Biden's national security strategy
A "democracy vs. autocracy" framing doesn't work and globalization is still good
Last week the Biden administration published the new U.S. National Security Strategy, a document which every administration is legally obliged to produce in order to explain the principles of its foreign policy to Congress and the public. Taking these documents too seriously is kind of a rookie mistake in foreign policy commentary - they’re mostly intended as public relations exercises rather than actual guidance for those creating policy. Still, with careful reading they can be useful for getting a sense of what an administration’s priorities are and what contradictions and problems exist in its thinking. Trump’s NSS was an attempt by career Republican foreign policy types to try to put an intellectual and strategic framing around the uncontrolled impulses that mostly governed U.S. foreign policy in the Trump years. Trump never read it, but its core catchphrase - “great-power competition” - became shorthand for what was supposedly his policy. Biden’s NSS doesn’t contain any one single pithy phrase which will come to define his foreign policy, but we can still learn a few things from it.
The democracy vs. autocracy framing continues to not really work
When Biden was campaigning, he made a big deal of how his foreign policy was going to be organized around the principle that all the world’s democracies should stick together against the non-democracies. He got a lot of criticism for this from people who pointed out - accurately - that the world just does not work that way. America has plenty of non-democratic allies and always will. To name just a few, it needs Saudi Arabia for its oil, Vietnam as a counter-weight to China, and Uzbekistan for a military base in Central Asia. India is a democracy which is undergoing some backsliding but even in the unlikely event that it became a full-blown dictatorship, the U.S. would still need it to contain China. There’s just no simple relationship between whether a country is a democracy or not and whether the U.S. needs it as a partner.
Now, to be clear, neither Biden or his team are stupid, and they know this. But they tried to have their cake and eat it too by framing their foreign policy as one giant Summit of Democracy when in fact the reality is different. They seem to have done this for two reasons. The first was an attempt to differentiate themselves from Trump, who is a threat to American democracy at home and enjoyed buddying about with dictators like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin abroad. The second, I think, was just a general flailing around for some way to characterize the new era of conflict with China and Russia without using “great-power competition”, which sounds too realpolitik and amoral. Russia and China are both non-democracies, which is an important part of why they’re a problem, so democracy vs. autocracies was born.
In the new NSS, this attempt at what Boris Johnson called “cakeism” totally breaks down. It tries to advance the idea that the West’s competition with China and Russia is part of some grand battle of ideologies while at the same time having to admit that America does seek to work with governments of all stripes. The Biden administration’s position has long been that it wants to delink work on important issues like climate change from everything else, and so will work even with Beijing on this. That’s indisputably a consistent position because climate change could destroy the whole world. But then it also goes and says this:
We do not seek conflict or a new Cold War. Rather, we are trying to support every country, regardless of size or strength, in exercising the freedom to make choices that serve their interests. This is a critical difference between our vision, which aims to preserve the autonomy and rights of less powerful states, and that of our rivals, which does not.
When governments make choices that they think serve their interests, they often differ from the choice we would make. Often, it means the choice not to be a democracy - and according to this paragraph, that’s totally fine. The “autonomy and rights of states” is profoundly different to the “autonomy and rights of people”, and is intended here to communicate to the allies that America needs against Russia and China that whether they are democracies or not is ultimately not that important.
At another point the report claims that only states that “allow people to enjoy their basic, universal rights and freedoms” get to participate in the “free, open, prosperous, and secure international order” that America seeks to create. But this is patently absurd. More accurately, at yet another point the report says that some states “do not embrace democratic institutions but nevertheless depend upon and support a rules-based international system”. This hits the nail right on the head: what American foreign policy cannot abide is not what happens inside countries, but whether they seek to overturn the international order. At the end of the day, they’ll always take allies who they believe will help them defend the latter regardless of what happens at home, and this report shows it.
China is still the main threat - but not because its “rise” is inevitable
When Biden first came to office, his sense of priorities was clear. Russia was a declining power about which America didn’t really have to worry, and the Middle East was a region that America needed to get out of as quickly as possible. The real game was competition with China, and so America needed to pivot to Asia hard. The invasion of Ukraine created problems for this grand design, so much so that this seems to be the main reason it took so long to publish the present NSS. American attention and resources suddenly needed to be focused back on Europe just as competition with China is getting particularly worrisome.
While the new document gives more attention to Russia, it is still clear that China is viewed as the main problem for American foreign policy. Russia is an “immediate threat”, but with its military humiliated by Ukraine and its economy crushed by sanctions, it is not exactly going to be competing to replace America anytime soon. The PRC, on the other hand, “is the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to advance that objective”. Its aspirations to be the “world’s leading power” make it America’s foremost geopolitical challenge.
But what also interested me was the specific way that China was framed. For a long time too many Western observers believed that China was destined to follow a smooth path of continuous economic and military development until it achieved military dominance. Books with titles like When China Rules the World flew off the shelves. Nowadays the mounting challenges that the PRC is experiencing, first with its economy and secondly with the coronavirus, are encouraging a different view in Western capitals - that China might be dangerous precisely because the easy period of its rise is over. Facing mounting problems at home, the Chinese Communist Party may try to legitimize themselves by fighting for glory overseas. The report accepts the premise of this viewpoint in the following:
Our rivals’ challenges are profound and mounting. Their problems, at both home and abroad, are associated with the pathologies inherent in highly personalized autocracies and are less easily remedied than ours. Conversely, the United States has a tradition of transforming both domestic and foreign challenges into opportunities to spur reform and rejuvenation at home. This is one reason that prophecies of American decline have repeatedly been disproven in the past—and why it has never been a good bet to bet against America. We have always succeeded when we embrace an affirmative vision for the world that addresses shared challenges and combine it with the dynamism of our democracy and the determination to out-compete our rivals.
The idea of China on a smooth glide path to dominance has always struck me as wildly simplistic, and I think this is a much more nuanced and correct view.
Globalization is still out of fashion - and that’s bad
One of the starkest features of Biden’s foreign policy has been that it has been much less enthusiastic about globalization and trade than that of almost any recent president except for Trump. Early on the administration had this idea of “a foreign policy for the middle class” which as I explained in an article for The Washington Quarterly was basically was basically new window-dressing for continuing Trump’s protectionist policies. Biden has not sought any new trade deals and has kept Trump’s sanctions on China in place. Last week he placed massively consequential sanctions on China’s semiconductor industry which are such a big deal that I’m planning a separate post about them. If you’re not already subscribed then sign up below if you want to read that, by the way.
The new NSS is, if anything, even less enthusiastic about globalization than the administration’s previous statements. Check out the following paragraph, which has one pro forma can be good before getting into what it really wants to say:
The United States has long benefited from international trade’s ability to promote global economic growth, lower consumer prices, and access to foreign markets to promote U.S. exports and jobs. At the same time, the longstanding rules that govern trade and other means of economic exchange have been violated by non-market actors, like the PRC; were designed to privilege corporate mobility over workers and the environment, thereby exacerbating inequality and the climate crisis; and fail to cover the frontiers of the modern economy, including digital trade. The United States must once again rally partners around rules for creating a level playing field that will enable American workers and businesses—and those of partners and allies around the world—to thrive
It’s common for administrations to back off from having an active trade policy when elections are coming up, because the general public has long been less enthusiastic about trade than elites. But for the Biden administration the problem is deeper: its entire trade policy is really just a political strategy dressed up as foreign policy. The administration made the decision not to make the case for trade and globalization because they think the public don’t want to hear it and that it’ll cost them votes. But protectionism makes America less wealthy, stifles innovation, and kills chances for huge diplomatic gains, like when Trump walked away from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and with it an opportunity to unify much of Asia against China. If no-one is making the case for free trade then of course the public will continue to turn away from it, which is ultimately bad for America.