Post-Biden, Democrats need more muscular approach abroad

President Joe Biden bestrode the narrow earth as a values-oriented colossus with loftier thoughts than who paid for what. That was quite a contrast to the transactionalist Donald Trump – but much of the world looked on and mainly just saw weakness.

That’s the foundation of a key message the Trump campaign can be expected to deploy:  Biden inherited stability and leaves “a world in flames” – from devastating wars in Ukraine and Gaza to possible escalation in the Middle East and fears of an emboldened China – having gotten away with gutting the autonomy of Hong Kong – finally attacking Taiwan.

The irony is that Trump had actually admired the disruptor-dictators who cause such mayhem – from Russia’s Vladimir Putin to China’s Xi Jinping and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. But in Trumpworld’s telling of the story, what looks like infantile admiration and dangerous appeasement is actually deft maneuvering that prevents “forever wars.”

Assuming Vice President Kamala Harris becomes the Democratic nominee, it will be difficult for her to disassociate herself from a Biden foreign policy that in fact does allow for plenty of criticism.

The example most people cite is the earliest – the shambolic August 2021 pullout from Afghanistan, eight months into Biden’s term, in which the U.S. appeared to flee while abandoning thousands of locals who had helped its efforts over two decades.

Sometimes forgotten is the fact that the pullout had been negotiated by the Trump administration with the Taliban in the Doha Agreement of February 2020.  But the implementation did not have to look as it did – and the Biden administration was extremely forgiving when the Taliban violated their commitment to good-faith negotiations with the Western-backed Afghan government to establish a permanent ceasefire and a political roadmap for the future of Afghanistan. This medieval mafia overran Kabul and giddily resumed their cruel oppression of women, to deafening silence from the West.

All of this not only undid years of effort and investment but also signaled to the world that the U.S. might no longer be willing or able to uphold the values of democracy and human rights – or stand by allies in the face of determined opposition.

That might have encouraged Putin to invade Ukraine six months later. The Biden administration has, of course, led an impressive (and mostly Western) coalition to back Ukraine, provide financial and military aid, and absorb millions of its refugees. But the U.S. has also self-deterred in the face of Putin’s nuclear bluster.

Ever concerned by the risk of escalation, the Biden administration has denied Ukraine the types and amounts of weapons that might make a difference in the war. And those weapons it has supplied have come with a laundry list of prohibitions on their employment that effectively make Russian territory a safe haven for the aggressor. Moreover, the U.S. has been ineffective in getting quasi-allies like India – which has become one of the largest buyers of oil to help make global sanctions on Russia truly debilitating.

Mere days before Russia invaded Ukraine, Putin signed a strategic cooperation agreement with another dictator in the ex-Soviet space, Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev.  By the end of the year Aliyev moved decisively against the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh –  which was populated by ethnic Armenians and was self-governing for decades – imposing a blockade on the territory.

The Hague-based International Court of Justice issued an order that the blockade be ended. Aliyev ignored the order and attacked the exhausted enclave in September 2023, causing the exodus of all 120,000 residents. Biden had been sympathetic to Armenia because of its scrappy democracy and pivot away from Russia to the West – but was in no way prepared to take concrete action to impose costs on Azerbaijan for its move against Nagorno-Karabakh.

Within days of that ethnic cleansing came Oct. 7 – with a barbaric invasion of Israel by Hamas in Gaza. About 1,200 people were massacred in Israel and some 250 others, including U.S. and other foreign nationals, taken hostage. Hamas is in large part bankrolled by Qatar, which also hosts the forward headquarters of the U.S. Central Command. America’s potential leverage on Qatar to bring Hamas to heel has yielded not much to date.

Meanwhile, Israel launched a devastating counterstrike in Gaza that has degraded but not eliminated Hamas and also killed tens of thousands of people, a figure that includes a large but unknown number of combatants. Biden has labored mightily to organize an exit strategy for Israel that includes a wide-ranging Israeli-Western-Sunni strategic alliance against Iran – whose theocratic regime bankrolls Hamas as well as Hezbollah in Lebanon, violent militias in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen.

This plan, a gift to Israel, has been ignored by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu because of his reliance on local ultranationalists. Biden has basically absorbed this insult as well, from a brazenly ungrateful client.

Meanwhile, the aforementioned Houthis have badly impeded global maritime trade for nine months by attacking, out of supposed solidarity with the Palestinians, commercial vessels headed up the Bab-El-Mandeb on to the Suez Canal and the West. This affects a third of global container traffic, badly harms Egypt’s economy and causes global price spikes. The U.S. response has been a few pinpoint strikes that failed to discourage the Houthis from sending a pilotless drone against Tel Aviv that missed the U.S. embassy by a whisker and hit buildings a block away, killing a man as he slept.

There have, of course, also been more effective actions and in many cases a course that was far more wise, considerate of others and deliberative than anything a Trump administration might essay.  But overall, it is reasonable to conclude that Biden’s tenure has been marked by a degree of timidity that strangely undermined the values-based paradigm it’s meant to serve, projecting weak-kneed acquiescence and perhaps even appeasement.

This is bad. There is a reason why the two main U.S. political parties have historically both adhered to a foreign policy that is both driven by a commitment to a liberal, rules-based international order and prepared to back it with some power and determination. That provided some predictability and stability in global affairs, reassuring allies and maintaining a degree of global order.

It was the Trump presidency that marked a stark departure. Trump displayed a disdain for the established international order, favoring a transactional, unilateral approach over multilateral cooperation. His foreign policy was driven more by personal instincts and emotions than by process-driven expertise. That’s why there are currently great concerns among many U.S. allies about Trump’s potential return.

He seems almost eager to abandon Ukraine, and it is not difficult to imagine him allowing further Russian adventurism, say, in Moldova or the Baltics, or embracing Aliyev even if he attacks Armenia proper.  Indeed, Trump has even questioned America’s role in NATO, saying he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO members not meeting the alliance’s target for spending 2 percent of GDP on defense.

America’s allies and partners are therefore rightly concerned about a second Trump presidency. The exception comes from the moderate (but dictatorial) Sunni countries in the Middle East, especially in the Gulf, where there is clear preference for Trump, based on his indifference to humanitarian outrages among allies with whom he shares goals. This, too, is a reaction to perceived weakness.

Biden’s withdrawal from the race offers something of a chance for a reset.

The challenge for Harris or any other Democratic leader will be how to reconcile cautious multilateralist instincts with a more muscular policy in defense of goals and values. This entails not only responding robustly to global crises but also restoring faith among allies and adversaries alike in America’s commitment to a stable and predictable world order.

The Democrats walk a tightrope. Having made advancing human rights and protecting democracy a core tenet of U.S. foreign policy – Biden’s National Security Strategy mentions the word democracy 38 times, compared to only six in the Trump strategy – they cannot abandon international norms and humanitarian concerns. But it is possible to reconcile those with a more robust proactivity against the world’s genuine miscreants.

It was indeed a problem that the world’s bad-faith players – from Putin to the Houthis – were not afraid of Biden. America’s power is not unlimited; but where treaty allies are threatened, or where important U.S. interests and the values the country purports to uphold are under attack, the resolute and responsible application of American power is not necessarily a step toward involvement in “forever wars.” On the contrary, it can both end current aggression and make it a less attractive option for future bad-faith actors.

Harris, a former prosecutor, may just have the steel necessary for this. That is one of the main things she now must prove.

Note for the Democratic nominee: speak moderately but very clearly, and carry a huge stick.

Colonel (Ret.) Robert Hamilton heads Eurasia Research at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, has been a professor at the U.S. Army War College and served in a variety of diplomatic posts. Dan Perry is the former chief editor of the Associated Press in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and the former chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem. Follow him at danperry.substack.com.