Two years deep into the Biden Presidency, is there a readily discernable Biden Doctrine? Two years is around the time that this sort of speculation on a unified field theory of a President’s foreign policy thinking usually begins. Matthew Duss and Stephen Wertheim have a fascinating article in The New Republic, titled “A Better Biden Doctrine” on the subject, filtered through the Progressive lens. How has Biden been, thus far, on foreign policy vis-a-vis Progressive goals?
The short answer: Not bad. Overall, the article is largely complementary of the Biden’s administration’s approach to foreign policy — and gives credit to some of its largest departures from Establishmentarian norms. One major highlight is the decision to withdraw all troops from America’s longest war, in Afghanistan. There is general consensus that the chaotic pullout was poorly executed — and more details will come out, clearly, in the highly partisan forthcoming Congressional investigations — but the decision itself was popular. “Disastrous,” however, is how the Think Tanks describe it, while on Main Street opinions vary wildly. It was the first sign that the Biden Doctrine was going to be a significant departure from the Obama Doctrine, and from conventional Establishment wisdom in general, one that veered further leftwards.
The influence of Bernie Sanders on the Biden administration does not get nearly enough ink, imho. When Biden beat his friend, he absorbed a lot of his positions into his campaign and into his Presidency. “Following the 2020 primaries, Biden led Democrats in rewriting the party’s platform in an effort to reconcile the ethos of the Obama years with a growing left in the party’s base,” write Duss and Wertheim. This post-primary re-write also, curiously enough, included the controversial Afghanistan pullout. Biden had telegraphed the move. And, of course, Bernie (with Ro Khanna) were there for the President with strategically placed Op-Eds as soon as the decision was made, to bolster Biden. Ezra Klein wrote of Bernie’s endorsement of Biden after the primaries in Vox:
Sanders and Biden noted repeatedly that they disagreed but that they were friends — had been for a long time — and saw themselves in coalition with each other. The closest analogue was what you see in multi-party systems, where one party wins the election and absorbs its nearest competitors into a governing coalition by giving them substantive influence over the agenda and key staffing appointments.
“I know you are the kind of guy who is going to be inclusive,” Sanders said. “You want to bring people in, even people who disagree with you. You want to hear what they have to say. We can argue it out. It’s called democracy. You believe in democracy. So do I. Let’s respect each other. Let’s address the challenges we face right now and in the future. And in that regard, Joe, I very much look forward to working with you.”
“Coalition.” That word. All week I have run up against it and am confounded. In this new, hyper-partisan age we find ourselves in, perhaps everything is coalition and coalescing now. The Establishment had a good run after World War II, but now, it appears, that time is over. The extremes animate our politics and the world is no longer unipolar, it is multipolar. The United States is no longer the unchallenged hyperpower of 2002, and that is probably a good thing.
During Joe Biden’s 36 years in the Senate and during his Chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee he was the perfect Establishmentarian. And at the beginning of his administration much was made — especially in Europe — of whether or not an incoming Biden administration mean a return to Cold War Establishment groupthink, the antidote, from the perspective of Europe, to Trumpism. Two years into the administration, that has not happened. Joe Biden realizes that we are now in a new world — a post-COVID, post-Trump, climate challenged, inflationary world — where he has to build coalitions between progressives and moderates and sometimes even suburban Republican women for his political survival. His 2024 pitch is all about bipartisan accomplishments (McConnell at the bridge; Abbott at the border), and how much more can be done if we come together. Duss and Wertheim write:
Beneath the surface of his “America is back” slogan, Biden and his advisers understood important realities—that a diminishing share of global power limited what the United States could accomplish; that decades of corporate-led trade policies have diminished the livelihoods of too many Americans; and that climate change, pandemic preparedness, and anti-corruption are central national security challenges. He was also responsive to a growing constituency in the Democratic Party calling for a less militaristic international posture, and broader dissatisfaction in the country with 20 years of the expensive and destabilizing global war on terrorism.
Biden, in short, seems to have absorbed a not insignificant amount of Bernie Sanders’s thought during this particularly stressful time in American history. Domestic affairs and international affairs are one; our trade policy should not be left to elite school graduates en route to jobs in investment banking. That was the old way of thinking that led, in part, to the global authoritarian countermovement. The COVID crisis allowed Biden to get through largely bipartisan legislation on Infrastructure, on climate change, on insulin price caps and the American families plan. Domestic affairs and international affairs are one.
Out of touch elites cared more about the global free marketplace and their place at the top of that international pyramid than the devastated American family. Trump was, in many ways, the bull in the China shop meant to serve up a message by smashing all those fragile, crystalline elite American institutions. Biden, the least wealthy Senator that did not go to the ivy league, got that. Biden also cleverly got that Bernie Sanders, his old friend from Vermont, had a holistic philosophy that dealt with the neglected American family in a non-Establishmentarian manner. So, why not coalesce with some of those ideas? It went well, but maybe too well. Eleven months ago, Joe Biden had to literally say in a press conference: “I am not Bernie Sanders.” Center yourself, Mr. President!
The there is Latin America. On Latin America our last few Presidents have been quite conservative, partly because of the war on drugs, partly because of the optics of immigration and the ridiculous foreign policy Establishment belief that Chavez’s Venezuela — or Maduro’s Venezuela — might become the future of the entire hemisphere. Even Obama, though friendly with Lula, kept him at a distance. Obama’s position of Cuba was evolved for the time, but still fairly conservative in retrospect. Bush the Younger was the worst, in almost everything, but particularly on Latin America (and the Middle East).
On Jeet Heer’s podcast The Time of Monsters, Duss and Wertheim brought up Biden’s begrudging acceptance of socialist governments in the Latin American hemisphere in light of the geopolitical wars between authoritarian governments and democracies. This stunning 180 degree turn on Latin America is, of course, even more interesting now in light of the recent events in Brazil. Republican administrations, generally, have gravitated towards embracing right-wing authoritarians outright as well gunboat diplomacy and conducting covert operations like mining harbors, while Democrats, as an alternative, have merely presented a lighter version of this sort of thinking. This acceptance, or at least willing to deal with socialist Latin American governments is a very radical departure from previous American Presidential administrations — including Obama’s. Progressives finally have a meaningful seat at the grown ups table on foreign policy.
President Biden’s Ukraine policy has been shrewd, committed to anti-authoritarianism, pro-democracy principles, yet also drawing in neoconservatives while dividing progressives. An incident this past October showed how shrewdly the Administration staked its claim on an issue quite popular with the American people, namely, arming Ukrainians. From Jonathan Guyer at Vox:
On Monday, the Washington Post ran an exclusive report on a letter that 30 members of the House Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) sent to the White House on Russia-Ukraine policy. They conveyed support for Ukraine and praised President Joe Biden’s efforts in Europe while appealing for more diplomacy, including “redoubling efforts to seek a realistic framework for a ceasefire.”
By the evening, the caucus issued a clarification. The letter’s signatories expressed confusion about the timing of its release, saying it had been written and signed in June and July, and that it had been released without being properly revetted after a long October recess — and after the conditions of the war had changed.
On Tuesday, caucus chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal essentially withdrew the letter. The CPC disavowed it.
Of course, nothing lasts in what the now-forgotten novelist Gore Vidal (who is that?) once called The United States of Amnesia. Things fall apart; the Center does not hold. Public opinion could swing away from support for the struggle in the Ukraine to against in the space of a few months, as the new Republican House makes those arguments. It is not an inconceivable possibility. But, for the present, the President is perfectly balanced in the Center, firmly on the side of pro-Democracy and anti-authoritarianism.
This is a hallmark of the Biden Doctrine, which combines a robust domestic policy bolstering American workers, families and the American Commons in uncertain times while standing, domestically and globally, against the rising encroachment of authoritarian, anti-democratic regimes.