What Would Biden’s Foreign Policy Be?

In his latest Wall Street Journal column Walter Russell Mead speculates about what the foreign policy of a Biden Administration might seek:

There will certainly be changes. One will be on climate policy. While moderate liberals may not embrace the entire “Green New Deal” agenda that featured prominently in the Democratic presidential primary, a strong climate program is central to Democratic thinking these days. Mr. Biden’s America would not only return to the Paris agreement; it would put U.S. diplomatic weight behind a stronger, faster push to reduce global emissions.

There will also be surprises. Those looking for a Biden administration to return to the free-trade agenda that presidents from George H.W. Bush through Mr. Obama prioritized should brace for a shock. It isn’t only Republicans like Mr. Trump and Sens. Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley who have broken with the free-trade orthodoxy of past decades. Jake Sullivan, a former top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and national security adviser to Mr. Biden in the Obama White House, published an article this February calling for significant changes.

He and co-author Jennifer Harris (another Obama veteran) argue for a fundamental shift away from what they call the “neoliberal” agenda of recent presidents. “Policymakers must move beyond the received wisdom that every trade deal is a good trade deal and that more trade is always the answer,” they write. A “postneoliberal” agenda would promote industrial policy (large public investments in green energy and other climate-friendly technologies as well as funding to match China’s support for tech). It would include the reshoring of strategic manufacturing capabilities, “a laser focus on what improves wages and creates high-paying jobs in the United States,” and aggressive campaigns against firms taking advantage of low-corporate-tax havens like Switzerland and Ireland.

A Biden administration would likely share Mr. Trump’s position that China is America’s major geopolitical competitor, but it will pursue that competition in a different way. While the current president views existing international architecture with suspicion, Mr. Biden would likely see it as an indispensable element in building an effective international approach to Beijing. A Biden administration would not share Mr. Trump’s willingness to disrupt relations with both European and Asian allies, and it would attempt to smooth relations with important U.S. allies like Japan, South Korea and Germany. But Mr. Biden’s White House would likely combine any friendliness with a new emphasis on human rights and a skepticism about the value of trade—which could lead to some interesting conversations with regional powers including Vietnam, Myanmar, Thailand and even India.

On Iran, most Democratic foreign-policy experts regret Mr. Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA, but there is less consensus on what to do going forward. So many things have changed since 2017 in Iran and the region that simply returning to the status quo ante Trump is unrealistic. The unilateral sanctions the Trump administration imposed on Iran may not have brought Tehran back to the bargaining table on the president’s terms, but a Biden administration might not want to give up the leverage those sanctions provide without receiving something from Iran in return.

much of which sounds pretty good to me which makes me suspicious of it. How much is based on VP Biden’s published statements and how much on wishful thinking? Is it mostly the latter?

A President Biden would need to protect his left flank so I have little doubt that climate change will figure in his foreign policy as it has not in President Trump’s. In the face of a global depression which is exactly what will happen if the U. S. doesn’t come back online quickly, pursuing U. S. carbon emissions as a major focus of foreign policy will look increasingly surreal.

Indeed, unless the U. S. economy recovers more quickly than seems likely at the present, I doubt that President Biden will have the time to take much of an interest in it at all.

But all of this is getting far ahead of ourselves. At this point we can’t be sure that Joe Biden will be the Democratic nominee let alone whether he will be elected.