David Rothkopf evaluates the Biden-Harris foreign policy to date

David Rothkopf has a useful essay generally praising the Biden-Harris foreign policy at this stage, Here's What Biden's Team Expects From His Meeting With Putin Daily Beast 06/14/2021. He also summarizes his major points in a tweet thread that starts here:

Yesterday, I wrote an article about the progress @POTUS & @VP have made on the int'l front this past week. I observed that it was the result of sound diplomacy, hard work, experience & vision. I immediately got slammed by some folks for suggesting I was being blindly supportive.

— David Rothkopf (@djrothkopf) June 15, 2021

I try to think of foreign policy on two different tracks. One is a more fundamental critical perspective that wants the US to not be an imperialist state and consistently work to promote peace and nuclear disarmament and to exert a leadership role is a serious effort to deal realistically with the climate crisis.

The second is to look at foreign policy as it stands, realizing that even the most enlightened approaches to foreign policy with the interests of arms manufacturers in particular completely subordinated to the US national interest as defined by promoting a peaceful, democratic, and nuclear disarmed world and climate responsibility would have to work in a world where strong conditions of interaction established in the world system.

The first perspective is something like Wilsonian internationalism without the imperialist perspective, white racism, and bad international agreements that heavily defined the actual Wilson Presidency. The second would look more like the "realist" world as seen by thinkers like Stephen Walt combined with the pragmatic perspective of strategic restraint as envisioned by the folks at Andrew Bacevich's Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Here I'm looking at Rothkopf's analysis more from the first perspective. And part of the best news in that perspective is that the Biden-Harris foreign policy team distributes real competence in foreign policy management. Competent management only produces good results if the policy is good, of course. But having the foreign policy run on the basis of perceived national interests and not on the principle of how the President's private business can wrangle good private deals out of it is in itself a good thing. In the tweet thread, he writes:

This last point illustrates another key point that has not gone unnoticed around the world. This administration is returning to alliances with a keen awareness of our own limitations and missteps at home and abroad. These are not the unilateralists of the Bush era. These are not the narcissists of the Trump era. And they act with more skill and confidence and clarity of vision than the Obama or Clinton teams certainly did in their first terms in office. None of this is opinion or spin. The facts are there. This administration, led by the president with the most foreign policy experience of any in modern history, is getting off to a better start than any of its predecessors in the last 30 years.. [my emphasis]

Rothkopf himself mentions a couple of significant reservations about the current policy, the one-sided tilt to Netanyahu's government in the recent chapter Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Cold War rhetoric about China.

I would add a big reservation about Latin American policy. I was less impressed with Kamala Harris' recent trip to Mexico and Central America than he. But he does argue in the theet thread that there was real progress: "She re-engaged in a constructive way with Mexico after the threats, demagoguery, human rights violations at the border and sheer insanity of the prior administration. She got AMLO to agree to a cabinet level security dialogue that is essential and was by no means assured."

I'm working about a post on the encouraging recent developments in Latin America. The Obama-Biden Administration's Latin American policy was poor, which unfortunately has pretty much been the case for the last two centuries. Obama tilted distinctly against the center-left governments that had been in power and for the conservative oligarchs, with Argentina as one dramatic example. And Biden hasn't ended the ridiculous clown coup attempt initiated by Trump in Venezuela. In terms of competence along, that policy is so bumbling and foolish that even close US allies surely can't be impressed by it, even ones that have cooperated in that farce.