Biden's Foreign Policy - It Makes A Lot Of Sense
As to domestic policy, however, he's way out to lunch. But domestic policy falls under the control of Congress, and it looks like there's a lot of blame shifting going on, to avoid accountability...
“Afghanistan represents the starkest example of Biden’s pragmatic realist streak. He ended the war swiftly after concluding that doing so would benefit the United States, heeding the strong preference of the U.S. public and resisting pressure from the Pentagon and many foreign policy elites to renew the U.S. state-building project. In justifying his decision, Biden insisted that U.S. service members should be sent into combat only to defend the United States. As an animated Biden told an interviewer during his presidential campaign, “The responsibility I have is to protect America’s national self-interest and not put our women and men in harm’s way to try to solve every single problem in the world by use of force.”
Afghanistan may be just the beginning. Biden has ordered the Defense Department to conduct a “global posture review” of the United States’ forward deployments. If the review acts on the insight of General Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, that many existing deployments were “developed during the Cold War,” it could recommend a significant restructuring of the U.S. military footprint. The administration has already signaled its intention to “right-size” the U.S. military presence in the Middle East and has recently begun that process by pulling antimissile systems out of Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. Biden may also become the first president in three decades to avoid the enlargement of NATO: he has soft-pedaled talk of extending NATO membership to Ukraine, although he has continued to send military aid to the country.
To be sure, Biden has often framed U.S. relations with China and Russia in ideological terms. He has vowed to disprove the notion that “autocracy is the wave of the future” by demonstrating the continued vitality of American democratic institutions. Yet Biden’s actual policies toward the two powers betray his pragmatic bent. Rather than merge the countries into a single specter of an authoritarian menace, Biden has prioritized competition with a rising China well above that with a weaker Russia. He has aimed to establish a “stable and predictable relationship” with the latter, an approach that seeks to limit bilateral tensions and potentially enable the United States to focus on counterbalancing China.
If Biden continues to apply this vision, he will deliver a welcome change from decades of overassertive U.S. foreign policy.
As he did during the Cold War, Biden has taken steps designed to open the door to negotiated resolutions to disputes with the United States’ geopolitical rivals. He chose to hold his first major bilateral summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin and has also signaled his interest in meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Diplomacy, he said after his summit with Putin, does not depend on trusting the other party. It requires merely that both sides have mutual interests and establish understandings based on those interests. “This is about self-interest and verification of self-interest,” Biden emphasized. “It’s just pure business.”
At times, Biden’s own rhetoric can obscure his most distinctive foreign policy instincts. He has expressed revulsion at Trump for embracing “all the thugs in the world” and vowed that “human rights will be the center of our foreign policy”—a claim that is hard to square with his unapologetic defense of vital national interests as the sole grounds for war. And in December, he plans to hold the first of two “Summits for Democracy” intended to help the world’s democracies defend against authoritarianism and show they can deliver for their citizens. Contrasted with Trump and his affinity for autocrats, Biden may sound like he is returning to the United States’ muscular promotion of liberalism and democracy abroad.
Still, most of Biden’s statements and actions are consistent with an outlook that puts national security above all other considerations. Likewise, the Summits for Democracy so far do not reflect a substantial effort either to expand U.S. alliances with democracies or to restrict U.S. alliances to liberal states. After all, pro-democracy rhetoric has not precluded the Biden administration from deepening ties with authoritarian states such as Thailand and Vietnam and increasingly illiberal democracies such as India and the Philippines. The summits may simply reflect the fact that Biden supports democracy, liberal values, and human rights—without thinking they should be promoted at the point of a gun or dictate U.S. defense obligations.” https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-09-09/biden-realist