Dominance in the Name of Internationalism

In a piece at TomDispatch Andrew Bacevich predicts the likely foreign policy of a Biden Administration:

On the eve of the upcoming presidential election, the entire national security apparatus and its supporters assume that Trump’s departure from office will restore some version of normalcy. Every component of that apparatus from the Pentagon and the State Department to the CIA and the Council on Foreign Relations to the editorial boards of the New York Times and Washington Post yearns for that moment.

To a very considerable degree, a Biden presidency will satisfy that yearning. Nothing if not a creature of the establishment, Biden himself will conform to its requirements. For proof, look no further than his vote in favor of invading Iraq in 2003. (No isolationist he.) Count on a Biden administration, therefore, to perpetuate the entire obsolete retinue of standard practices.

As Peter Beinart puts it, “When it comes to defense, a Biden presidency is likely to look very much like an Obama presidency, and that’s going to look not so different from a Trump presidency when you really look at the numbers.” Biden will increase the Pentagon budget, keep U.S. troops in the Middle East, and get tough with China. The United States will remain the world’s number-one arms merchant, accelerate efforts to militarize outer space, and continue the ongoing modernization of the entire U.S. nuclear strike force. Biden will stack his team with CFR notables looking for jobs on the “inside.”

Above all, Biden will recite with practiced sincerity the mantras of American exceptionalism as a summons to exercise global leadership. “The triumph of democracy and liberalism over fascism and autocracy created the free world. But this contest does not just define our past. It will define our future, as well.” Those uplifting sentiments are, of course, his from a recent Foreign Affairs essay.

So if you liked U.S. national security policy before Trump mucked things up, then Biden is probably your kind of guy. Install him in the Oval Office and the mindless pursuit of “dominance in the name of internationalism” will resume. And the United States will revert to the policies that prevailed during the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama — policies, we should note, that paved the way for Donald Trump to win the White House.

I think he’s being unduly optimistic. Although he correctly predicts how a Biden Administration will frame its actions and what it will probably seek to do, today is not the same as 1950. It’s not even the same as 1990. Liberal interventionism won’t pursue dominance in the name of internationalism unless, of course, you mean Chinese dominance under the guise of U. S. internationalism. International institutions are now so thoroughly distorted by the PRC that they’ll probably have us pursuing Chinese foreign policy goals.

At the bottom line, I agree with Dr. Bacevich. We should follow John Quincy Adams’s advice and avoid going forth in search of monsters to destroy but should follow Voltaire’s advice: tend our garden. The United States is an outlier and not only am I not troubled by that I would prefer that it remain so. We need to tread an increasingly narrow line between isolationism and internationalism against U. S. interests.