By Joe Barnes
Bonner Means Baker Fellow
The Biden administration has experienced its first foreign policy crisis: the recent round of deadly violence in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. After nearly two weeks of violence, an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel went into effect on May 21. We can only hope it endures. According to press reports, the Biden administration played an active behind-the-scenes role in fostering a cessation of hostilities.
This was combined with public statements of support for Israel’s right to self-defense and opposition to several earlier UN Security Council resolutions calling for a ceasefire. The administration’s approach broke no new ground: it reflected Washington’s traditional commitment to Israel’s security, tempered by a desire to end the escalation.
Indeed, four months into the Biden presidency, perhaps the most noteworthy thing about the Biden administration’s foreign policy is how unsurprising it has been. Joe Biden himself – a fixture of American public life for decades – is the most known of known quantities. He entered the campaign with a long record, as senator and then vice president, on a broad range of foreign policy issues. During the campaign, Biden spoke extensively on those issues. True, his statements were sometimes couched in the vague, hedged language typical of presidential candidates. But Biden’s broad approach to foreign policy was clear. Moreover, when forming his foreign policy team, Biden assembled a group of trusted and like-minded individuals; there may be differences among them, but those differences reflect nuance, rather than irreconcilable differences in overall approach. To date, Biden’s foreign policy has conformed closely to expectations. It is a case – whatever the merits of Biden’s approach – of truth in advertising.
Surely one of Biden’s greatest strengths in the campaign was a promise, often implicit but pervasive, that his election would mark a “return to normalcy” after four years of Trump’s erratic, at times chaotic, presidency. His foreign policy clearly marks such a return.
This begins with style. The Biden administration has a far more traditional attitude toward the day-to-day mechanics of foreign policy. Biden’s is a far more sober, approach which includes painstaking preparation and harnessing career professionals in the foreign affairs bureaucracy. This does not mean that the execution of Biden’s foreign policy is seamless. Given the complexity of the issues, time pressures, and the often substantial number of individuals involved, no U.S. foreign policy can be seamless. But we have clearly seen the end of Trump’s highly personalized, erratic “foreign policy by tweet.”
But Biden’s “return to normalcy” is not just a matter of re-instituting a semblance of order in the conduct of foreign policy. There is also a clear return to the general thrust of the foreign policy of the Obama administration. This should not be surprising, given the fact that Biden himself and many of his senior advisors were members of that administration. Biden has already moved quickly on some of his key campaign promises to restore two signature Obama-era policies: the United States has reentered the Paris Agreement on greenhouse gas emissions and is in the midst of negotiating a resumption of the Iran nuclear deal.
But Biden’s foreign policy embodies more than a return to Obama policies. Biden, like Obama, is an adherent to liberal internationalism — at some simplification, an approach that emphasizes multilateral institutions, security alliances, expanded global trade and investment and promotion of human rights and democracy. Needless to say, actual U.S. policies, even under nominally liberal internationalist presidents, routinely reflect naked self-interest, disdain for international institutions when they do not bend to our will, old-fashioned great power politics and a very selective (and often hypocritical) approach to human rights. But Biden’s foreign policy does stand in stark contrast to Trump’s overtly nationalist and zero-sum approach. Biden, for instance, has been assiduous in stressing the importance of alliances, declaring that “America is back.”
To this extent, Biden’s foreign policy to date may be called “restorationist.” It seeks to restore U.S. foreign policy not just to the approach of the Obama administration but to the tradition of liberal internationalism, perhaps the dominant strain in Washington’s approach to international affairs since World War II.
Needless to say, Biden’s foreign policy is not identical to President Obama’s. It can’t be. The world has changed substantially since Obama left office. Biden’s more confrontational stance toward China, for instance, reflects a clear shift in consensus view of Beijing in the wake of heightened Chinese provocations abroad and human rights violations at home. Additionally, Biden’s speed in ordering the exit of U.S. troops from Afghanistan reflects not only general public dissatisfaction with the war, but Biden’s own strong views on our presence there; he was a strong opponent of then-President Obama’s decision to send more troops to Afghanistan in 2009.
U.S. liberal internationalism itself faces challenges. The rise of a multipolar world — notably the emergence of China as an economic superpower and regional military force to be reckoned with — makes a full restoration of a U.S.-centered international order impossible. The days of unrivaled U.S. power in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War have irretrievably passed. The years ahead will tell us how effective the Biden administration will be in protecting U.S. interests and, where possible, advancing U.S. values in a fundamentally altered geopolitical landscape.