Soviet Union is unlikely to occur. Competition, therefore, means building and maintaining an edge over China in order to ensure that the unavoidable coexistence overall tilts in our favor.
This redefinition of competition has implications in various, disparate arenas. In defense spending, for example, it’s out with (expensive) carriers and in with (cheaper) standoff weaponry. The Bidenites believe that overwhelming American military dominance in the Indo-Pacific is now out of reach. But while Chinese development of missile and drone technology may be neutralizing America’s historic naval advantage, Biden’s team reasons that investing in similar asymmetric means could deter China’s adventurism in its own backyard.
The money thus saved from being squandered on pricy military “platforms” could be redirected to various R&D efforts — another top priority of a Biden administration. Clean energy, biotech, and artificial intelligence are singled out as areas in which Chinese investments need to be met or exceeded. The rationale here extends beyond military applications (though those remain important). It represents a bet that an industrial policy informed by national security concerns could spawn unimagined industries and opportunities for growth further down the line, not unlike how DARPA research during the Cold War helped seed the information revolution decades later.
Trade, too, comes in for a rethink. Those with Biden’s ear stress that alliances must continue to be bolstered by robust and mutually beneficial commercial relations, but this work won’t be guided by the assumption that all trade is by definition mutually beneficial. Expect, therefore, a robust attempt to target offshore finance and tax havens, as well as a focus on reining in currency manipulation. By setting forth commitments to more fair and transparent trade relationships, Biden’s team thinks it can bring along American workers battered by globalization, as well as allies traumatized by Trump’s neo-mercantilism.
There are a lot of decent ideas kicking around Bidenworld, and some of the proposals may even work as envisioned. That said, when taken as a whole, the vision is suffused with a kind of optimism that should give us pause. Position papers tend toward the optimistic, as they must offer a plausible way forward. And optimism, it has been said, is a force multiplier: Better to be motivated by a can-do attitude than to waste time admiring problems. But the emergent Biden administration worldview seems to be predicated on the idea that all sorts of positive-sum solutions are within reach, and that the only reason they have not been realized has been for lack of trying.
Biden’s team is in part overinternalizing the lessons learned from watching the Trump administration frequently flail about. Trump’s failures stem from his almost cartoonish insistence on unprincipled transactionalism and on a dumbed-down version of realpolitik, and a correction is certainly in order. Alas, overcorrection — doubling down on diplomacy as an end in itself — unfortunately seems to be in the cards. For many Democrats, diplomacy is too frequently seen as the process by which rational actors meet to deliberate in order to get to a win-win. A case in point is the JCPOA, also known as the Iran nuclear deal, which Democrats under Biden stand ready to resuscitate. Though Trump’s bunglingly aggressive approach has met little success, Biden’s surrogates continue to brush off criticism that the deal itself did nothing to deter Iran’s ambitions at regional hegemony, with all the destabilizing implications that implies. Missing is the understanding that deals between adversarial countries are not the bedrock upon which lasting order is built, but rather just a temporary codification of a mutually accepted assessment of the balance of power — and each side’s willingness to use it.
This attitude is on prominent display in the Biden team’s hopes for tackling climate change. While it’s heartening to see that some inside a possible Biden administration see competition for technological solutions as a more promising way forward, the widespread enthusiasm for multilateralism, coupled with the fact that fighting climate change is put forth as a first-order challenge, could end up shaping approaches to most other questions. Look no further than Europe’s toothless approach to Beijing to see how this plays out in practice. If reversing climate change requires cooperation with China, and competition with China is judged to be a struggle that is defined as perpetual and in some sense “unwinnable,” it’s easy to see how even the most hawkish Asia strategists in the Biden administration could be undercut.
As Helmuth von Moltke wrote in his 1871 treatise on strategy, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. That’s the proper spirit in which one should view any campaign’s ambitious proposals for tackling a messy and unpredictable world. Policy papers and strategic planning documents at their best help organize thinking within a sprawling and unwieldy bureaucracy. But despite people’s best efforts, forcing events have a way of reordering priorities. Biden’s long record on foreign affairs attests to that.
Damir Marusic is executive editor at the American Interest and senior nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council.
