Biden’s Foreign Policy Legacy: A Troubled Interregnum

“Well, who you gonna believe? Me or your own eyes?” – Chico Marx, Duck Soup

As they near the end of their tenure, U.S. administrations often take “victory laps,” flaunting their accomplishments and seeking to define their legacies. Today’s fraught circumstances—a world on the edge—have not deterred Secretary of State Antony Blinken from offering his Panglossian assessment. In the pages of Foreign Affairs, Blinken labels the Biden administration’s foreign policy achievements as a “Strategy of Renewal,” “defin[ing] a new age in international affairs.” In prose, that is partly absurd and partly tendentious. Blinken tries to put a glossy veneer on the administration’s performance, airbrushing away its mistakes.

Blinken’s core assertion, for example, requires some head-scratching: “The Biden administration’s strategy has put the United States in a much stronger geopolitical position today than it was four years ago.” This self-assured certainty at a fluid, uncertain moment—what Chinese leader Xi Jinping calls “changes the likes of which we haven’t seen in 100 years”—is hubris on steroids.

By many measures, the “Rules-Based Order” (adhered to à la carte by the United States) is decomposing. The unmentioned debacle of the bungled exit from Afghanistan in August 2021 was a blow to American credibility. Today, the world is in a state of polycrisis—interacting crises cascading downward and unraveling the global order. Blinken’s metric for measuring U.S. success on the world stage seems to be President Joe Biden’s achievement in building stronger security and tech networks with U.S. partners and allies in Europe and Asia. In this, he has been successful even if these gains are impermanent. But Blinken’s assessment is only half right. As former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin said, “You don’t make peace with your friends; you make peace with very unsavory enemies.”

From the 1648 Peace of Westphalia through the Cold War and the unipolar moment in 1991, international orders have been based on a balance of power, as Henry Kissinger argued—an agreed concept of order in which all the major actors accepted the legitimacy of the others. None of these elements exist today. Kissinger wrote in 2015 that the world was in a period of dislocation—with more actors and wealth and power more diffuse—and that stability requires “a new concept of international order.”

A Binary Ideology

Biden’s binary “democracies vs. autocracies” ideology, defining a complex world by regime type, is fostering an intellectually lazy, yet familiar, landscape of antagonistic alignments. This approach places the international system on a trajectory closer to where it was before World War I or during the 1930s when the international order was fraying. 

What drives U.S. strategy, Blinken writes, is “fierce competition” to “define a new age.” The competitors are an aligned group of actors—China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea—that “are determined to alter the foundational principles of the international system.” The logic of the Biden administration’s policies appears to forge a democracy-centric economic and political order, a G7-plus with no obvious place for China or Russia—both of which the United States seeks to maintain its primacy over. Yet Blinken writes, “the administration has also sought to make international institutions more inclusive,” apparently a reference to unachieved proposals to expand the UN Security Council.

Does Russia, with its nuclear weapons and oil, and China, the largest trading and capital-exporting power and the second-largest military power with nuclear weapons, get a vote? Neither Russia nor China will go away anytime soon. How is stability and prosperity possible—let alone cooperation on existential global issues like climate change, global health, or creating global norms and standards for artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies—absent a clear idea of a structure, balance, and process of order?

Blinken rightly says that what is often called an axis is more complex, that “their forms of governance, ideologies, interests, and capabilities differ,” and that the glue that unites them is opposition to U.S. primacy and desire to make the world safe for authoritarians. Blinken says that while the United States “has been clear that it does not seek bloc confrontation, choices these revisionist powers make mean we need to act decisively to prevent that outcome.”

There is no discernible awareness in Washington that any U.S. causality is pushing the authoritarians together in what seems to be classic security dilemma behavior, an action-reaction cycle. The more the United States seeks to bolster its security against Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, the more they do the same. Nor have there been any nuanced efforts by the Biden administration to explore the significantly differing interests or tensions between China and Russia or Iran and their ties to both. For example, Stephen Hadley, former national security advisor to President George W. Bush, argues that the United States should seek to separate China from what he calls an “Axis of Losers” as a dynamic power dependent on its global integration.

Conflicts Abroad

Toxic relations with China and the strategic and economic cancellation of Russia do not bode well for a stable balance. The risks of this approach are playing out in two wars—Ukraine and the Middle East—with no end in sight and a serious risk of escalation. The United States has appeared reactive, weak, and overwhelmed, with no discernible strategy for ending either conflict amid a divided Congress and public.

Despite substantial amounts of U.S. assistance to Ukraine—$183 billion in military and economic aid since the February 2022 Russian invasion—and to Israel—$17.9 billion for military operations since October 7, 2023—the United States displays little control over events in both conflict zones. One often-overlooked irony is the Biden administration’s continuity with former President Donald Trump’s foreign policy: Trump sent lethal military aid to Ukraine (though he was impeached for trying to politicize it). In the Middle East, Biden’s strategy is based on fulfilling the intent of the Abraham Accords with Saudi-Israeli normalization. In China, Biden has kept Trump’s tariffs, expanding curbs on tech as well.

In the Middle East, Washington is playing both arsonist and firefighter—providing Israel with bombs and then desperately seeking to provide humanitarian aid to the victims of Israeli attacks. Sustained, frenzied U.S. diplomacy might yield ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon and a temporary calm, but peace remains elusive. Actions by the Netanyahu government suggest Israel intends to de facto annex Gaza and the West Bank, rendering implausible a two-state solution, which has been the lynchpin of U.S. strategy. In the case of Israel, the tail appears to be wagging the dog.

Perhaps Blinken’s most preposterous claim is “I do policy, not politics.” For starters, to publish a piece on the eve of a national election whose main theme is to contrast Biden’s policy against Trump’s “America-First” strategy is, at best, disingenuous and, at worst, ridiculous. This is particularly true when domestic U.S. politics are shaping U.S. support for Ukraine and U.S. policy toward Israel in the conflict in the Middle East, and not the least, U.S. policies toward China. This is likely to be more the case in the incoming Trump administration.

It was not by accident that former Secretary of State James Baker’s memoir was titled The Politics of Diplomacy. As occurred during the George H. W. Bush administration, Baker’s operating premise was: if you don’t have political support, you don’t have a policy. That may be one reason why Baker and NSC Advisor Brent Scowcroft oversaw the most successful U.S. foreign policy in fifty years.

The Impact of U.S. Policies on the Green Transition and Global Markets

Heralding the administration’s geopolitical and economic statecraft, Blinken points to the domestic economic renewal, where so far, manufacturing outcomes have been substantial. The CHIPS Act and Inflation Reduction Act pumped $53 billion and $390 billion, respectively, in grants, tax credits, and loans, into restoring U.S. manufacturing in advanced semiconductor chip and green energy technologies (solar, wind, batteries, electric vehicles (EVs)). These subsidies have generated some $400 billion in private investment in electronics and green tech, as well as a boom in manufacturing. But will this boom be sustainable when subsidies end? Moreover, given China’s dominance of wind, solar energy, minerals processing, batteries, and EVs, “buy/make America” policies may slow the green transition and result in the United States failing to compete with China in green tech. 

On this shaky foundation, Blinken articulated efforts for Washington to lead the green transition along with U.S. partners—a “foreign policy for the middle class.” However, U.S. partners in Europe are only partly following Washington, levying more modest tariffs of up to 45 percent on EVs while importing Chinese solar panels and components (polysilicon, wafers, cells, and modules) batteries. Moreover, some countries are inviting Beijing to build battery and EV factories in their countries. Brussels is also calling for negotiations with China to settle differences. Asia is less restrictive, importing Chinese solar panels and modules, batteries, and EVs, as well as hosting Chinese factories.

Blinken further cites the proliferation of multilateral groupings of like-minded world leaders as the sinews of order: The Transatlantic Trade and Technology Council (TTIP), with the EU, as well as the fourteen-nation Critical Minerals Partnership to develop secure supply chains via a “critical minerals marketplace” for green tech now dominated by China. To address the interests of Global South countries, some of whom, like India, are participating in mineral and tech “friendshoring” efforts, Blinken cites coalitions like the G7 Partnership for Global Infrastructure, which he says will mobilize $600 billion by 2027 in private investment to build regional infrastructure networks in Africa, and an India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC).

However, like Biden’s Asia economic initiative, the International Partnership for Economic Framework (IPEF), these are reactive projects in response to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). For all its debt-creating flaws, BRI has invested some $1 trillion in over 200 projects in 149 countries. IPEF is an economic grouping largely in response to Asian trade initiatives that exclude the United States: the Comprehensive Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), which the United States negotiated and then rejected, and the Regional Comprehensive Partnership (RCEP), which includes China and all U.S. Asian partners.

IPEF, focusing on supply chains, workers’ rights, and climate issues, is called a trade agreement, but it has no market access provisions for opening the U.S. market or partners’ markets for U.S. exporters. Similarly, whether the G7 initiative will result in more than a fraction of the promised infrastructure is an open question. Moreover, the U.S.-EU TransAtlantic Trade and Technology Council, with modest achievements in supply chain cooperation and coordinating tech standards, has not expanded market access. So far, TTC has demonstrated differences between the U.S. and EU trade policies and regulatory cultures, while Europe is adapting to China’s economic dominance. The Europeans are troubled that U.S. subsidies for chips and green tech are luring their firms to invest in the U.S. rather than the EU and have countered with its protectionist industrial policy.

The EU has moved closer to the United States in its skepticism about China’s aggressive mercantilism and strategic challenges. Still, it has been driven more by China’s support for Russia in its invasion of Ukraine than U.S. cajoling. At the same time, there is an understanding, particularly on the part of Berlin, that Europe’s prosperity depends on trade with China. Europe has already endured one major economic shock with the cutoff of cheap Russian natural gas for most Europeans; the loss of the Chinese market wouldn’t be just painful, it would be catastrophic: China is the EU’s second-largest trading partner after the United States. Despite Europe’s posture criticizing both Russia and China, in seeking to cater to both the U.S. and China, Europe is moving gradually toward the multi-aligned posture of many middle powers that depend on economic ties with China but also want the U.S. as a counterweight against China.

Fading Primacy

At a troubled interregnum between a waning era and a profoundly uncertain future—one that threatens to be shaped by war—Team Biden, as Blinken evidences, exudes an unwarranted certainty. As the limits of U.S. power became more obvious, the Biden administration sought to perpetuate a fading primacy. Biden’s economic nationalism has compounded the risk of economic fragmentation and the corrosion of the successful Bretton Woods institutions forged in 1944 with little notion of what would follow. Thus, U.S. allies and partners increasingly hedge even as they cling. The lengthening Global South queue to join the BRICS reflects a search for a post-American world. The start of a new administration in January will prove a good moment to reflect.