US FOREIGN POLICY IN THE BIDEN ERA

Walter Russell Mead is the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and previously taught American foreign policy at Yale University. He was also the editor-at-large of The American Interest. In 2014, he joined the Hudson Institute as a Distinguished Scholar in American Strategy and Statesmanship. He served as the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations until 2010,[5] and is a Global View Columnist for The Wall Street Journal. Mead is a cofounder of the New America Foundation, a think tank that has been described as “radical centrist” in orientation. On a visit to Sydney, as a guest of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, Walter Russell Mead addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 14 February 2023. The paper which follows has been taken from an edited transcript of the talk.

US FOREIGN POLICY IN THE BIDEN ERA

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

Thank you for the invitation and the introduction.

The subject of American foreign policy under the Biden administration is a complicated one. I’ll try to speak clearly about it. At first, we have a problem which has much to do with American foreign policy in general, and isn’t specific to the Biden administration. This is that almost always American foreign policy looks like it’s a terrible mess. If you go back in history to the George Washington administration, the country almost broke up over foreign policy battles. Sophisticated observers of the American system, friendly and unfriendly, have generally agreed on one thing which is the Americans are terrible at foreign policy. Alexis de Tocqueville said that success in foreign policy requires all of the qualities which a Democratic republic like the United States lacks, and none of the qualities which it actually possesses.

I’m 70 years old. All my life, the United States has been in decline and our foreign policy has been a disaster. When I was a very young child, I can dimly remember the Sputnik satellite of the Soviet Union. The Soviets had won the space race, American children were not learning math in schools, the future was over. America had fallen from the post-Cold War, post-World War II era into irredeemable decline. Just a few years later, we had the missile gap when, again, the Russians were going to defeat us in the Cold War. Following that we had the balance of payments deficit, the collapse of Bretton Woods that would destroy America’s economic leadership and the role of the dollar forever. Then we had the Civil Rights Movement, which tore the country apart and polarised us and destroyed American peace. I can remember when tanks were sent into the city of Detroit, and 100 people were killed in race riots, obviously America was over.

And if that wasn’t enough, then we had the Vietnam War which ripped our society apart, which was a colossal failure, and lost America the goodwill of the entire world. It was a complete and utter disaster and failure. We survived that only to stagger into Watergate. When our institutions collapsed, we lost faith in the presidency forever, ethics had vanished and departed from the United States. Almost immediately following that, we had stagflation with the Arab oil embargo, and prices quadrupling. The automobile age and the American oil empire had been destroyed.

In all this, I’m leaving out the predictions of the collapse of capitalism from our Marxist friends who’ve been speaking about late capitalism since I was a very young boy. But late capitalism in the United States somehow continued to stagger on, and then the Germans and the Japanese had actually won the Cold War. The European Union was to be the superpower of the future and America lacked what it took; Japan’s dynamic economy with its clever state-guided system of development had left those pathetic Americans coughing in the dust. Then came the Iraq War and, again, American credibility was utterly destroyed, the American position in the Middle East would never recover we were told, the American people had lost their unity forever. I haven’t even come to Donald Trump yet.

So, it has been one long story of staggering decline and failure. Yet somehow, we’re still, maybe uneasily, still here. And we’re still declining, and we’re still falling. I have to say, after 70 years, I’ve grown just a little sceptical. When somebody comes in and tells me American foreign policy is a total wreck, and the American republic is falling apart, I want them to explain why so many people in the past have come up with the exact same diagnosis, and why they’ve all been wrong. And then explain to me why their approach is fundamentally different from all of these others.

So far, I have not been fortunate enough to hear somebody who’s able to answer those questions. So, I remain unconvinced. We will continue to decline but not fall. I actually wrote a book about American foreign policy working better than people think. Bismarck, at one point in his career was marvelling over the United States succeeding again, when it really should have failed. Bismarck came up with the phrase, “God must have a special providence for drunks, fools and the United States of America.” And that’s where I got the title for my book, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World. Because the one thing that everybody has agreed on for 200 years is that Americans are really terrible at foreign policy and American foreign policy is in a state of disarray. The other thing that everybody agrees on, looking back over the course of history, is that for the past 200 years, the most pronounced and prolonged trend in international relations has been the rise of the United States, in power and influence in the international system.

So, somehow, a country that is always falling apart, exhibiting the most insane incompetence at every moment, electing utterly unqualified people to office with a public opinion that is profoundly ignorant of international relations, nevertheless, over the last 200 years, has gradually risen to a place in the international system that no other country has ever occupied in this way. In short, my prediction for the future is the most likely thing we’ll see is more of the same. We will continue to fail and look stupid and be mocked by everyone, including ourselves. And yet, people will look around and notice, as our somewhat insecure and nervous national anthem suggests in its lines “O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave/O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave”, that the flag is still flying “by the dawn’s early light”. It will be as it has been since the nineteenth century.

So, with that as context, let’s look at the failures of the Biden administration, and the problems of American division and polarisation. I will say that the Biden administration’s foreign policy is in trouble. In some ways, the mental map that the policymakers in Washington are using to understand the world, doesn’t fit the actual world. The world’s situation has become a good deal grimmer, a good deal faster, than many people in Washington yet understand. What do I mean by all this?

First of all, look at what people, such as Secretary Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, were saying before the election about how they saw American foreign policy unfolding. They believed that in terms of geopolitics, what we could do, as Jake would put it, was park Russia. That is, reach some sort of accommodation with Putin so he would stop being a problem. Then we could engage in other things. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) of course. It was assumed that we could announce our intention to return to the JCPOA and the Iranians would jump at the chance to get back in, and that will stabilise the Middle East. America could do much less in Europe with a parked Russia, much less in the Middle East with, in essence, a parked Iran. Then, the US could focus on China without raising the defence budget to any meaningful degree or encountering any serious risks. We would be able to concentrate.

What happened was that Russia and Iran decided not to go along with that strategy. As people say in the military, the enemy gets a vote. And Russia and Iran both see themselves, as does China, as in an adversarial relationship with the United States. Regardless of the policy that a particular American administration chooses to adopt at a particular moment, they see the Americans as systemic rivals. And that the American system of liberal commerce and liberal governance is an existential threat, both to the continuation of their current regimes, and even to their international standing.

Here, we’ve been slow to see this in the West. Part of it is we read the history of the end of the Cold War rather differently from the way people read it in Russia, Iran and China today. Our reading is that the wise Mikhail Gorbachev reached out to Reagan and Bush, the terrible Cold War ended and Russia had a chance. Unfortunately Russia fumbled, for freedom and peace, but many other countries have benefited. For us it is a case of isn’t liberalisation wonderful. And certainly, if the Chinese and the Iranians understood their true interests, they would embrace such a benign process.

However, in Beijing and Tehran and, under Putin, more and more in Moscow, people see this very differently. The Soviet Union let the nose of the camel into the tents, a little bit of liberalisation in the early Gorbachev years. And it set off an irresistible dynamic of destruction and disaggregation. This broke the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the structures of the Soviet Union, ultimately, the state and the economy of the Soviet Union; it impoverished the Russian people, weakened Russia, and, a generation later, Russia is still struggling to somehow recover from. This is how Putin sees the world. It’s how the Chinese Communists see what happened in Russia. Why has the Chinese Communist Party absolutely set its face against liberalisation? This is why. They believe that liberalisation would mean the destruction of the Chinese Communist Party and, quite likely, the collapse of the Chinese state and the Chinese economy. In such a scenario, they believe the West would move ruthlessly to take advantage of whatever economic and political gains it could accomplish. They are resolute in their determination not to let this happen.

In Iran, even more so. We often forget that the nation of Iran is not an ethnic nation state, and ethnic Persians are, at most, a small majority of the total people who live in the Islamic Republic. You have Azeris, you have Kurds, you have Balochs, you have Arabs and, to a greater or lesser degree, there’s a lack of cohesion among some of these groups and the central government. What you have in Iran is what you had in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. You have an ideology that links the country, at least nominally, together and then you have a security service that enforces that ideology and serves a central state. The fear that haunts the Ayatollahs and their hangers on is that, if you give up that ideology and with it its sense of endangerment by the Americans, if you start to liberalise, you lose the legitimacy not only of the government of the Ayatollahs in the religious dictatorship in Iran, you lose the legitimacy of Iran.

The Arabs in the oil rich province where the Arabs live, who don’t always like having the revenue from oil creamed off to be redistributed into Iran, might want to join with the Shia Arabs in Iraq, or set up their own wealthy Gulf Arab Shia state. The Kurds of Iran are as interested in independence as Kurds are in other parts of the Middle East; the Azeris face the government of Azerbaijan which very much thinks of north-eastern Iran as Southern Azerbaijan waiting to be reunited with the motherland. That hope has been strong enough, among other things, to build a very deep relationship between the government of Azerbaijan and the government of Israel, which share many concerns and views about Iran.

Thus, Iran and China and Russia see themselves engaged in a common ideological and geopolitical struggle against an enemy whose mere existence is a threat to their power, their unity, their way of life, their prestige. Are they right? A Russian once said, “We finally understand you Americans and democracy.” I said, “What do you mean?” He replied, “You’re alcoholics. You swear you’ll never have another drink after the bender you went on, and in the Middle East, you’ll never do it again. But then you see a revolution in Libya, and you just have to take another drink. So we don’t trust you when you say.”  In his view, Russians are prepared to have a perfectly realistic, live and let live relationship with the US. But he said that should there be democracy riots in Moscow, or the government faced real threat, the US would do everything that it could to try to get rid of the Putin government.

Are they right? Are they wrong? You can’t say it’s unreasonable. In any case, the world is far more deeply divided with enemies who are more determined than American foreign policy has fully reckoned with. We’re seeing, as I speak, the president of Iran visit China. You would think, with all of those riots, he would have more important things to do than visit China. But then we look at the Iranian plans to build a drone factory in Russia and the closer cooperation happening there, we look at how China, despite its denials, has been providing Putin with a great deal of aid. In spite of all the hopeful declarations that come out of the West, China remains as close to Putin today as it was at the beginning of the war with Ukraine. And they are rationally calculating their interests.

In Washington, there is hope that these are somehow separate, completely separate things, that we don’t have to think about one big struggle around the world. That we don’t have to add up the strength of China,  with Russia and Iran. When we think about the dangers we face, what kind of defence systems do we need? We’re still in that post-Cold War mood of wanting to cut back our commitments internationally. So that’s one problem that the Biden administration has.

The Biden Administration is learning, but slowly, and in the most expensive possible way – through bad experience. Beyond that, I’m afraid that the Biden Administration also hasn’t yet grasped how difficult its core problem is. I voted for Joe Biden. I don’t know if it’s an irrational prejudice. Or maybe I just don’t vote for people whose surname start with T, at the presidential level.  But the folks in the Biden Administration think that what happened was that we had a perfectly good foreign policy up until 2016. We were building a world order; we were establishing peace and other countries liked what we were doing. And then the horrible Trump meteor came in from outer space and caused a tremendous explosion.

The Biden Administration believes it is one of restoration. You will hear them say, if we can just go back to the foreign policies of the Obama years, then we will gradually see the world regain its love and trust in the United States, we will see American society begin to heal. We shall move back to a more peaceful era.

I’m afraid it’s not that simple. In fact, American foreign policy had been in some ways, since the end of the Cold War, on a false course internationally. We read the lessons of Gorbachev one way and China, Russia and an Iran read them another. You could argue that our strategy in Iran is a kind of encapsulation of our global strategy. That is to say, for the last 20 years. Look at what we’ve been doing in Afghanistan. We’ve been building up Afghan civil society, we’ve been engaging in programs of rural development, to give people an alternative to opium to make a living. We’ve built up education for women and girls, we’ve started new universities, we’ve encouraged the rise of newspapers and we’ve worked on the development of civil society and NGOs, all of these wonderful things at the US Embassy. We even flew pride flags from our embassy the summer before the evacuation.

All right. We had this fabulous policy for uplifting and helping the people of Afghanistan who, God knows, could use a helping hand. But there was just one little, tiny nagging detail that got left out – a plan for winning the war. In the same way, you could say that Western strategy, since 1990, has had wonderful plans for making this a better world, for improving civil society, raising the status of women and other minority groups, encouraging agricultural development, and making the world a greener place. Fabulous ideas, benevolent ideas, far reaching ideas, but again, one little, tiny thing we neglected – the balance of power. Really, such a small thing, while these other things are so great, and so alluring, and so attractive.

So many people want to make careers in teaching people around the world the best way to live and so on. And it’s a lovely life. But we did not attend to one basic fact. We sat for 12 years while China went from a position of such weakness around the Taiwan Straits that there was no chance that China could land a single boat on Taiwan, to the present situation where it’s not entirely clear what would happen if China launched an attack. I tell you that, on the day of the Last Judgement, Neville Chamberlain will rise up and condemn our generation, as a bunch of passive soft minded appeasers who failed to take note of the obvious facts before them. The Chinese build-up was not a secret. Nor were their intentions. We all knew it was happening. After the Second World War, everyone should have read Mein Kampf. Hitler said what he was going to do. The People’s Daily News every day has said what China wants to do.

But we sat there planning new programs for uplifting rural women in Central Africa saying Africa is the continent of the future, and so on and so on. I’m not trying to denigrate anything or anybody and I would love to see women and everybody else in Africa live better lives, and I hope they do. But we sat there paralysed while China slowly and steadily changed the military balance on the Taiwan Straits.

It was a return to a policy of, I would say, criminal incompetence, and not by one or two people. The foreign policy establishment of the United States, the foreign policy establishment of Japan, the foreign policy establishment of Australia, we were all in this together. We colluded in our group ignorance and our group denial of the plainest duties. And now, we’re asking ourselves, “If we keep supplying Ukraine with missiles and ammunition, does that mean we won’t have any if China attacks Taiwan?” And discovering quite possibly the answer is yes. American military leaders are saying, “Well, it could come in 2023. By 2027, there’s a real crisis.” And so on.

How long does it take to have enough weapons so that we could help Ukraine and help Taiwan? It might take several years. And some of the components might be sourced in China. What massive incompetence. Nobody has been this stupid on this scale for this long. And they’re not just individual errors of “we didn’t read this piece of data correctly or draw the correct inference here”. There’s a culture within our leading intellectuals and security establishments, our politicians and professors. We have a map of the world in our heads that does not actually correspond to the world in front of our noses. As a result, we just have wandered and strayed like lost sheep.

I’m really glad now that I prefaced this with the observation that American foreign policy has always been a mess. Certainly, in the 1930s, we were inconsequential in the run up to World War II. In fact, nothing reminds me more of our policy toward Putin since the Crimean invasion of 2014, than our policy about Japan in the 1930s. Which was: We will not recognise Japan’s conquests in China. There, take that, you evildoers be shamed, be shamed. And wow. You know, the impact was tremendous. We confronted a real geopolitical threat in an inconsequential way.

So, what will happen now? I think the Biden administration is waking up, American public opinion is waking up, and these crazy balloon stories for the last few days have been a wakeup call to a lot of people. I got texts from family members, “Watch out that balloon is coming over to you.” People were following the story. I’ve certainly noticed in Australia on this visit, a much more active engagement and serious concern about the state of things around Taiwan, and the balance between China and the United States.

I was in Japan in the northern fall. It’s like a revolution in Japan. They’ve announced they intend to double defence spending. I see the Indonesians were in Canberra this week talking about a military treaty, a legally binding security treaty with Australia. Things are happening. And hopefully enough things will happen quickly enough that we’ll be ready. But I don’t want to close without hitting a very serious point. A fundamental point, one last time.

We are looking at a generational failure of Western strategy. A generational failure of an establishment, a generational failure of the journalistic class, of the political class. I can’t exempt myself from this. And there’s no way we can go back and change that. The past. All we can do is try to absorb the lesson and move on as quickly, as thoroughly, as seriously and as constructively as possible.