Biden on Foreign Policy (2 of 3): China

I should preface this whole post by saying, yes, we can certainly expect that a conservative Democratic Joe Biden Administration will pursue a more responsible foreign policy in general than the Trump Administration. And that's very important. It's also a perfectly reasonable claim for Biden's current Make American Boring Again campaign to make.

But I want to start here by referring to this article by Über-Realist Stephen Walt, Yesterday’s Cold War Shows How to Beat China Today Foreign Policy 07/29/2019.

In my love-hate relationship with "realist" foreign policy theory, I don't accept the implicit narrow-nationalist focus of the Realist outlook that views the world order as an unending set of evolving conflicts between self-interested nations. On the other hand, that's still largely how the world system works, because the slow process of establishing common international norms is still not at the point it needs to be to deal adequately with nuclear proliferation and climate change.

Walt, looking at the world system as it is, gets an awful lot of things right in his empirical understanding of international developments. And he sees war as inherently a bad thing to be avoided whenever possible. He also turns a jaded realist look not only on other countries but on the United States, as well. So he has no love for America Firster jingoism or even the bipartisan idolization of "American exceptionalism".

Joe Biden, on the other hand, in his Foreign Affairs essay, Why America Must Lead Again: Rescuing U.S. Foreign Policy After Trump, strikes the conventional bipartisan pose of standing up to threatening adversaries, of which he pictures China as the most significant. In seeing China's rise in economic and political power as displacing the Post-1989 "unipolar" dominance of the US, he's in agreement with the realists. But Biden takes a different tone:

• Tech "companies must act to ensure that their tools and platforms are not empowering the surveillance state, gutting privacy, facilitating repression in China and elsewhere."
• "To win the competition for the future against China or anyone else, the United States must sharpen its innovative edge and unite the economic might of democracies around the world to counter abusive economic practices and reduce inequality."
• "There is no reason we should be falling behind China or anyone else when it comes to clean energy, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, 5G, high-speed rail, or the race to end cancer as we know it."
• "The question is, Who writes the rules that govern trade? Who will makesure they protect workers, the environment, transparency, and middle-class wages? The United States, not China, should be leading that effort."
• The US must insist "that China - the world's largest emitter of carbon - stop subsidizing coal exports and outsourcing pollution to other countries by financing billions of dollars' worth of dirty fossil fuel energy projects through its Belt and Road Initiative."
• "As new technologies reshape our economy and society, we must ... avoid a race to the bottom, where the rules of the digital age are written by China and Russia."
• The US is getting "heroin from Mexico and, more recently, fentanyl from China, which is much more lethal."

Here is how Biden frames his general approach to China:

China represents a special challenge. I have spent many hours with its leaders, and I understand what we are up against. China is playing the long game by extending its global reach, promoting its own political model, and investing in the technologies of the future. Meanwhile, Trump has designated imports from the United States' closest allies-from Canada to the European Union- as national security threats in order to impose damaging and reckless tariffs. By cutting us off from the economic clout of our partners, Trump has kneecapped our country's capacity to take on the real economic threat.

The United States does need to get tough with China. If China has its way, it will keep robbing the United States and American companies of their technology and intellectual property. It will also keep using subsidies to give its state-owned enterprises an unfair advantage- and a leg up on dominating the technologies and industries of the future. The most effective way to meet that challenge is to build a united front of U.S. allies and partners to confront China's abusive behaviors and human rights violations, even as we seek to cooperate with Beijing on issues where our interests converge, such as climate change, nonproliferation, and global health security. On its own, the United States represents about a quarter of global GDP. When we join together with fellow democracies, our strength more than doubles.

China can't afford to ignore more than half the global economy. That gives us substantial leverage to shape the rules of the road on everything from the environment to labor, trade, technology, and transparency, so they continue to reflect democratic interests and values. [my emphasis]

That distant, discordant sound you hear whenever American leaders brag about how they want policies that "continue to reflect democratic interests and values"? That is the sound of cynical laughter echoing from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego.

And if his Yellow Peril video spots are a measure, "get tough with China" is the main message he wants to convey here. But the whole piece is an example of Establishment foreign-policy boilerplate. Which means it doesn't base itself around the points that Stephen Walt stresses about US China policy:

• Lesson #1: Make sure you have the right allies.
• Lesson #2: Investing in science, technology, and education pays off.
• Lesson #3: Greater openness, transparency, and accountability gave the United States an important advantage [in competition with the USSR].
• Lesson #4: Playing rope-a-dope (i.e., letting the Soviet Union squander resources in strategically marginal areas) was a smart strategy.
• Lesson #5: Nice countries finish first.

On the last point, Walt writes:

The United States is not as virtuous as Americans like to pretend, but during the Cold War, it benefited from standing for freedom, human rights, and other popular political values. U.S. leaders also recognized that making progress on civil rights would be important in the context of the Cold War, as greater racial equality would make the country look better in the eyes of nonwhite societies around the world.

To be sure, the United States backed authoritarians when it thought it had to and sometimes acted with callous disregard for foreign populations. But on balance - and especially when compared to its Soviet rival - the United States was seen as standing for something more than just the naked exercise of power.

Equally important, U.S. leaders consistently treated their foreign counterparts with respect, even when they were privately angered by others’ actions or when they had to play hardball with them within the broader alliance context. French President Charles de Gaulle irritated several U.S. presidents on more than one occasion, but you rarely heard U.S. officials denouncing him in public. U.S. officials understood that denigrating or humiliating one’s partners would generate resentment and undermine Western unity, so they kept the mailed fist inside a velvet glove. Because the United States was so much stronger than others, it usually got its way. But its leaders were wise enough not to boast about it, lest this trigger resentment and impair cooperation. [my emphasis]