Biden’s Foreign Policy at 2

Halfway through his first term in office, President Biden generally gets high marks for his foreign policy from the national security commentariat. Of course, he enjoys a cheap grace for not being Donald Trump and for surrounding himself with certified members of the “Blob.”

Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, argues, as reported recently by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, that the president has “achieved the three national security goals he initially set: rebuild the US economy and rejuvenate the middle class; revive NATO and other global alliances; and withdraw US troops from Afghanistan to focus on current threats.” This raises more questions than it answers.

On the economy, Biden has won legislative victories that will provide long-overdue investment in domestic infrastructure, the first steps of an industrial policy for high technology, and a significant, if inadequate, investment in renewable energy. He also has sensibly sustained Trump’s break from the ruinous neoliberal trade policies of the past decades, although an alternative strategy remains undefined.

America’s beleaguered middle class, however, would be surprised to learn of its “rejuvenation.” Ominously, Biden has essentially conceded the inflation argument in ways that are likely to have brutal consequence. The Federal Reserve—and central banks across the world—are hiking interest rates, as if rising prices were driven by rising wages. The virtually promised result is a recession, with millions losing their jobs, wages stagnating, and, as the World Bank predicts, a costly global downturn.

Yet there’s little doubt that the major causes of inflation are the supply disruptions—those attending the Covid shutdown and reopening of economies across the world—extreme weather, the blowback of sanctions on Russia, and monopoly price gouging. Most of these are now chronic, not transitory, conditions. But there is no sign that the administration is moving forcefully to meet the destabilizing effects of climate, contagion, and monopoly that will continue to roil the economy.

Biden finally brought the folly in Afghanistan to an end. The immediate collapse, for which Biden was savaged, of its corruption-ravaged government was only further evidence that the United States should have gotten out years ago. Afghanistan, however, was only one front in the endless war that began on 9/11 and continues to this day. Troops remain in Syria, a glaring affront to the “rules-based order.” Biden returned soldiers into Somalia and sustained support for Saudi Arabia’s brutal war on Yemen. The drone strikes continue; special forces are dispatched to over 100 countries. There’s no sign that the Afghan withdrawal has led to a sensible and needed review of the War on Terror or of our commitments abroad.