Jessica Mathews offers a thorough review of the Biden foreign policy which Harris will inherit, with clear recommendations for changes that should be made. T

Foreign Affairs

What Was the Biden Doctrine?

Leadership Without Hegemony

By Jessica T. Mathews

September/October 2024

Published on August 14, 2024

Although it is too soon to judge the historical significance of Joe Biden’s one-term presidency, it is clear that the past four years have witnessed remarkable achievements in foreign policy. Biden has made some notable strategic mistakes, as well, mostly when he chose to follow the policies of his predecessor, Donald Trump. But he has carried out a crucial task: shifting the basis of American foreign policy from an unhealthy reliance on military intervention to the active pursuit of diplomacy backed by strength. He has won back the trust of friends and allies, built and begun to institutionalize a deep American presence in Asia, restored the United States’ role in essential multilateral organizations and agreements, and ended the longest of the country’s “forever wars”—a step none of his three predecessors had the courage to take.

All of this happened in the face of grievous new threats from China and Russia, two great powers newly allied around the goal of ending American primacy. Biden’s response to the most pressing emergency of his term—Russia’s brutal full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022—has been both skillful and innovative, demonstrating a grasp of the traditional elements of statecraft along with a willingness to take a few unconventional steps. The picture is more mixed when it comes to China, which in the long term poses the most complex challenge to U.S. foreign policy. Biden’s approach to Beijing has occasionally reflected a disappointing degree of continuity with that of Trump and has fostered uncertainty over Taiwan, the most sensitive issue in U.S.-Chinese relations. But unlike the former president, Biden has embedded his China policy in a vigorous matrix of new and restored alliances across Asia. He has arguably pulled off the long-sought U.S. “pivot” to the region, without using that term.

In the Middle East, the record is disappointing. The boldness Biden showed in withdrawing from Afghanistan has been conspicuously absent from his reaction to the war in Gaza, where his outdated understanding of Israel has prevented him from exerting more pressure on its leadership to adopt a wiser, less destructive approach.

In a deeply divided country, four years is too little time to establish a foreign policy doctrine. Much of what Biden has achieved could be quickly erased by a successor. Yet his legacy to date suggests the lineaments of a new approach well suited to today’s world. Most important among them is a resolve to eschew wars to remake other countries and to restore diplomacy as the central tool of foreign policy. That diplomatic revival has not been without flaws: it has not fostered a coherent global economic strategy, and it has lacked a strong commitment to nonproliferation and arms control. But it has presented to the world a country that has unambiguously left behind the hubris of the “unipolar moment” that followed the Cold War, proving that the United States can be deeply engaged in the world without military action or the taint of hegemony.

BIDEN’S WORLD

On taking office, Biden’s most important task was to restore trust abroad. He had campaigned on the slogan “America is back” and promised that the country would once again “sit at the head of the table.” Once in the White House, however, he seemed to appreciate that neither U.S. power nor, as he frequently put it, “the power of our example” were what they had been. The administration focused instead on convincing others that they no longer had to worry about Trump’s “America first” policies, open disparagement of NATO, and contempt for multilateral cooperation on issues from climate change to the COVID-19 pandemic.

It was not easy. Even warmly disposed governments understood that Trump (or a leader with similar views) could return as soon as the next election. To highlight the shift, on Biden’s first day in office, he returned the United States to the World Health Organization and the Paris agreement on climate change, both of which Trump had exited. Biden moved quickly to affirm Washington’s commitment to numerous economic and security agreements and bodies, NATO in particular. In the next three-plus years, the number of NATO members reaching the benchmark goal of spending the equivalent of at least two percent of GDP on defense grew from nine to 23, with more set to do so soon. Two militarily strong states, Sweden and Finland, dropped decades of cherished neutrality to join the alliance. Today, readiness is substantially higher across the alliance, as are deployments near Russia’s borders.

The Biden administration directed even more diplomatic energy into building what it calls a “latticework” of deepened and new connections across Asia spanning geopolitical and economic interests, all with the motive of countering China. The image of a crisscrossing web of relationships is meaningfully distinct from the familiar “hub and spokes” metaphor, which portrayed the United States as ensconced in the center of everything with other countries arrayed around it.

The change was not merely a matter of abstraction but of action. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (known as the Quad) partnership linking Australia, India, Japan, and the United States was elevated from a forum for foreign ministers to one for heads of state. To build an Australian nuclear-powered submarine fleet that could operate stealthily and at very long range, strengthening deterrence against China far into the Pacific, the Biden team forged AUKUS, a new security arrangement aligning Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Trilateral summits connected the United States with Japan and the Philippines and with Japan and South Korea, with security as the central purpose. For the first time, a summit of the Association of Southeastern Asian Nations was held in Washington. New bilateral agreements allowed for expanded U.S. military access in Australia, Japan, Papua New Guinea, and the Philippines. And Biden deepened U.S. relations with India, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Even this partial list reflects an extraordinary level of effort and achievement in less than four years, with new and restored ties cemented, where possible, in formal agreements designed to survive a change of direction in Washington.

For more than two decades, leaders in Washington have paid lip service to the centrality of Asia in the twenty-first century and the necessity of a commensurate shift in U.S. foreign policy. But the George W. Bush administration was sidetracked by its all-consuming “global war on terror.” The Obama administration recognized the importance of a stronger strategic presence in Asia but failed to achieve it. The Trump administration’s disdain for alliances weakened relations across the region. The Biden administration made the pivot happen.

A LOST CAUSE

To set a new course for the United States, Biden saw that it was necessary to end the longest “forever war” of the post-9/11 era. By the time he took office, the United States had spent 20 years fighting in Afghanistan at a cost of more than $2 trillion—the equivalent of $300 million a day. U.S. strategy had shifted from counterterrorism to counterinsurgency and back again; from taking a low-profile approach that relied on special forces and air power to deploying 100,000 troops in the country; from wooing the government in Kabul to suggesting that the Afghan government’s corruption was the main impediment to progress. Washington had tried a vast array of tactics: creating a national police force, attempting to build an army, improving literacy and education for women and girls. In the end, it was mostly for naught. By the time Biden was inaugurated, U.S. intelligence showed unequivocally that the Taliban’s control of areas of Afghanistan had been growing for years despite this immense investment—a fact largely unknown or underappreciated by the American public.

In his speech in August 2021, Biden asked what the “vital national interest” was in Afghanistan and offered the correct answer. “We have only one: to make sure Afghanistan can never be used again to launch an attack on our homeland.” The United States had achieved that goal with the defeat of al Qaeda and the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, Biden noted. But then, he said, “we stayed for another decade.”

After the unexpected, shockingly swift collapse of the Afghan army and the national government, the takeover by the Taliban, the chaos in Kabul as thousands of Afghans tried to flee, and the deaths of 13 U.S. service members and more than 160 Afghan civilians in a suicide bombing near the airport, foreign policy experts leaped to criticize the decision to withdraw. “What makes the Afghanistan situation so frustrating is that the [United States and] its allies had reached something of an equilibrium at a low sustainable cost,” Richard Haass, then president of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote on Twitter as the chaos grew. “It wasn’t peace or military victory, but it was infinitely preferable to the strategic [and] human catastrophe that is unfolding.” But the apparent low cost was an illusion created by the absence of American deaths in the preceding months: the Taliban had decided to cease attacks on U.S. forces as it waited for them to withdraw under an agreement negotiated by the Trump administration. Had the United States not left, American losses would have resumed, and the price of staying would have been clear once again.

The stark truth was that the United States had lost the war long before August 2021. But defeats are easier to forget than to absorb. With plenty of prompting from Trump, far too many Americans remember the few days of disarray at the end and forget the years of failure that preceded them; the 13 Americans who died at the very end rather than the 2,461 killed and the 20,744 injured in the years before. No strategic loss stemmed from Biden’s decision—quite the reverse. “There’s nothing China or Russia would rather have,” the president correctly noted in his speech, “than the United States to be bogged down another decade in Afghanistan.” Washington failed to anticipate how swiftly the Kabul government would collapse. But the significance of that failure pales beside the significance of Biden’s success in grasping the lasting strategic benefits of withdrawing. “This decision about Afghanistan,” he said, “is about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.”

Months after the departure from Afghanistan, the Biden administration was tested again when Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. During his first week in office, Biden and Putin had agreed to extend the New START treaty—the only remaining bilateral nuclear arms control agreement—a few days before it would have expired. It was a hopeful sign. But a few weeks later, Moscow moved thousands of troops and heavy weapons to its border with Ukraine. Although Putin’s intentions were opaque, the move raised alarms inside the administration. “We’re looking at it very carefully, 24/7,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told David Ignatius of The Washington Post—nearly a year before Russia invaded, in February 2022. Immediately after the attack began, Moscow put its strategic weapons on heightened alert. Later, Putin spoke of using tactical nuclear weapons should the West’s support of Kyiv go, in his opinion, too far. As the war dragged on, he upped the ante by moving those weapons into neighboring Belarus and ordering joint combat drills in their use.

On the whole, Biden’s handling of the war has been masterful. In the run-up to the invasion, he broke sharply with traditional practice by publicly disclosing U.S. intelligence on Russian troop maneuvers to alert the world to Putin’s plans and neuter the Kremlin’s disinformation campaigns. Once the attack was underway, he made his case for an energetic defense of Ukraine by starting with an emphatic prohibition against the involvement of U.S. troops there—a pledge that he repeated often and that largely kept public opposition to active support for Ukraine in check. He then exerted vigorous political and personal leadership to rally European states, NATO, and the U.S. Congress to support Kyiv and ordered an initially cautious but steadily growing flow of weapons and money. He has calibrated the sophistication of weapons Washington has provided against the curve of Russian violence, staying just behind rather than leading it. And he has bolstered Ukrainian strength in less visible ways with the forward-leaning use of U.S. military and intelligence expertise.

FLASH POINTS

Although a path to ending the war has not been found, Biden’s handling of the Russian invasion has been a credit to the United States—as was the Afghanistan withdrawal, conventional wisdom notwithstanding. The record is murkier on two other priorities: China and the Middle East.

The Biden administration’s 2022 National Security Strategy defined China as having both the capacity and the intent to reshape the international order, displacing the United States and its democratic values. Without question, China’s recent behavior in the Indo-Pacific, its steep increase in military spending, its aggressive trade policies, and its “no limits” partnership with Russia (including support for the war in Ukraine) demand a strong American response. The Biden administration has provided that, wisely walking a fine line by strengthening its relations with Asian allies and partners and bolstering the U.S. military presence while dispensing with bluster and needless provocation.

An unfortunate exception has been the administration’s record on Taiwan, the flash point of U.S.-Chinese relations. An intentionally ambiguous “one China” policy negotiated by Washington and Beijing more than four decades ago has kept the peace across the Taiwan Strait ever since. Maintaining it requires constant attention to language and symbolism, especially when it comes to the question of whether Washington would use military force to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack. Several times, however, Biden has heightened uncertainty in Beijing by plainly stating that the United States would do just that, requiring the White House to issue clarifications. More serious was his unaccountable acquiescence to an official visit to Taiwan in 2022 by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, a high-profile critic of Beijing and longtime supporter of Taiwan who was at the time second in line to the presidency. As the leader of the Democratic Party, Biden could have easily forbidden the trip, which followed others that also broke an unwritten “one China” rule against official visits. Pelosi’s mission predictably sparked an unprecedented spate of military and cyber-retaliation by Beijing and another ratcheting up of cross-strait tensions.

Washington can only guess at Beijing’s intentions. China’s military buildup may presage a direct threat to Taiwan or the United States. Or perhaps the Chinese Communist Party is responding to what it perceives as American aggression, or simply taking the steps that any newly arrived great power feels are its due. In the same way, Beijing cannot know whether Washington has purposely abandoned the “one China” policy. Perhaps Biden is encouraging Taipei to assert its independence and would militarily support it if it did so. The only thing both sides know for certain is that an escalating spiral of action and reaction relating to Taiwan is underway, and neither is taking the necessary steps to interrupt it.

Biden took office determined not to be distracted from priorities in Asia and elsewhere by perennial conflict in the Middle East. He inherited a Trump administration policy that seemed to have achieved substantial success. Through the so-called Abraham Accords, Israel normalized relations with Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates. The accords embodied the view that if Arab countries were given the right incentives, it would be possible for them to negotiate peace agreements with Israel even without addressing the fate of the Palestinians. But as the administration sought to add the region’s most important state, Saudi Arabia, to the accords, the Netanyahu government was expelling Palestinians from more and more of the West Bank to make way for Israeli settlements. Together, these steps were a bridge too far for many Palestinians, and the militant group Hamas exploited their sense of despair and rage to justify the horrendous terrorist attack it carried out on October 7, 2023—the worst day in Israeli history.

U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan’s mortifying remark made days before the assault that the region was “quieter today than it has been in two decades” captures the administration’s mix of inattention and wishful thinking. Biden responded to the attack with unprecedented personal support that reflected his career-long passion for Israel. But as the Israeli military response unfolded, he seemed unable to see what was happening on the ground. Washington has put all its weight into trying to broker a permanent cease-fire, an outcome that neither the leadership of Israel nor that of Hamas believes is in its best interest. Biden has remained stubbornly unwilling to use the leverage the United States holds to compel Israel to reduce the staggering level of civilian death and suffering in Gaza, address the humanitarian calamity there, and craft a realistic plan for the long term.

NUCLEAR NEGLECT

The negative side of Biden’s ledger contains a few other items, as well. Biden has extended Trump’s trade protectionism, continuing and in some cases raising tariffs that Trump imposed on imports from China. Unlike Trump, Biden has sharply focused the tariffs, mostly on high-tech and clean energy products, and enhanced their effectiveness with a variety of export bans, sanctions, and subsidies to boost domestic production and slow the development of the Chinese technology sector. He also worked to coordinate such steps with European allies and others. Even so, tariffs are bad economic policy: they are regressive and inflationary and invite retaliation. Because they are hidden taxes disguised as fees paid by foreigners, they also invite dangerous domestic one-upmanship: after Biden quadrupled tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles to 100 percent, Trump called for a raise to 200 percent.

With two successive U.S. administrations that disagree on almost everything having adopted the same economic tool, global trade may have reached a turning point: the era of globalization and free trade has perhaps definitively ended. If others follow Washington’s lead, the likely result will be to make all states poorer—as the world learned when protectionism reigned in the 1930s.

Notably missing from Biden’s diplomatic surge has been a sustained effort to advance nuclear arms control and nonproliferation—a surprising omission, given his outspoken advocacy of both goals during his Senate career and vice presidency. Dithering in the administration’s earliest days seriously and perhaps fatally damaged prospects for resolving the most important proliferation issue of the day: what to do about the Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. In 2018, Trump pulled the United States out of the hard-won agreement, which Iran was abiding by—a decision that Biden and his team saw as a catastrophic own goal. But in trying to prove that they were as tough on Iran as their Republican critics, Biden’s appointees took such aggressively anti-Iranian stances in their Senate confirmation hearings that they left the impression in Tehran and Washington that they did not truly believe in the JCPOA. By the time this got untangled, the narrow window of opportunity to convince Tehran that the administration still wanted to revive the deal had closed.

Biden also set aside nonproliferation considerations in negotiating the AUKUS agreement. By transferring highly enriched (and thus weapons-grade) fuel to power the submarines of Australia, a country without nuclear weapons, the accord set a damaging precedent that other countries could follow by using naval reactor programs as covers for developing nuclear weapons in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

On arms control, too, the administration has come up short. In January 2022, the leaders of the five original nuclear powers affirmed that “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought”—repeating the breakthrough statement that emerged from talks held by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Yet Putin’s unprovoked war has been marked by repeated threats of nuclear use. In 2023, he suspended Russian adherence to the extended New START treaty, tying the move not to any lack of U.S. compliance but to Washington’s support for Ukraine. Meanwhile, China plans to double the number of nuclear weapons in its arsenal to 1,000 by 2030. Coupled with the fundamentally new situation created by the deepening Chinese-Russian partnership, these moves have made the prospects for any progress on arms control, or even for maintaining the status quo, unlikely in the extreme.

Unfortunately, the Biden administration made no major effort to reverse this trend and has even contributed its bit to the bleak outlook. It maintains a willingness to negotiate a follow-up to New START and has taken a few small steps toward opening arms control talks with Beijing. But the administration is also pursuing a hugely expensive modernization of all three legs of its nuclear forces, including its land-based missiles. Because those missiles are stuck in silos whose locations are well known to adversaries, they are “first strike” weapons, which must be quickly launched in a conflict or lost to enemy attack. They are therefore both vulnerable and destabilizing. U.S. security and the prospects for avoiding a new arms race would be better served by extending the life of a smaller number of existing Minuteman III missiles instead of buying a new land-based nuclear missile force at a cost of more than $150 billion.

As vice president, Biden fought for a major change in U.S. policy: a declaration that deterrence is the “sole” (rather than the “primary”) purpose of nuclear weapons. That seemingly minor change hides the major meaning: that nuclear weapons have no utility in warfighting. Such a shift would have profound consequences for the design of nuclear forces and for international arms control. President Barack Obama chose not to make this change—and, as president, Biden did the same. It was a missed opportunity. Given the realities of the war in Ukraine and China’s nuclear expansion, however, he arguably had no political leeway to do otherwise.

Partly as a consequence of the poor prospects for arms control, some of the Biden administration’s opponents are calling for expanding the U.S. nuclear arsenal and even for a return to nuclear testing. After conducting more than 1,000 tests, the United States has little to learn from carrying out more. But China, which has conducted fewer than 50 tests and is observing the current testing moratorium, could benefit substantially if the United States were to legitimize a return to testing. It would not be long before other states, nuclear and nonnuclear, did likewise—a giant leap backward to the 1950s.

AMERICA REDUX

Biden assumed the presidency with a mountain of his predecessor’s mistakes to undo. He had to reverse the beliefs and behaviors inherent in an “America first” foreign policy. He needed to restore predictability to U.S. policy and rebuild willingness among other countries to support Washington’s initiatives. Although his party controlled both houses of Congress for his first two years as president, it did so by the slimmest of margins, and Biden later faced a House of Representatives run by an increasingly extreme Republican caucus that prioritized scoring political points over substance in foreign policy. From almost his first day in office, he confronted the looming question of what Russia intended in Ukraine; soon after, he faced the stunning reality of the first act of large-scale international aggression in Europe in the postwar era. Finally, he had to manage a relationship with China characterized by rising acrimony, unfulfilled agreements, military threats, and an almost total lack of purposeful communication.

Biden also had made promises that would need to be adjusted or walked back. He had wrongly described the world as divided between autocracies and democracies, suggesting that foreign policy was a Manichean contest between the two camps. He followed through on an unwise promise to hold a “Summit for Democracy,” which, predictably, produced a diplomatic nightmare of deciding which countries qualified for inclusion. In the end, the meetings were mostly held online, with low expectations and little to show in terms of results. Most prominently, Biden had promised “a foreign policy for the middle class.” In practice, this mostly meant massive investments at home in manufacturing, education, health care, and lowering middle-class debt. Abroad, it unfortunately took the form of protectionist trade policies, an element of Biden’s legacy the United States and the world may come to regret.

But Biden’s determination to finally realize a shift in priority to Asia has been a notable success. Relations with China are steadier than those he inherited. There is now at least a floor on which more can be built, even though Taiwan remains a simmering source of tension to which both Washington and Beijing are paying far too little attention. But the number of new partnerships and economic, geopolitical, and military agreements in Asia and the density of new and restored ties there are a testament to what dedicated diplomacy can achieve.

Whether or not a stable cease-fire is reached in Gaza, Biden’s legacy must include his apparent inability to see Israel as the illiberal, militaristic state it has become under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rather than as the plucky young democracy that Biden remembers from decades ago. An Israeli decision to attempt to govern Gaza for the long term and continue to annex the West Bank would foreclose the possibility of a two-state solution; bleed Israel militarily, financially, and reputationally; and constitute a historic injustice for the Palestinian people. As long as the United States maintains a special connection to Israel, it cannot afford to ignore this festering sore, as the Biden administration tried to do.

Biden’s determination to end Washington’s longest war was a major achievement. There are no U.S. forces in sustained combat now for the first time in a quarter century. His policies reflect a recognition that the United States will continue to have global interests but that its ambitions must be tailored to a realistic assessment of its present resources, partisan divisions, and political will. In a world facing existential global challenges, Biden assigned an appropriately high value to alliances and looser partnerships, recognizing them as a major component of American strength, and saw the value of multinational solutions. He reaffirmed that democracies are special political kin but seemed to learn that since so many countries lie somewhere between democracy and autocracy, few causes benefit from a U.S. foreign policy framed as a contest between the two.

The world is so much in flux that it is impossible to predict how Biden’s short presidency will fit into the flow of history. Will voters in the United States and Europe turn to populism, go-it-alone nationalism, or even isolationism? What does China intend in the Pacific and beyond? Can the war in Ukraine be ended without setting a precedent that rewards naked aggression? Will the major powers follow each other over the cliff of a second nuclear arms race? And, of course, will Biden have a successor who shares his worldview or be followed by Trump, who will seek to reverse most of what he has done? No matter the answers, and despite the symptoms of debilitating political polarization at home, Biden has made profound changes in foreign policy—not to accommodate American decline but to reflect the country’s inherent strength.

JESSICA T. MATHEWS is a Distinguished Fellow and former President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/what-was-joe-biden-doctrine-leadership-hegemony-jessica-mathews