Biden's Foreign Policy is a Wreck, Except Ukraine
Biden's Foreign Policy is a Wreck, Except Ukraine
The president arrived as inheritor of the post-WWII rules-based liberal world order. On Ukraine, he's been a success. The rest of the record is filled with blunders. This week, another example looms.
President Joe Biden’s foreign policy is awful, a huge disappointment.
The Moderate Democrat expected a well-run apparatus steeped in the legacy of the post-World War Two establishment of alliances and rules making up the 75-year-old liberal world order.
Instead, we received a series of blunders. They have been deadly, especially in the withdrawal from Afghanistan. They have been costly to Americans. And they have raised the temperature on a hot-headed world.
The very notable exception is Biden’s policy on Ukraine and Western European relations generally.
Another Democratic president must do better. That’s why The Moderate Democrat advocates for the Democratic Party to bring forth a new team of nominees to run in the 2024 election for president and vice president.
One headline says it all: “Biden’s Foreign Policy is a Mess.” This appeared above a February article in Foreign Affairs written by Kori Schake, the director of foreign and defense policy at the American Enterprise Institute.
Just this week, the Biden foreign policy faces a new test when pandemic immigration restrictions end on Thursday at the U.S. border with Mexico. Even more thousands of illegal immigrants than usual will likely cross into the United States from Mexico.
The public pays attention, and Americans believe Biden’s foreign policy is awful — just like his overall approval ratings. His overall job approval rating just hit its lowest point ever.
The single outstanding success has been Biden’s management of U.S. bipartisan efforts to corral democratic countries in Europe to provide massive assistance to Ukraine, attacked without provocation nearly 15 months ago by Russia.
But Biden may also be behind one of the Russia-Ukraine war’s most curious incidents of espionage. Not all the truth has yet emerged, but the outcome could be an embarrassment for Biden and blemish his Ukraine policy success.
In all, Biden’s most dramatic foreign policy failure was the deadly and sloppy withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
But Biden’s most impactful failure has been the U.S. inability to work jointly and cooperatively with China. It will take years to fix this.
Consider two recent poll results:
Biden’s job approval is at its lowest level, according to a Gallup Poll news release published April 27.
Biden’s approval rating for his foreign policy in particular is also under water, according to a Real Clear Politics average of several well-established national polls. The polls were conducted between March 1st and April 19th.
As in other major countries, execution of foreign policy is a large undertaking involving several departments of the national government and thousands of people. In our country, that means principally the departments of State and Defense as well as the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency.
But Schake lays the blame for the U.S. foreign policy mess at the feet of the Biden White House, not the surrounding bureaucracy. She calls the foreign policy “unbalanced” and “muddled from the outset.”
I believe much of the fault lies in Biden’s reliance on Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. Both men have impressive Washington résumés, and they have been associated closely with the president for decades. But Blinken and Sullivan have been disappointments.
Who might’ve done better as secretary of state and national security advisor?
The list begins with proven Democratic policy foreign leaders: Hillary Clinton, Avril Haines, Samantha Power, Susan E. Rice, and Linda Thomas-Greenfield. (All of these women were well-known to Biden.)
Could another Democratic president have done better — or do better beginning in 2025? Of course. The new Democratic president could appoint a new secretary of state and a new national security advisor from the list above.
This is a major reason why The Moderate Democrat urges the Democratic Party to bring forth a team to oppose Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for the 2024 Democratic Party nomination.
I must note that Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin has been a success. Not a disappointment. His failure lies in not convincing Biden to go along with policies and budgets recommended by the Pentagon.
Here is an excerpt from the February Foreign Affairs article in which Schake blames the disconnect between Biden’s foreign policy and domestic policy for undergirding many of the foreign policy errors, including China and — I would add — his immigration and border policy. She writes:
“America is back,” [President Biden] pledged to allies in February 2021. After the tumult of the Trump years, an administration with a serious foreign policy agenda once again called the shots in Washington.
Yet the first two years of the Biden presidency have not vindicated this optimism or promise. Instead, confusion abounds, with a troubling disconnect between the administration’s stated priorities and its conduct. Biden’s desire to protect U.S. workers and boost U.S.-based industries has found itself at odds with the imperative of building an alliance to contain the threat of China.
The central deficiency of Biden’s national security strategy is the absence of an economic vision that will allow the United States and other countries to reduce their dependence on Chinese products and markets. With Washington unable to get allies on board on the economic front, other elements of U.S. strategy end up carrying more weight, notably the armed forces. But there, too, the administration’s recognition of the urgent military threat posed by China has not produced a sufficient change in actual policy, in terms of both the defense budget and how policymakers deploy U.S. forces. The State Department is not strong enough to make up for these deficiencies and often finds itself sidelined. Unbalanced, the administration’s strategy lacks credibility. Unless the administration puts into practice the strategy it extolls—by disciplining the president’s loose comments about Taiwan, giving friendly countries incentives to enact difficult economic transitions, enforcing export controls, significantly increasing defense spending, and boosting the capacity of the armed forces—its foreign policy will continue to be ineffective.
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The administration’s thinking about how economic policy relates to foreign policy has been muddled from the outset. On the one hand, the White House seeks to protect the United States from the supposed ravages of globalization and Chinese mercantilism. On the other, it preaches the virtues of alliances and the solidarity of the international community. These two goals have inevitably clashed.
The administration has ignored the pleas of allies in East Asia to help them reduce their economic reliance on China. China’s neighbors do not want paeans to democracy or military posturing that might increase the risk of war. Instead, they want a path to prosperity that weakens China’s economic grip on them. Australia, Japan, and South Korea, for example, have asked the United States to commit more seriously to free trade in the Indo-Pacific. More than simply trying to isolate Beijing, Washington needs to craft a positive economic policy that persuades its allies to develop markets and supply chains independent of China. But the economic plank of Biden’s foreign policy seems interested only in the vicissitudes of U.S. domestic politics, demanding that allies bring their economies into line with U.S. standards and offering few concessions.
With all that as introduction, let’s look at specific foreign policy topics.
Russia-Ukraine War.
Push is coming to shove in Ukraine.
The Russian war on Ukraine that began in February 2022 has come to define the Biden foreign policy. Until now, Biden and his team have worked well with leaders of NATO and the European Council to bring training and arms to Ukraine from places like the USA, Britain, France, Germany, and Poland.
But the world of the Ukraine war is about to change. With spring comes the planned Ukrainian offensive against Russia to take back the Donbas in the east of Ukraine. And, surprise, maybe even an offensive to bloody the Russian hold on the Crimean peninsula.
The Moderate Democrat believes the Biden owes Americans a level-headed speech about prospects in Ukraine during and after the spring offensive. What are the latest ideas for a negotiated peace? How can Ukraine compromise with the bull-headed irrational dictator in Vladimir Putin of Russia?
Liana Fix, the Europe fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in a January roundup of Biden’s record in Foreign Policy: “What is needed going forward is decisive action to decide on and implement a Western theory of victory in 2023 — and to develop a long-term strategy toward Ukraine and Russia beyond the war. After former U.S. President Barack Obama’s underestimation of Russia as a power and his successor, Donald Trump’s, infatuation with Putin, Biden’s Russia policy is arguably the most successful in more than a decade.”
But everything will change in Ukraine by this fall, if not sooner. A strong Democratic president would set assertive expectations and announce them to the American people as well as allies in Europe. I fear we are being led by closed-door machinations in which a deal will be worked out with no buy-in from the American public. This could spring a surprise that will hurt the policy’s success.
Also, Biden could be badly stung if it turns out the United States sabotaged the Nord Stream Two natural gas pipeline stretching under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany. Seymour Harsh, the former New York Times investigative reporter, published his account of the covert operation in his Substack blog three months ago.
If the Hersh report is widely verified, Biden will lose standing with the public as well as with both Russia and Germany. The U.S. covert operation will need to be justified to allies who were counting on Russian natural gas to heat homes this past winter.
China.
In The Moderate Democrat’s view, China does not need to be “contained,” at least not in the sense that master diplomat George F. Kennan meant in his 1946 “Long Telegram” from his post as ambassador to Moscow and then in his 1947 article in Foreign Affairs titled, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.”
But China requires a reckoning from the United States. Will America re-arm itself to face a Chinese military that already fields a navy larger than the U.S. Navy? Will American policy focus exclusively on protecting Taiwan from attack? Or will American policy focus on cooperative trade with China while also investing in chips manufacturing and renewable energy manufacturing at home?
Writers Matthew Duss and Stephen Wertheim wrote in The New Republic this year that Biden has acted — whether intentionally or accidentally — to set up a rivalry with China that could last decades and also lead to war:
When he came into office and promised to follow Trump’s truculence toward China with “extreme competition,” Biden missed what might prove to be the last off-ramp from a prolonged and costly rivalry between the world’s leading powers. His repeated “gaffes” on Taiwan, vowing to send U.S. troops if China attacks, may have made war more rather than less likely. And his administration’s sweeping decision to block advanced semiconductors from being sold to China suggests an effort to cripple the Chinese economy apart from protecting national security.
Bonnie S. Glasser, Asia program director for the German Marshall Fund of the United States, wrote in the Foreign Policy roundup on Biden’s foreign policy that the president has not backed up military resolve with required military budgeting, and he has left allies in Asia-Pacific adrift in their own efforts to work together to counteract China’s growing influence in trade and economic development.
The Biden administration deserves high marks for sustained focus on China and the Indo-Pacific despite Russia’s war in Ukraine. It has begun to deliver on what it calls its “invest, align, and compete” strategy toward China, including by channeling billions of dollars into U.S. semiconductor manufacturing and science research, retaining most of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s restrictions on China, and going a significant step further by restricting semiconductor exports in an attempt to thwart China’s development of high technology.
Little progress, however, has been made in putting guardrails around intensifying Sino-U.S. competition, such as risk reduction measures between the two countries’ militaries. Cooperation on climate change, global public health, and even narcotics trafficking has stalled. Beijing has either set unworkable preconditions or suspended talks due to U.S. policies toward Taiwan.
Biden officials have taken welcome steps to strengthen Taiwan’s security (including almost $3.8 billion in arms sales approvals), bolster economic ties, and cooperate on semiconductor supply chains. U.S. allies have been persuaded to warn Beijing against the use of force to change the status quo in the Taiwan Strait. But Biden’s suggestion that Taiwan can declare independence if it chooses to do so, along with other gaffes and decisions, have undermined the credibility of U.S. support for the “one China” policy, thus increasing the risk of war. The U.S. military still hasn’t addressed its dependency on large, fixed bases and vulnerable aircraft carriers to defend Taiwan, which could tempt Chinese President Xi Jinping to try to seize the island. A plan to transform the U.S. force posture in the region is in the works, but it’s unclear whether it can restore a more favorable military balance.
The administration’s Indo-Pacific Strategy, released in February 2022, makes a strong case for a bigger U.S. role in the region. Its implementation is a work in progress. Achievements have been most significant in the diplomacy bucket, including two presidential trips to the region, annual Quadrilateral Security Dialogue summits, a U.S.-Pacific Island Country Summit, and the launch of the U.S.-Association of Southeast Asian Nations Comprehensive Strategic Partnership.
The economic pillar of Biden’s Indo-Pacific Strategy remains weak. The Indo-Pacific Economic Framework is better than nothing, but its lack of market access and tariff reductions limits its appeal. Rejoining the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership remains the best way to boost U.S. economic competitiveness and geopolitical influence.
Alliances and partnerships that frayed in the Trump administration have been restored and strengthened, although concerns persist among Washington’s closest friends over what they see as its proclivity to act alone to advance its interests.
Immigration and Border Security.
The public will watch what happens on Thursday and after with immigration pressure renewed on the U.S. southern border. Republican governors in Arizona, Texas, and Florida may well send more busloads of undocumented immigrants to northern cities run by Democratic mayors. The mayors complain they need federal assistance to cope with immigrants. And all the while, Biden and his border czar, Harris, remain mute.
Are they stuck between Republicans and Progressive Democrats? Yes. Could a better moderate Democrat in the White House set forth a third way to success? Yes.
Jorge Castañeda, a former Mexican foreign policy minister who is now a professor at New York University, wrote a scathing critique of Biden’s border policy and Mexican relations policy in the Foreign Policy roundup on Biden’s foreign policy:
Biden has avoided an outright failing grade on immigration only because of two positive decisions he made early in his term: sending a comprehensive immigration reform bill to the U.S. Congress (it went nowhere, but at least he made the effort) and eliminating the Trump administration’s most odious policies, including family separation and the requirement for asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico while their cases are reviewed.
Other than that, the Biden team has been unable to deter migrant flows—what it and the Republicans want—or channel them through legal, secure, and orderly channels. It made a mess of Title 42, the pandemic-era measure used to expel hundreds of thousands of migrants on supposed public health grounds, even if Republican governors and the U.S. Supreme Court take part of the blame. Biden has neglected every other issue concerning Mexico in exchange for Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador doing Washington’s dirty work by stopping Central American migrants at Mexico’s southern border. Biden also helped provoke an immense increase in Cuban migration to the United States — more than during the 1980 Mariel boatlift and 1994 Balsero crisis together — in a foolish attempt to win Democratic votes in Florida.
Biden has done very little, and now the worst of both worlds are on his hands. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and powerful Democrats such as Sens. Chuck Schumer and Bob Menendez have lashed out at the administration’s policies from the left while Biden finds no support from Republicans on any immigration issue.
Middle East, from Israel to the Arabian Peninsula to Iran.
Middle East. Biden has failed to rein in regimes in Saudi Arabia, Syria, and even Israel that lack attention to human rights in their territories. And Biden has been surprised to discover that China is making foreign policy inroads and success in the Middle East, most notably brokering a deal for Iran and Saudi Arabia to re-open embassies in each other’s capitals.
Khalil E. Jahshan, executive director of Arab Center Washington, writes that the Biden foreign policy team is simply allowing for war provocations to take root in Israel.
[M]any Israelis and their supporters around the world have expressed their concerns about Israel’s future. Israeli opposition parties, leaders of mainstream US Jewish organizations, human rights organizations, Israeli Air Force veterans, prominent Jewish academics, and even Israeli President Isaac Herzog have expressed their fears about the future of the country as they have known it for the past 75 years.
Netanyahu quickly added fuel to the fire, and particularly for the Palestinians, by releasing the basic tenets of his government’s political agenda, which are focused on the Jewish people having “an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel.”
Clearly, Netanyahu has set the stage for the next war in the Middle East. This essentially transforms the problem from a local and regional political issue into a direct challenge for the Biden administration, which is not prepared for any additional conflicts in the region, regardless of Israeli dictates. Mr. Biden considers the results of the latest Israeli election and the return of Netanyahu as the head of an extremist government to be a setback for his limited but specific objectives: securing a steady supply of oil from the region, maintaining relative quiet in the Palestinian territories, achieving a nuclear agreement with Iran, and obtaining cooperation from regional partners in confronting Russia in its war on Ukraine. These national security objectives, as limited as they are, will not be achieved by simply dispatching National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan to placate Netanyahu or by additional diplomatic soft-pedaling by Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
As for Iran, Biden took office with intent to re-enter the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran. But two years later, the agreement is “not even on the agenda” according to Biden’s Iran envoy, Robert Malley, as reported by The Jerusalem Post.
Dennis Ross, distinguished fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told The Jerusalem Post that it is clear that the Iranians are moving their nuclear program forward.
“Iran is putting itself in a position where it will have the option to go for a nuclear weapon,” he said. “That is where the current path is leading. Thus, if we want a different result, we will need a different approach. If nothing else, Iran must come to fear that if it stays on its current path, it is risking a military attack that could wipe out its entire nuclear infrastructure.”
Afghanistan.
“One can debate the decision on withdrawal [from] Afghanistan,” said Ross in The Jerusalem Post. “President Biden was right that if we kept 3,000 forces there, after 20 years we would never be able to withdraw – there would always be a reason to stay.
“The issue with the withdrawal was the way the decision was implemented,” he said. “It was as if we had one objective – getting our forces out safely as we drew them down, and their smaller numbers made them more vulnerable. This was a completely legitimate and a necessary objective. The problem is that it was not the only objective; we had obligations to those Afghans who worked with us, fought with us, and were all over the country and not only in Kabul.
“We had to have plans for getting them out, and that meant that our forces had to stay there long enough to fulfill that mission. Instead, we had a plan that pulled the military out before we evacuated the civilians, and by definition that created a problem. The chaotic nature of the withdrawal created a misimpression about the U.S. and whether [it could] be counted on.”
In closing.
The foreign policy of President Biden — apart from Europe and Ukraine — is grandiose but not buttressed with specifics and objectives understandable to the American people and to our country’s allies and opponents abroad.
Another moderate Democratic president could do better, as well as appoint a better foreign policy team.
The writers Matthew Duss and Stephen Wertheim wrote in The New Republic in January:
[P]rogress under Biden has been incremental rather than fundamental. Unless his administration recovers its initial, reformist insights, Biden will miss his opportunity to put U.S. foreign policy on a more peaceful and strategic footing, and risk handing deepening problems to a potentially dangerous successor.
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The president has said that the United States is “not at war,” but this is simply untrue. Commando raids go on, troops still face attacks in Syria and Iraq, and last May Biden redeployed 450 troops to Somalia on dubious legal grounds. The administration broke its promise to swiftly reenter the Iran nuclear deal, and now faces the possibility of getting no deal at all. The forever wars aren’t over, and Biden is not on track to end them.
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Biden should return his focus to the priorities Democrats identified in 2020, rooted in the country’s enduring needs. Otherwise, Biden could pass down an even more costly and risky U.S. foreign policy than he inherited, setting up the next generation of Americans to face the regular prospect of catastrophic war and democratic decay, all while the planet burns.