With the election just around the corner, President Joe Biden and his administration have nearly faded from the news. This week, though, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin returned to the headlines with their latest threat to cut off weapons sales to Israel unless the Jewish state accedes to their vague demands about the humanitarian situation in Gaza. Although the timing is convenient for the Democratic Party—their deadline falls after the election—it undermines Israel’s campaign to restore deterrence against Iran.
Much of the Washington blob has lauded the Biden administration for emphasizing that its foreign and domestic policies are interlinked. This is hardly a revolutionary concept, since George Washington was the first president to integrate his strategy for foreign and domestic affairs. But Biden’s foreign policy has largely failed because of his attempts to cater to his party’s increasingly unrealistic views about global affairs.
The Biden campaign argued that Donald Trump was a menace to American democracy and the international order. As Team Biden saw it, once "the adults" were back in charge, America’s standing and global stability would return quickly. That has not happened. Not only is the global situation worse, but Biden has strengthened the forces of isolationism at home.
Soon after entering office, Biden claimed that "your children or grandchildren are going to be doing their doctoral thesis on the issue of who succeeded: autocracy or democracy?" He and his allies thought that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine proved them right and created the central battlefield in this struggle.
They also decided that the Ukraine war was an extension of their domestic struggle to defeat the Republican Party—including the Republicans who support Ukraine. This was enormously foolish, since few countries with free and fair elections only elect one party, and democracies rarely support a long war on a partisan basis. Predictably, Republican support for Ukraine has declined rapidly, even though the strategic case remains strong.
Ever since Biden failed to deter the Russian attack, he has delayed arms deliveries to Ukraine and restricted how the Ukrainians could defend themselves. Ironically, Biden, who has the strongest case of Vietnam syndrome of any active politician, embraced Robert McNamara’s controlled escalation approach that created the quagmire in Indochina. A plurality of Democrats, who tend to prefer statements of resolve to more visceral demonstrations of American power, approve of this approach or even think it is too robust.
As a result, the United States has spent about $90 billion on Ukraine with no realistic plan for defeating Russia. After the Afghanistan humiliation, a Ukrainian defeat would be two lost wars in a row. That will bolster critics of America’s attempts to maintain a favorable balance of power in strategically important regions, to say nothing of America’s enemies.
Biden and his team have generally performed better in Asia, where they gained access to Philippine bases and between Japan and South Korea. The crown jewel is the AUKUS submarine and technology agreement that sprang from Trump-era discussions with Australia.
American shipyards, however, build too few submarines to supply the Navy’s needs, let alone Australia’s. Democrats are generally suspicious of defense spending, and Biden’s proposed budget will drop the rate of production even further. Congress will need to force the White House to stop undermining its own initiatives.
The Middle East has been particularly trying for Biden. He initially tried to cajole Iran into reentering the 2015 nuclear deal, only to come up short. Despite the Democrats’ disdain for Mohammed bin Salman and Benjamin Netanyahu, he pivoted to trying to bring Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords.
Iran’s war on Israel has deeply divided the party. For decades, pro-Israel constituencies dominated the Democratic Party, but as they have declined, the pro-Hamas radical left has tried to win over the bulk of the party that initially sympathized with Israel but cannot stomach the human toll of defeating Iran and its henchmen. A wider war in the region, particularly if the United States is involved, could tear the Democrats apart. Biden’s standing in his party improves when he fights Netanyahu publicly, but he has yet to dispel the specter of a cataclysmic war as it looms ever nearer.
Biden hoped to have the transformational impact of a Franklin D. Roosevelt or Lyndon B. Johnson, but history is likely to remember him as a transitional figure. Since the Berlin Wall fell, the United States has tried to consolidate its Cold War victory. The post-Cold war era is over though. As the tide turns against the U.S.-led international order, Washington needs to recover the flexibility and determination that ultimately defeated the Soviet Union. Bidenesque half-measures will not do.
Scranton’s most famous son wanted to begin a new period of American prosperity. But the country will prosper best by ending Bidenism.