Crises and Non-Crises in Biden's Foreign Policy

An interesting book review provoke some interesting ruminations.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has not yet had the chance to read Alex Ward’s The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy After Trump.¹ But I did read Paul Musgrave’s review of the book in the Washington Post. That review is an intellectual meal unto its own that provokes some interesting thoughts. Let’s dive in!

According to Musgrave, Ward’s book begins with Jake Sullivan on election night in 2016, dealing with Donald Trump’s surprise Electoral College victory after running on a foreign policy platform that was decidedly out of the mainstream. Sullivan ruminated on that loss for a good long while. The book ends with Sullivan’s April 2023 speech at Brookings outlining a foreign policy orientation premised on renewing economic leadership. In Ward’s own words:

Instead of rampant globalization, Sullivan’s pitch was that a reenergized American economy made the country stronger. It was time to remake the Rust Belt into a Cobalt Corridor, to establish industries that led not only to blue-collar work but to azure-collared careers. If that was done right, a strengthened America could act more capably around the globe.

“This moment demands that we forge a new consensus. That’s why the United States, under President Biden, is pursuing a modern industrial and innovation strategy — both at home and with partners around the world,” he said….

“By the time President Biden came into office, we had to contend with the reality that a large non-market economy had been integrated into the international economic order in a way that posed considerable challenges,” he said, citing China’s large-scale subsidization of multiple sectors that crushed America’s competitiveness across industries. Making matters worse, Sullivan continued, “economic integration didn’t stop China from expanding its military ambitions.” It also didn’t stop countries like Russia from invading their neighbors.

Sullivan, the accomplished debater, was dismantling, point by point, the dominant worldview that Biden held for decades and that the national security adviser grew up believing until Trump won the election in November 2016. He was, wittingly or not, offering a mea culpa for once being an acolyte of the foreign policy establishment….

Standing in front of the esteemed audience, Sullivan was telling them he didn’t want to be caught flat-footed as the global economy reshaped around them. The U.S. government would be proactive, prepared and proud in search of an industrial strategy to undergird American power. Without saying the words, he was offering a plan to make America great again.

[I have… let’s say “limited sympathy” for Sullivan’s new worldview. There is no denying that a new strategy was needed to cope with Russia and China. That said, I think Sullivan grossly overinterpreted the lessons from the 2016 election. I think rejecting the Trans-Pacific Partnership was a massive foreign policy own-goal. You can click here and here for my longer elaborations on this point. But I also think that this is not the point of this particular newsletter. So let’s move on.]

Musgrave’s review of The Internationalists raises some interesting questions about the Biden administration’s attempt to refashion a new grand strategy:

Hard as it is to devise a new worldview, Ward’s book shows that it’s still more difficult to implement one, even under the best of circumstances. And the Biden team has not been blessed by circumstances….

Process, the fetish of staffers, receives extensive attention. This often flatters an administration that prides itself on its competence. To coordinate policy and talking points during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, for example, the administration employed a shared doc that kept everyone up to date in a chaotic situation. Descriptions of how Biden’s team deployed intelligence to blunt Russian President Vladimir Putin’s moves before the invasion also reveal a cool, well-gauged strategy that achieved tactical successes even if it could not stop a war….

Sullivan spent the Trump years forging a Democratic coalition around a new vision, a “foreign policy for the middle class,” which he defines as demonstrating how U.S. actions abroad can improve “the daily lives of Americans.”

Once the Biden team was in office, though, Ward shows that it had to engage in the actual business of running a global superpower, like brokering a deal in which the United States would send Abrams tanks to Ukraine, providing political cover for a German coalition government torn over sending its (probably more useful) Leopard tanks to aid Kyiv. Such maneuvers are tough to explain in terms of mortgages, health-care affordability and other middle-class American preoccupations — but they are also the inescapable tools of great-power politics….

Ironically, Ward’s portrait of the disjuncture between the administration’s ambitions and its challenges suggests that the Biden team needs to campaign this year on a bolder vision than it did in 2020. Policies seemingly remote from middle-class interests, such as promoting the defense of democracies, resonate with the administration’s supporters and independents. Depicting the White House’s foreign policy record as part of a struggle for a new deal for the world might help frame its failures and successes — and even its compromises — as part of the story of redemption that the administration desperately wants to tell.

Musgrave’s review, made me realize what vexes me about the Biden administration’s foreign policy. Biden’s team is truly stellar on the foreign policy process in areas where the challenges are linear and known. This has yielded them some concrete wins in some lower-profile areas, like bolstering democracy in Latin America and cementing alliances in the Pacific Rim. The administration’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was also extremely good — because it was a known challenge. It hasn’t been perfect — see Afghanistan in 2021 — but it has been extremely good and much better than recent prior administrations.

The thing about foreign policy, however, is that while administrations can sometimes choose the issues they want to prioritize, sometimes the issues choose them instead. The Biden administration has stumbled in responding to the more acute crises that have hit them — like the war in Gaza or the influx of immigration across the Southern border. It has failed at perceiving the connections between foreign policy challenges. The notion that events Gaza might affect the U.S. ability to rally support for Ukraine seems to have escaped them. The idea that industrial policy and trade protectionism could complicate negotiations among allies on other issues was never entertained by Biden’s team.

To be fair, most foreign policy teams cannot handle all foreign policy challenges well, and Biden’s team has been better than most. There are days, however, when it feels like the Biden team believes that its competent response to Ukraine is emblematic of its foreign policy across the board. And that’s not how life in the big city of world politics works.

1. I have read the excerpt Ward published in Politico (where he’s a reporter) but that’s not the same thing.