Biden on Foreign Policy (3 of 3)

Joe Biden in his Foreign Affairs essay, Why America Must Lead Again: Rescuing U.S. Foreign Policy After Trump is presumably meant to provide not only talking points for his campaign but to signal a wide variety of political and foreign policy actors what his Presidential policy will be.

Although it's largely standard Democratic boilerplate, it's worth taking a critical look at what the article is signaling that we can expect from a Biden Administration. What actually happens in a Biden Administration will depend in major part on how hard the Democratic Party pushes him to do decent and constructive things.

Biden: "Democracies-paralyzed by hyperpartisanship, hobbled by corruption, weighed down by extreme inequality - are are having a harder time delivering for their people. Trust in democratic institutions is down."

The most serious manifestation of corruption in the US is the effectively unlimited flood of money to candidates, campaigns, and parties. It's nullifying democracy. Biden can be expected to continue the ritual denunciation of Citizens United begun by Barack Obama immediately after the decision came down. "This ruling strikes at our democracy itself," he declared. "I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest." But he showed little seriousness in actual trying to overturn that decision. And Joe Biden won't, either. He's more than fine with the current system of campaign contributions. And that's probably the single biggest reason in the US that "trust in democratic institutions is down."

He says later in the piece that he would fight to clean up corruption and that "starts by fighting for a constitutional amendment to completely eliminate private dollars from federal elections." There's a good chance this will be the last we hear from him of that plan. Unless he is pushed hard to do so. Several states have passed resolutions calling for a constitutional amendment for just that purpose. Biden might be dragged into going along with it. But he will never make a serious effort on this on his own initiative. It' also worth remembering that the Obama-Biden Administration made a limp and failed effort to pass a legislative fix for Citizens United. Biden's endorsement of a constitutional amendment may be an excuse not to push for any kind of legislative fix. And actually, both are needed, and urgently.

Extreme inequality: a Biden Administration will not address the current distribution of wealth and income in any major way. At most, we can expect to get a higher minimum wage. And even that will have to be pushed on the Administration hard by the public and the Democratic base to get even that done. If Joe Biden has ever had any serious concern about the maldistribution of wealth, income, and political power in the United States, he's managed to keep it a secret. But there's this: Joe Biden to rich donors: "Nothing would fundamentally change" if he's elected. (Igor Derysh, Salon 06/19/2019)

"Fear of the Other is up."

A fear to which Biden contributed in a major way with his infamous Crime Bill and his rhetoric around it.

We know what the Obama-Biden immigration policy was. Certainly not as criminally brutal and sadistic as the Trump Administration's. But their immigration policy was to take a hard line and expel large number of immigrants and refugees, claiming that if they showed those nice Republicans that they were serious about enforcing current law that the Republicans would come around to agreeing on a serious immigration reform law. The default assumption for a Biden Administration is that he will revert to that policy. And the Trumpified Republican Party is not going to agree to real immigration form until and if they have been electorally devastated. The Democrats could pass such reforms and a Democratic President could sign it into law. But unless his hand is forced, Biden will simply revert to the Obama-Biden policy.

And it's difficult to imagine that Biden would insist on appointing an Attorney General who would prosecute officials who committed crimes in the kidnapping and sometimes literally fatal neglect of refugee children. Although that is as serious and important a responsibility as anything for a President. He will not do that. And he won't even think about abolishing ICE, which actually currently functions as a thuggish criminal organization.

That is the general meaning of his return-to-normalcy, Make America Boring Again pitch. And is there any reason to expect that Biden will pursue a more peace-and-democracy-friendly Latin American policy that he and Obama did before? The coup in Honduras in 2009 backed by the Obama-Biden Administration and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was a major factor in destabilizing Central America and is still producing refugees here 11 years later. Here is Clinton in 2016 on Democracy Now!, Hear Hillary Clinton Defend Her Role in Honduras Coup When Questioned by Juan González 08/13/2016:

Biden on "trade" treaties:

... my administration will equip Americans to succeed in the global economy-with a foreign policy for the middle class. 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.

This is standard neoliberal economic rhetoric. In other words, a return to the normalcy of the Obama Administration, for good and ill. The ill part including a commitment to more corporate-deregulation treaties labeled as "free trade." Here we see him praising the benefits of so-called free trade - with the parts about deregulating corporations via treaties left out:

A foreign policy for the middle class will also work to make sure the rules of the international economy are not rigged against the United States - because when American businesses compete on a fair playing field, they win. I believe in fair trade. More than 95 percent of the world's population lives beyond our borders - we want to tap those markets. We need to be able to build the very best in the United States and sell the very best around the world. That means taking down trade barriers that penalize Americans and resisting a dangerous global slide toward protectionism. That's what happened a century ago, after World War I - and it exacerbated the Great Depression and helped lead to World War II.

The wrong thing to do is to put our heads in the sand and say no more trade deals. Countries will trade with or without the United States. The question is, Who writes the rules that govern trade? Who will make sure they protect workers, the environment, transparency, and middle-class wages? The United States, not China, should be leading that effort.

As president, I will not enter into any new trade agreements until we have invested in Americans and equipped them to succeed in the global economy. And I will not negotiate new deals without having labor and environmental leaders at the table in a meaningful way and without including strong enforcement provisions to hold our partners to the deals they sign. [my emphasis]

The "labor and environmental" promises are a stock part of the corporate-deregulation trade treaty marketing rhetoric. After 30 years of those promises (since NAFTA), there no reason to assume that's more than a throwaway line unless the past failures to deliver are explicitly acknowledged.

As a final example of the thoroughly conventional approach he takes: Trump "has also alienated the United States from the very democratic allies it needs most. He has taken a battering ram to the NATO alliance, treating it like an American-run protection racket." But NATO problems are much larger than having a President who continuously says stupid things. The previous Republican Administration (Bush-Cheney) not only derided NATO allies and very pointedly encouraged division within the alliance over the Iraq War. Obama restored more conventional friendly relations with NATO. Now this Republican Administration has seriously called into question whether it takes the US' NATO commitment to mutual self-defense seriously.

After NATO extended membership to include members of the former Warsaw Pact and even the three Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia) that had been formally part of the Soviet Union itself, it would be very difficult in practice for NATO to decide on its own to disband, reorganize and redefine itself, or to convey the impression that it would not honor its defense commitments. A new diplomatic approach that aimed at settling various points of dispute with Russia could be very useful. The goal would be to resolve issues like Russian intervention in Georgia and Ukraine with some kind of new safeguards from NATO to insure that NATO would not be used for aggressive purposes, i.e., to attack Russia.

But there is no indication in Biden's Foreign Affairs essay that he sees the need for such a fresh approach.

But his article does comport well with the current Democratic Presidential election strategy of offering a return to a recent past remembered as more comfortable than the current demented reality show in the White House.