Since President Biden couldn’t resist the temptation to pat himself on the back for his foreign policy record, I won’t …Continue reading →
Since President Biden couldn’t resist the temptation to pat himself on the back for his foreign policy record, I won’t resist the temptation to explain why his self-congratulatory Monday speech was largely bogus.
The first rejoinder should be screamingly obvious. The most important measure of a president’s foreign policy success or failure is whether he’s helped make the nation more or less secure, and it’s revealing that he never directly addressed that issue. If I was him, I wouldn’t, either.
After all, he’s brought the nation uncomfortably close to a nuclear war with Russia over a country – Ukraine – that’s not even close to being a vital national interest. He’s turned America’s southern border into a sieve through which criminals, drugs, and terrorism watch list members have flowed. And he’s displayed no ability to protect his own government, U.S. businesses, or individual Americans’ privacy from major Chinese and other hacks.
The president’s principal claim is more credible, and pretty noteworthy. He has encouraged some progress in strengthening what he called “Our sources of national power.” In particular, during the Biden years, big efforts have been made toward restoring America’s ability to manufacture the world’s most advanced semiconductors. They of course already power many of the most advanced military systems in the U.S. arsenal, and will serve as the heart of all the new artificial intelligence and robotic weapons that will undergird national military superiority and therefore national security going forward.
It’s true that the CHIPs and Science Act Mr. Biden signed into law in 2022 hasn’t yet created any U.S.-owned capability to make cutting-edge semiconductors. Taiwan and to a much lesser extent South Korea “duo-polize” that activity and are determined to keep occupying those commanding heights. But the law’s subsidies and tax breaks have convinced their semiconductor manufacturers to invest significantly into semiconductor factories that will be able to turn out chips more advanced than anything their U.S.-owned counterparts can fabricate. (See. e.g., here.) It’s a lot better than nothing.
Nevertheless, the arguments Mr. Biden touted for the other half of the equation – weakening U.S. adversaries – are difficult to take seriously. Russia’s military has clearly improved since its lousy performance in the early weeks and even months of its war on Ukraine, and its economy has held up surprisingly well. That’s partly because so many economic sanctions have been far too little and far too late. U.S. temporizing has been especially puzzling given the president’s description of the conflict in Manichean terms. (See, e.g., here.)
China’s economy is much less impressive nowadays than it was when President Biden took office, but most of the blame goes to dictator Xi Jinping’s determination to reverse many of the country’s free market-leaning reforms, and his regime’s inflation of a gargantuan property bubble that’s been rapidly and damagingly deflating. The sweeping Trump tariffs (smartly left on by the president) have helped as well.
Mr. Biden has greatly expanded export controls aimed at limiting Beijing’s technological progress and therefore its ability to create the next generations of weapons. But even his own Commerce Secretary has called them “a fool’s errand” (although she hasn’t acknowledged the main explanations that they’ve been entirely too piecemeal, and have left open too many loopholes).
And although Iran is also a shadow of its former self, that’s overwhelmingly because Israel has crippled its main terrorist proxies Hezbollah and Hamas (the latter over the president’s ongoing complaints about allegedly excessive civilian Palestinian casualties), along with its main defenses against aerial attack,(including on its nuclear facilities). If anything. the Biden administration helped keep Iran’s economy afloat, along with its ability to finance terrorism, by relaxing sanctions on tens of billions of dollars’ worth of Tehran’s oil exports.
Sharp-eyed readers may notice that I haven’t mentioned the Biden administration’s epically botched military withdrawal from Afghanistan. That’s because, although it certainly didn’t enhance America’s reputation for strength and reliability, I strongly disagree that it encouraged Russian dictator Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine, or further whetted China’s appetite for Taiwan. Again, the former was never of any importance to U.S. security, independence, or prosperity, and Putin has always known this. And reclaiming Taiwan has always been high on Xi’s priority list – at least rhetorically. If the island’s independence is vital to the United States (as I believe it is due to its semiconductor prowess), then it’s best defended by concentrating forces in its vicinity – not by somehow defeating Moscow.
Nor has Afghanistan been significant to protecting the American homeland versus Islamic terrorism. As I’ve repeatedly argued, since the early, successful stages of the Afghan war, that’s been far better achieved by securing U.S. borders, than by endlessly chasing extremists around a region that’s bound to keep spawning them. (See, e,g., here.)
Let’s close, however, with one more genuine Biden achievement: As mentioned in his speech, he has indeed managed to induce America’s Asia-Pacific allies to work more closely together to help resist Chinese expansionism. It’s possible that Beijing’s belligerence has grown so that it’s simply put the fear of God into chronic defense free-riders like Japan. But given long-festering feuds that could have crippled any coordinated and therefore effective response to any Chinese aggression (mainly that between South Korea and its former colonial master Japan), Biden administration diplomacy wasn’t small beans.
Despite the passage of two and a quarter centuries, George Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address remains a remarkably wise “what to do” lesson for U.S. leaders on the foreign policy front. If it’s remembered at all, most of this Biden speech is likely to be seen as a lesson in what not to do.
