The Vision Thing: Joe Biden and US Foreign Policy

Democratic Presidential Candidate Joe Biden speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations

Joe Biden, now the presumptive Democratic nominee for President, is an unusually well-qualified candidate. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the field of foreign policy. His long service as a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and his eight years as Vice President mean that, if elected, he would enter the Oval Office with more foreign policy experience than any President since George H. W. Bush. Biden has been endorsed by over a hundred foreign policy professionals, including 77 former ambassadors, has touted his personal relationships with leaders all over the world, and has built his campaign around the idea that President Obama placed unique trust in his judgement, especially on foreign policy issues.

Like Bush though, Biden seems to lack ‘the vision thing’. Insofar as Biden has an overarching foreign policy vision, it is to restore the United States to its rightful place as leader of the world. Biden’s campaign platform and his speeches are full of references to reinvigoration and renewal. His call for a restoration of American moral leadership has echoes of Hillary Clinton’s argument during the 2016 election that ‘America was already great.’ Even if Biden doesn’t end up sharing Clinton’s electoral fate, something more imaginative is needed if he wants to avoid becoming an American Brezhnev.

Time for New Thinking

What’s striking about Biden’s triumph in the primary campaign is that while he has staked his candidacy on his experience, few of the other candidates spent much time directly questioning what that experience had taught him. Apart from occasional attacks on Biden’s vote for the Iraq War, foreign policy did not feature heavily in any of the campaign’s debates. Indeed, in the most-watched debate of the primary season, the Nevada event where Elizabeth Warren catalysed the destruction of Mike Bloomberg’s campaign, foreign policy was not mentioned once. This fit with a broader pattern of the primaries, where opponents often assumed that Biden’s campaign would inevitably implode and spent more time attacking each other and positioning themselves for a post-Biden race than in targeting the front-runner.

While Biden might have welcomed the relative lack of scrutiny, this has actually done him – and the Democratic Party – a disservice, as it means that important debates about the future of US foreign policy simply haven’t come to the surface. Ever since the 2016 election, foreign policy scholars have been endlessly debating whether or not the fabled ‘liberal international order’ is worth restoring and to what extent American hegemony has already ended. Moreover, the bipartisan consensus supporting American military interventionism is falling apart, as can be seen in the establishment of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a thinktank funded by an unusual partnership between the Koch brothers and George Soros and dedicated to questioning the efficacy of military intervention.

None of this is apparent in Biden’s foreign policy platform. One of his headline initiatives is a commitment to holding a global ‘Summit for Democracy’ where the old alliances of the Free World would be reaffirmed. He has also promised to maintain and invest in ‘the strongest military in the world.’ If one wants to find evidence for this new thinking, one needs to turn instead to the campaigns of Biden’s progressive opponents, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Having been criticized in 2016 for rarely talking about foreign affairs, Sanders assembled an impressive team under former journalist, Matt Duss, and began to offer a detailed and coherent foreign policy platform. While Sanders drew his foreign policy advisors from the world of journalism, Elizabeth Warren – in keeping with her reputation as a policy wonk – built her foreign policy team around a cohort of left-liberal former Obama staffers led by Sasha Baker. While both Sanders and Warren were closer to Obama on the question of military intervention than some of their most ardent supporters liked to think, neither offered a foreign policy vision that sought to wind the clock back to an earlier era.

Both Sanders and Warren emphasized the need to end America’s endless wars and to cut military spending. Indeed, Sanders’ foreign policy platform rejected American military hegemony altogether, while Warren focused on reinvigorating the State Department. Sanders positioned himself in opposition to authoritarianism of all stripes, vowing to confront Vladimir Putin’s undermining of democratic regimes, but also calling Nicolas Maduro, the socialist leader of Venezuela, a ‘vicious tyrant’. While not quite as sceptical of Obama-era trade agreements as Sanders, Warren promised to use these treaties as a means to combatting climate change and strengthening international labour standards, while also outlining plans to pursue corruption, curtail the power of international monopolies, restrain financial markets, and end tax havens worldwide.

While there were certainly meaningful differences between Warren and Sanders on foreign policy, both saw that domestic and international affairs were deeply interconnected, which was reflected in foreign policy initiatives that were often extensions of their ideas on how to reorder the American economy. The current crisis has made these interconnections all too clear, while also demonstrating how little vast spending on the US military has done to protect the United States. Nowhere has this been more obvious than in the plight of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, where 4,000 sailors needed to be evacuated from the aircraft carrier as coronavirus spread among the crew. The coronavirus pandemic has called into question not only the competence of the federal government, but the economic model on which the contemporary United States is based. As one New Yorker contributor put it, ‘reality has endorsed Bernie Sanders’.

Biden’s Choices

Given the state of the Democratic primary race, such an endorsement matters little. Neither Bernie Sanders nor Elizabeth Warren will be the nominee. Joe Biden will be. If he is elected to the Presidency, he will have to deal not only with an economy recovering from an unprecedented shock, an enormous public health crisis, and a social safety net under serious strain, he will also confront a world where more people than ever question the value of American hegemony. The old lines about American exceptionalism and ‘moral leadership’ will not suffice here.

There is though, room for Biden to adapt on foreign policy and to shift his emphasis towards the sort of linkages between foreign and domestic policies that Sanders and Warren have highlighted as vitally important. Biden might be an American exceptionalist at heart, but his campaign has already made some concessions to the contemporary political atmosphere. Combing through his foreign policy platform, one can see elements of good ideas taken from elsewhere: Biden too wants to elevate diplomacy and tackle the climate crisis, and he says he wants to end the forever wars, including US support for the Saudi war in Yemen. His platform even mentions the need to reinvigorate American democracy. He has made conciliatory noises towards his opponents’ supporters, telling them there is a place for them in his campaign. If he is serious about this, there must be a place for their ideas too. Not only that, but there must be a place for former Sanders and Warren staffers in a Biden administration. The time is long past for a serious conversation within the mainstream of the Democratic Party on the future of American foreign policy, and that conversation should not be led by the same old voices.

David Fitzgerald is a Lecturer in International Politics at UCC. His most recent book is Obama, US Foreign Policy and the Dilemmas of Intervention.