Is It Possible To Create a Biden Doctrine?

When the Democratic presidential primaries ended and Bernie Sanders announced his support for Joe Biden, the two initiated a series of meetings between members of each camp with the express purpose of molding a political platform that would not split the party. The only problem was that the working groups that were set up to address the key policy issues (justice, environment, economy, education, health and immigration) left out one fundamental issue, making clear that there was a deep incompatibility between the progressive and centrist factions when it came to the subject of foreign policy.

There are well-established reasons for this dispute, all dating back at least 30 years. If Biden is an heir to traditional Clintonian, liberal, internationalist views, comfortable with using military action as an instrument of indisputable American primacy, Sanders, on the other hand, rejects America’s exceptionalist role and the Pentagon’s billions, adopting instead a more constrained foreign policy. This distinction does not seem to favor a balanced and coherent common position, but what has occurred suggests there is actually some room for such a development.

The Biden team is far more experienced and well known than Sanders’ team, which relies solely on Matt Duss as an influential adviser in this area, but Duss appears, nonetheless, quite capable of building bridges with the Biden advisers, particularly with the core group made up of Tony Blinken, Bill Burns, Jake Sullivan, Julie Smith and Michele Flournoy, all formerly in the Obama administration. The working groups are in regular contact, and the clearest sign yet of their effectiveness has been the Democrats’ unity, in contrast with the chaos of Donald Trump’s management of the pandemic and the damage this has done to America’s credibility abroad. The Democrats have also benefited from Biden’s strong relationship with Elizabeth Warren, the candidate in the primaries with the most interesting foreign policy, counseled by Sasha Baker and Ganesh Sitaraman, and about whom there has been talk of consideration for the vice presidency.

There are, for the moment, two key points of agreement between the teams, and these could set the stage for eventually defining a set of priorities. The first is the result of a structural change in the American political climate, hastened by the catastrophic effects of COVID-19: an America less inclined to intervene in several crises simultaneously, or even willing to assume a key role in shaping the discussion about globalization. The lingering hangover from the long, post-Sept. 11 wars (Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya), coupled with the devastating financial crisis of 2008-09, had already made Barack Obama more skeptical about the use of long-term military responses, and steered him instead toward a greater accommodation with rising regional powers, pressing the reset button with Russia, using diplomacy with China, becoming more attentive to relations with Brazil and India and reintegrating Iran into the international arena. Four years of Trump have changed all of this, though they have also added $100 billion to the Pentagon’s budget. Allies have become rivals, the unilateral belligerence directed at Beijing and Tehran has reached alarming levels of carelessness, and the authoritarian alignment with the leaderships of Brazil and Russia has threatened the health of Western democracies.

In this context of open competition between the great powers—in contrast to the international accommodation previously practiced by Obama and Biden—the response drafted by the Democratic election platform assigns the highest priority to a domestic rebuilding of the country (currently polarized, institutionally dysfunctional, in a historic recession and with rampant unemployment), continuing the retraction of the last decade, but for different reasons. Whereas Trump is a committed nationalist who despises the way global dynamics function, Biden’s internationalism is simply inverted, making a domestic rebuild a part of the reinvention of America’s global role. In other words, the catastrophe brought about by COVID-19 and Trump’s political leadership has contributed to the harmonizing of strategic views among Democrats, a reconciliation which at first seemed impossible.

The second point of gradual agreement between Democratic factions has to do with the financial resources potentially available to fight the current economic crisis. Official data point to a contraction of 32% of the gross domestic product between April and June, the most serious in American history. To put this in perspective, this same measure only reached 8.4% during the worst period of the 2008-09 crisis. The situation is profoundly dramatic, and one of the reasons for Trump’s threat to postpone elections even though he did not have the power to do so, or the descent into anarchy implied in his comment that he might not accept the election result if he were to lose, something which would make official America’s entrance into the typology of regimes commonly known as "banana republics."

The COVID-19 crisis makes clear the need to marshal all available federal resources to create programs to support the unemployed, businesses and public health. This is where "progressive" Democrats’ old proposal to cut 10% of the defense budget comes in, a proposal which Sanders had already introduced in the Senate, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s support. Biden is not shutting the door on this idea, though neither is he committing to it. What appears to be certain is that the perceived inability to manage military interventions and missions abroad in the same manner as at other moments in history implies a revision of financial priorities in the Pentagon, a position that it would be sensible to make a central point in the presidential election campaign.

This double predisposition (a constrained foreign policy and a reorientation of resources) only makes sense, however, if it is accompanied by an intensive diplomatic effort, or else it will risk being seen as just a more polished version of Trump’s retraction. And that can’t happen. Alliances will need to be reactivated, recovered and reinvented. They will need to be less dependent on Washington’s unilateral will, and more balanced with respect to means and scope. All of this implies a greater contribution from allies, namely those in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The same goes for the reinvention of international organizations. It will not be enough to simply restore what Trump has cut, financially as well as politically. It will be necessary to build coalitions among states that focus on common goals, and to adapt these to a multilateralism that is effective in a post-COVID-19 context, after the pandemic eclipsed and discredited so many of the world’s institutions.

The temptation to simply restore Obama’s foreign policy is great. Only, the world has changed a great deal in recent years, and it is never a good sign to attempt to latch on to something that, manifestly, cannot be reproduced or adapted by others. In the absence of a true Biden doctrine, it will be up to the various factions of the Democratic Party to design one. And that may be the way to make it a winning campaign.