Foreign Policy and the 2024 Election

Has Biden's policy been a failure? Would Harris be better or worse? And is Trump the peace candidate?

I expect foreign policy to have almost no impact on the 2024 election. It’s possible that Kamala Harris winds up losing Michigan because of President Biden’s strong support for Israel, but I suspect that if Biden had been less supportive or if Harris had broken from the president on the issue that would have been even worse for her electoral prospects. Regardless, Michigan remains Harris’s best state among the battlegrounds; if she loses Michigan, she’s probably already lost enough key states elsewhere to lose the election. And I don’t think any other foreign policy issue even registers.

Even if it doesn’t sway the election, though, the election could have profound consequences for foreign policy, since it’s an area where the president has an exceptionally large scope of action. And both Donald Trump and Harris have made strong claims about foreign policy, Trump arguing that he kept America at peace through strength while Biden’s record has been a disaster that is leading us to World War III, Harris generally declining to defend Biden’s record in detail but attacking Trump vigorously for undermining America’s alliances and fawning over dictatorships that wish us ill.

So what do I think? Has Biden’s foreign policy been a disastrous failure? Would Harris be better or worse? And is Trump the peace candidate?

Well, I’ll tell you.

The most important fact about Biden’s record is that there is a lot more conflict happening right now than there was during the Trump years. Not that the Trump years were years of peace, for America or for the world. The United States was still mopping up ISIS in Iraq, was still engaged in Afghanistan, and was supporting Saudi Arabia’s increasingly brutal war against the Houthis in Yemen. Trump lobbed some missiles at Syria and killed an important Iranian general; he threatened to rain fire down on North Korea, initiated a major trade war with China, and pulled out of the nuclear deal with Iran. There was ongoing conflict in the Donbas, continued threats over Taiwan, periodic suggestions that America might intervene in Venezuela or Mexico—I could go on.

Nonetheless, however you want to characterize Trump’s record, it didn’t involve getting the United States into any significant new wars, in contrast to Trump’s four predecessors. And while Biden extricated America from one war and didn’t initiate any major new conflicts, the Afghan pullout implemented an agreement that Trump negotiated, and the wars currently rocking the globe are both vastly more deadly and more significant in terms of American interests and overall world stability than anything that happened during the Trump years—and they are not going well. How can this record be described as anything other than a disaster?

The argument for the defense, broadly speaking, argues that Biden isn’t to blame for the outbreak of war on any of these fronts, that he has effectively steered America in the direction of both greater strength and greater security, and that he has been exceptionally effective at responding when war has broken out. I’ll make that argument and then assess it in each of three theaters: Russia/Ukraine, Israel/Iran and China/Taiwan.

A Biden defender would argue first of all that the war in Ukraine was launched by Russia without any immediate provocation; after all, Volodymyr Zelenskyy had been elected on a conciliatory platform toward Russia, the situation in the Donbas was relatively stable, and there was no imminent prospect of either NATO or EU membership for Ukraine. Biden’s pre-war policy was basically to maintain the status quo. If you take a hawkish view of Russia, then, the primary blame for the war belongs to Obama, for not responding more forcefully to Russia’s seizure of Crimea, and to Trump, for cozying up to Putin. If, on the other hand, you take the view that Russia’s moves are all responses at a deeper level to a sense of threat from the West, then the real culprits are the George W. Bush administration, for first suggesting Ukraine was on track to NATO membership, the Bill Clinton administration, for first expanding NATO to include former Warsaw Pact countries, and, ironically, the Trump administration, for sending the first lethal aid to build up Ukraine’s armed forces.

Russia launched the war at a scale that they knew would be unacceptable; Biden had been careful to distinguish between how America would respond to a “limited incursion” as opposed to a full-scale invasion, and Russia delivered the latter. In response, the Ukrainians put up a surprisingly strong defense (thanks in part to armaments provided during both the Trump and Biden years), Biden rallied America’s major allies to levy unprecedented sanctions on Russia, and NATO added Sweden and Finland to its roster. A number of NATO countries, most notably Poland, have significantly increased their defense spending since the war began, and many more have ponied up huge sums for both economic and military support of Ukraine. Not withstanding the setbacks Ukraine has experienced, Russia has been far more bloodied than anyone could reasonably have expected it would be in 2022, and will ultimately have to settle for far less than they wanted when they launched the war.

Is this account convincing? Not really, I don’t think, because of what it leaves out. Before the war, the Biden administration’s aims could reasonably be described as maximalist: an Ukraine that was free of Russian troops and not subject to Russian intimidation. If you believe that Russia thought it was acting defensively, that implicates Biden along with his predecessors. Then, if everyone—including the Biden administration—underestimated Ukraine on the eve of war, after their spectacular gains in the war’s first year everyone also overestimated their likelihood of ultimate success, and advised Ukraine accordingly, very possibly to their detriment. If Russia has been badly bloodied, it has also been pushed closer to China than ever, and the unprecedented sanctions launched by Biden have largely failed, revealing their weakness as a weapon. NATO has been united, but revisionist parties and movements opposed to the Ukraine war have been growing in strength across Europe, most notably in France and Germany. Finally, there’s never been a clear endgame to this war. The goal has been to defeat Russia without crossing whatever red line Russia has that would lead to uncontrollable escalation, but the more that goal fails to be achieved the more the administration has been tempted to test and cross the red lines it had previously identified. Every individual decision Biden has made is highly defensible, but overall the record has been reactive, and looks increasingly like it risks total failure.

Israel’s war looks similar in many ways despite the fact that, from the perspective of much of the world, it looks almost entirely opposite, with Israel the bullying Goliath and Gaza the plucky David. A Biden defender would claim that Hamas launched its attacks without immediate provocation, and with the aim of triggering precisely the all-out war that Israel launched in response, with all its attendant civilian death and destruction. If there’s a deeper cause of the war in Israel’s intransigent refusal to midwife a Palestinian state, Biden isn’t really to blame for that, and Trump is more to blame than any recent presidential predecessor because he gave Netanyahu a blank check. If there’s a deeper cause in the form of the threat from Iran, meanwhile, then Biden deserves credit for continuing Trump’s efforts to build a broad anti-Iran coalition within the region under the Abraham Accords.

Once war came, Biden reacted by showing Israel unequivocal support, winning enduring gratitude from the Israel people, and has provided both the weapons necessary to prosecute the war and assistance in battling more distant adversaries like the Houthis (whom America bombed) and Iran (whose missiles America helped shoot down). As a result, Israel has largely destroyed Hamas’s military capabilities and eliminated its leadership, is doing the same to Hezbollah in Lebanon, and has forced Iran to reckon with whether it wants a full-scale war. All the while, Biden has labored diplomatically to maintain Israel’s relations with America’s Arab allies, while also carefully exploiting cracks in the governing coalition, with the ultimate goal of a political settlement with the Palestinians under a new Israeli government. Biden was dealt an extremely difficult hand, but he has played it about as well as one could hope.

Is this account convincing? Again, not really. One possible motivation for Hamas to have launched this catastrophic war was fear of precisely the anti-Iran diplomatic initiative that Biden was championing: normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia. That goal might still have been worth pursuing—peace is good—but if peace is good then that goes for peace between America and Iran as well, and Biden has never made a serious priority of getting back into the nuclear deal that Trump scuttled. Diplomatically speaking, Israel’s war has done enormous damage to America’s interests around the world, to the primary benefit of Russia and China. Meanwhile, the attempts to pry open cracks in the Netanyahu government have almost completely failed; his coalition is growing, not shrinking. Finally, the bottom line is not Iran’s reckoning but the fact that Israel and Iran are now trading blows, and at any point one of those blows could prompt a major escalation, which would likely draw the United States directly into war. As with Ukraine, Biden’s individual decisions are highly defensible, but they add up to a reactive record that has not obviously advanced American interests.

Finally: China. American policy toward China began to change materially in the second Obama administration, and has continued to trend in the direction of confrontation with each change of administration. That’s primarily due to America’s assessment of China’s growing economic and military strength and the realization that under Xi Jinping it is determined to undermine and ultimately overthrow America’s position in the Western Pacific. Biden has entrenched Trump’s tariffs, continuing the economic decoupling from China and deepening it considerably. He has also taken actions specifically to prevent China from developing a technological edge, including by blocking China’s access to the most advanced semiconductors. Biden has brought India, Japan and Australia together in a security forum that can effectively check Chinese ambitions, has brokered closer cooperation between Japan and South Korea, and has deepened America’s effective alliance with Vietnam. Finally, Biden has also been more bold in declaring American intentions to defend Taiwan than any American predecessor. Trump talked big talk about taking on China, in other words, but Biden has actually taken big actions.

In this case, I think the assessment is fairly accurate—and, to be fair, there’s been no war yet across the Taiwan Strait. But it’s not at all clear that the increasingly confrontational relationship with China has redounded to America’s benefit. For one thing, China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are also cooperating far more effectively than they ever have before, and trading the complexity multipolarity for the simplicity of a new Cold War may be a bad deal. It’s possible that America’s chip war will also ultimately backfire, as China comes to depend less on imports of advanced chips from the West and both America and China worry less about the massive economic disruption that would follow the destruction of TSMC’s foundry on Taiwan. America may have committed more forcefully to Taiwan’s defense than ever before, but Taiwan hasn’t been matching that commitment—indeed, by denuclearizing they are making themselves even more vulnerable to a Chinese blockade—and America’s support for Ukraine and Israel has depleted our supplies of necessary weapons, supplies we have been slow to replenish. Meanwhile, China’s naval capabilities continue to develop while ours continue to atrophy. It’s not hard to escape the nagging suspicion that while war hasn’t broken out yet, the same kind of preconditions are developing across the Taiwan Strait as the ones that led to war between Russia and Ukraine, and between Israel and Iran.

Across the board, in other words, Biden has been pursuing a fairly prudent, centrist, well-informed course, guided by an understanding of the world and our adversaries’ objectives that is largely accurate. But, as Matt Yglesias admits, it doesn’t seem to be working. Is it nonetheless the best we could do? Could Harris do better? Or, heretical though it seems to suggest, could Trump?

Assessing Harris is very difficult because she has almost no foreign policy experience and has not staked out any distinctive place in any foreign policy disputes over the short course of her time in national politics prior to becoming Vice President—and as Vice President she has not been a key player in Biden’s councils. Her two key deputies, Philip Gordon and Rebecca Lissner, are liberal internationalists who like to see themselves described as “pragmatic” and “non-ideological,” and who make a point of describing how America needs to stop pursuing primacy and dictating terms, but instead learn to live in the world as it is and promote greater openness and cooperation. All of that feels like fighting the last war, against the neoconservatives who dominated the George W. Bush administration. And yet, Harris is also being supported by many of the veterans of that administration, most prominently the chief primacist of them all, former Vice President Dick Cheney. They may be supporting her primarily out of opposition to Trump, and primarily for reasons unrelated to foreign policy, but I would nonetheless not be surprised to see at least some people in Bill Kristol’s iPhone contacts finding positions in a Harris administration, even as other people who can’t stand them do too.

I suspect the truth is that Harris doesn’t have any strong convictions in foreign policy, which will mean she will be less able than, say, Obama was at charting her own course between these factions, and more vulnerable than most presidents to the group-think that characterizes Washington’s foreign policy “blob.” Biden was intimately familiar with that organism, and has often been described as being a part of it, but in fact he was more willing than most old hands to buck its consensus; he presciently opposed both the “surge” of troops into Afghanistan at the start of Obama’s first term and the war in Libya and, more alarmingly, floated the idea of partitioning Iraq during the Bush years. I have a very hard time seeing Harris sticking out her neck in either direction.

While I doubt Harris has any deep foreign policy convictions, she does have a favored rhetorical style, and it is not an encouraging one to me. Harris came up as a prosecutor, and she still speaks most compellingly, most clearly and most passionately when she can speak in a prosecutor’s register, leveling an indictment and pressing it home. That is an exceptionally poor frame for thinking about foreign policy, but it’s one that Harris has reached for repeatedly. I’m not sure how much good or harm America’s reflexive moralism does to our position internationally; I think at this point most other countries largely ignore it as pure rhetoric rather than either hoping or dreading it will be an actual guide to policy. But if it is a guide to Harris’s thinking then to me it suggests she hasn’t done much of it, and if it is just empty rhetoric then that’s yet one more clue we don’t have as to what, if anything, she actually thinks. Domestic audiences, however, may very well take her seriously, so the odds that Harris winds up creating political problems for herself by engaging in florid but unconvincing rhetoric untethered to policy strike me as very real.

My baseline assumption about a Harris presidency in foreign policy, therefore, is that it will be similar to Biden’s but more conventional and reactive, less creative and far-sighted. If you think the main threat to world order is that America does something crazy, then I feel comfortable saying that Harris will do a much better job than Trump will. But what if you think the current course of American foreign policy is wrong? Would Trump steer us, however erratically, in the right general direction? And is he plausibly described as the “peace” candidate?

Ross Douthat recently interviewed two of Trump’s leading foreign policy advisors, Robert C. O’Brien and Elbridge Colby, who did their best to make that case. I found it instructive that their cases were, in crucial ways, mutually at odds, reflective of the continuing tensions within the GOP camp even as Trump has made the party over more thoroughly in his image. O’Brien would have you believe that Trump is a master negotiator who always starts from a position of strength and readily intimidates adversaries into folding in part through the projection of unpredictability, a version of Nixon’s madman theory. Put a guy like Trump in charge, and he’ll both build up our objective military strength and project the image of that strength abroad, and nobody will dare cross America’s red lines. Colby, by contrast, centers his perspective on an acute sense of America’s real vulnerability, something that can’t be papered over with braggadocio. We simply aren’t strong enough to project strength everywhere, and so yes, we have to build up our strength, but we also have to reduce our commitments and either get our allies to step up and fill the gap or let them fend for themselves. Colby at one point in the interview says that the real divide isn’t between internationalists and isolationists—those who want us to be more engaged in the world versus those who want us to retreat from the world—but between primacists and realists—those who want America to be overwhelmingly dominant everywhere and those who know we can’t be and want us to realign our mission with our capabilities. Based on this interview, that divide runs straight through the camp of Trump’s own advisors.

But the most important reality is that the man they are advising is the opposite of a master negotiator. He’s an impulsive bully who frequently overpays for bad deals, is intimidated by any serious opponent, and routinely deflects responsibility onto others, a narcissist who cares only about his own image and believes he can boldfacedly lie his way out of any difficulty. He is, however, proposing actual policies, and they will not make O’Brien’s and Colby’s tasks easier. Trump’s fiscal plans make any kind of a military buildup completely unworkable, and the combination of his obsequious courting of big business and his plans for massive tariffs are incompatible with the kind of procurement reform and foreign trade and investment necessary to make a military buildup affordable.

If Trump does turn out to be a peace candidate, ironically, it might be precisely because he is such a poor negotiator. For example, the rational expectation of virtually everyone involved is that if Trump wins he will cut off aid to Ukraine and then negotiate whatever deal he can with Putin from a position of weakness. If he doesn’t do that, the fact that both he and so much of his team have been telegraphing their desire to get out of that war will encourage Putin to hold out for the best possible terms, so that eventually that’s precisely where we end up, just after a bit more fighting. That’s the kind of logic that Colby and O’Brien understand when they apply it to Biden and Harris, but it applies equally well if not more so to them.

With respect to Israel, meanwhile, the rational expectation is that Trump will once again give Netanyahu an even bigger blank check than Biden did. The interesting question though is how much is actually in the bank for Netanyahu to draw on, and specifically what happens if Israel’s war with Iran expands further. Trump relishes both appearing strong and staying out of fights; a full scale war with Iran may make it impossible for him to maintain both images. In his first term, Trump went to North Korea, and came back empty handed. It’s not hard for me to imagine him going to Tehran with similarly negligible results, but in the context of an ongoing war, and the possibility of Iran crossing the nuclear threshold.

The theater where the gap between Trump’s reality and his own self-perception might have the biggest impact, though, is in the western Pacific. Trump positioned himself, in the 2016 campaign, as the guy who was going to finally get tough with China. He then tore up plans for a Trans Pacific Partnership, which left China the preferred default trade partner across the region. He initiated a trade war, but was unable to put that move to strategic use, so he wound up signing a weak trade deal which China never fulfilled its commitments under. By all reports, the Chinese government considers Trump to be a weak opponent and and accelerator of American decline. Rationally, therefore, his election should lead them to believe that they won’t need to go to war to take Taiwan, because with time America will only be less and less capable of defending the island (or less willing to do so), and therefore will ultimately allow it to fall to them without fighting, by far the less-risky route to victory. That could make Trump a peace candidate of sorts, but not, I suspect, the kind of peace candidate that either O’Brien or Colby imagine.

Matt Yglesias ended his column on foreign policy by making the point that America’s position in the world depends, ultimately, on our actual strength vis a vis our current and potential adversaries, and only secondarily on how that strength is deployed. That means that questions about domestic policy—fiscal policy, regulatory policy, industrial policy, immigration policy, education policy, etc.—ultimately matter more to the long-term trajectory of American foreign policy than whether we handle Russia/Ukraine, Israel/Gaza/Lebanon/Iran or even China/Taiwan perfectly optimally. I think that’s broadly correct. I also think Yglesias is correct that while the kinds of alliances Biden has been building or shoring up—forming a military partnership with the UK and Australia, establishing the Quad with Japan, Australia and India, adding Sweden and Finland to NATO, bringing Japan and South Korea closer together, normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia—have been the right ones, he has been too eager to make those deals, to keep allies happy, and could benefit from being more aloof.

Those critiques could have had real force coming from a certain kind of Republican opponent. Heck, I think the Vice Presidential nominee has pressed many of them effectively, and would do so more effectively if the man at the top of the ticket were a Mitt Romney or John Huntsman. By the same token, I also think they could be advanced materially within the Democratic Party by the right kind of candidate, someone who had a stake in the Democrats’ own internal conflicts and who aimed to build on the Biden administration’s successes but clearly indicate a change of course in response to its missteps.

But those are not the two candidates we have been given. My ultimate feeling is that, while Biden’s foreign policy has been distinctly disappointing, whoever wins is going to make him look good in retrospect.