Joe Biden entered the White House with two extraordinary qualifications which no other US president could match in the past seventy years: nearly 50 years of experience in government and over a decade on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, respectively. And yet, with only ten months into office, his critics have already dismissed Biden as one of the most ineffective presidents. Why?
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In less than one year as president, Joe Biden already enjoys a unique distinction of two outstanding achievements: first, thanks to his Afghanistan folly, he is the first US president with a lowest popularity rating after eight months, both within the Democratic Party and outside of it; second, critics of his foreign policy have dismissed him saying there is no “comprehensive picture of Biden’s priorities in foreign policy, let alone a Biden doctrine or strategy.” How does one explain this? At least some analysts have found an explanation in Sheldon S. Wolin, who is considered one of the most influential political thinkers in the US in the past fifty years. Wilson, a Princeton University politics professor who passed away in 2015, once succinctly characterized the Democrats as Obama’s prospects of being elected as the US president became better in the early spring of 2008: “Should Democrats somehow be elected, they would do nothing to alter significantly the direction of society or substantially reverse the drift rightwards…”
When speaking of the current Democratic president, a US political analyst observed: “Biden is following in Bill Clinton and Barack Obama’s footsteps by providing yet more evidence for Sheldon Wolin’s thesis on the Democrats.” This evaluation of Biden was in reaction to the President’s rapidly declining approval rating – a distinction which only the 46th US president has the distinction to achieve. In the words of a US political analyst, this assessment of Biden was also made possible based on what he promised in 2019 to his Wall Street election investors – “nothing would fundamentally change” – if he became president.
And candidate Joe Biden stuck to what he promised – not to his voter constituency but to his Wall Street funders – after becoming President Biden. Remember his series of campaign promises? Namely a) to significantly slash college student debt; b) to raise the federal minimum wage; c) to pass a bill called Protect the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act); d) to cut 10% of the military budget; e) to push Medicare for all etc. and so on. All the above and many more campaign promises committed by either Biden himself or the Democrats have in the past months fallen by the wayside. Biden shelved his meagre campaign pledge to get the Congress to cancel $10,000 in college debt per person due to COVID; the federal minimum wage increase was sacrificed to “filibuster”; not only the new administration rejected a cut in military budget, instead an increase in military spending even beyond Trump’s bloating military budget has been proposed; “Medicare for all” too became a casualty of the Biden era within six months of his taking office; and the PRO Act too fell victim to “filibuster” before even the bill arrived in the US Senate.
Be that as it may, the focus of this write up is on Biden’s foreign and security policies and not domestic policies. Further, since I closely watch US-China relations, in what follows I shall put to scrutiny the US policy towards China under the Biden administration, so far.
Early on in his White House days, I did point out in my column that the Chinese were already calling him a “Cold War warrior.” Simply because to Beijing, as the successor to President Trump, the new US president had decided to “continue to strive hard to push US-China ties further into what you might call a new Cold War or ‘Biden Cold War’.” The latest media revelation confirms Biden’s China-policy is not only continuation but further consolidation of the Trump legacy. Early this month, the Wall Street Journal disclosed “US troops have been stationed in Taiwan for over one year.” Even more shocking (to Beijing) in the report was the claim that the previous administration acknowledged in a recently declassified document “the US administration loosened rules that restricted contacts with Taiwan by US officials.” Significantly, according to the report, the Biden administration has blatantly admitted “areas of continuity” between the two administrations on China policies, such as sending a US delegation to Taiwan in April this year.
Well, it is not without reason some in the West, as also in the US, are arguing that Obama’s “pivot to Asia,” Trump’s “all out anti-China policies,” and the current US administration’s “New Cold War against China” under President Biden have all been driven by the historic decline of US hegemony. However, resorting to populist chauvinism, as President Trump unsuccessfully did and now Biden is pursuing the same, out of fear for the rising China, is certainly not the best US strategy. “If the Sino-American relationship were a hand of poker, Americans would recognize that they have been dealt a good hand and avoid succumbing to fear or belief in the decline of the US,” observed one IR scholar recently.
Therefore, it is quite surprising the salient manner in which the US military strategists and the mainstream (global) media have in tandem unleashed the “China attacking Taiwan” theory. The latest is an opinion piece in the Financial Times headlined “A US-China clash is not unthinkable.” On October 5, retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis stated in an op-ed column “the US could stumble into a nuclear war with China over Taiwan.”
It is in this context, one must recall what Joseph Nye reminded us in his syndicated column last week. Invoking the historical metaphor “sleepwalking syndrome” Christopher Clark used in describing WWI, Nye attempted to explain the dangers of deepening US-China rivalry. “In 1914, all the great powers expected a short third Balkan War,” recalling Clark’s metaphor as far more worrisome in the present-day context, Nye reminded us by citing the British historian as if to warn us, “and they sleepwalked into a conflagration.” (Emphasis added) Nye went on to state: “As US President Joe Biden’s administration implements great power competition with China, a successful strategy must prevent sleepwalker syndrome.” At another level, the deepening social, political and economic crisis has been driving hundreds and thousands of teachers, factory workers, lorry drivers and others in the US to demand the right to unionize, regular work-hours, more wages etc. Is it any wonder therefore that within a few weeks after Joe Biden took office, a Financial Times columnist wrote in his column under the headline “America’s best hope of hanging together is China?” Janan Ganesh, the columnist went on to conclude: “Without an external foe to rail against, the nation turns on itself. For only an external foe can end the age of discord.” To conclude, as Beijing is right in calling Biden the Cold War warrior, Americans are not wrong either in describing Biden’s foreign policy as conventional.
