Biden 2.0: A promising but challenging future foreign policy 

This op-ed is part of a series exploring what a second term would look like for either President Biden or former President Trump.

If he wins a second term, President Joe Biden would be expected to maintain considerable continuity in his foreign policy. Except, that is, where the world won’t let him.

Indeed, on what I’d consider the three biggest issues in U.S. national security today — Russia/Ukraine, China/Taiwan and Mexico/fentanyl — Biden will likely need major overhauls on the first and the last.

On the Ukraine conflict, the Biden team’s record is mostly good so far. Biden rightly decided that the U.S. should not directly enter into the conflict and risk World War III over a part of Europe that, while important, is not vital to U.S. national interests. We take that decision for granted, but it remains enormously important.

Biden did, however, help lead a Western response in the economic realm that has cut off most high-tech cooperation between the West and Russia, even if it has not yet substantially reduced Russian oil and gas export earnings or brought Russia’s economy to its knees. In addition, Biden decided to provide massive security and economic assistance, and unprecedented intelligence support, to Ukraine to help its military forces and protect its government.

But we are far from done with this tragic conflict, and it will not do to keep a generally successful policy on autopilot. By early 2025, it may be apparent that the largely stalemated conflict between Russia and Ukraine is truly stuck. In the meantime, the Biden team should keep intensifying the economic pressure on Russia while expediting military and economic assistance further, if Congress will let it.

Yet if we reach a point of clear stalemate, we may have to fall back on a second-best strategy: keep providing Ukraine defensive but not offensive weaponry, and significant if reduced economic aid; anchor it somehow to the West in a security institution (many favor NATO, but I favor what Lise Howard of Georgetown University and I call an Atlantic-Asian Security Community); and find some way to formalize an armistice, while looking to longer-term economic and diplomatic (rather than military) tools to help Ukraine someday regain its lost territory and populations. I do not know, however, if such thinking would be popular within a second-term White House, State Department and Pentagon.

On China, Biden has been right to keep some Trump-era tariffs on general trade with China, use the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to impede Chinese acquisitions of American high-tech jewels, and otherwise push back against Chinese economic theft. The latter, of course, has national security ramifications, since advanced commercial technology can have many military applications.

In addition, the Pentagon has correctly described China as the “pacing challenge” and focused the Defense Department’s long-term modernization and investment strategies on that country, without calling China an adversary or enemy or evil empire (though the unwise American government decision to accuse China of “genocide” against the Uyghurs of Xinjiang province is a mistake, and comes close to the “evil empire” terminology).

The Biden team could be expected to continue such policies in a second term, as well as the so-called one-China policy and the “strategic ambiguity” or dual deterrence policy of the United States toward the China-Taiwan relationship. Biden’s frequent misstatements, if in fact they have been mistakes, about how he would authorize a U.S. response to any Chinese attack on Taiwan have probably been good for deterrence — even as White House staffers would always then walk back Biden’s words and reaffirm the longstanding policy of strategic ambiguity.

Abandoning the latter in favor of “strategic clarity” would be a mistake for two reasons: it would inflame relations with Beijing, and it would promise a military protection of Taiwan that, depending on the scenario, the United States might not be capable of providing reliably. But Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s concept of integrated deterrence, as well as the West’s collective response to the Ukraine invasion, signal strongly to Beijing that whether we intervened militarily or not, we would largely decouple economically from China in the event of a conflict. To be sure, such a process would necessarily be painstaking, gradual, and piecemeal — but it could also be sustained and expanded over time, just as we are now witnessing in regard to the West’s dealings with Russia. That integrated deterrence concept, plus Biden’s verbal gaffes, plus U.S. military modernization focused on China actually add up to a fairly strong deterrent posture.

A second-term Biden team would likely stay calm on China, and seek some collaboration where possible, as has been evident in recent months — yet also stay resolute. It would continue to collaborate with regional friends and allies, including with new groupings and new tools like the “Quad” (of India, Japan, Australia and the U.S.), the AUKUS submarine/technology arrangement with Australia and the United Kingdom, and the recent trilateral cooperation including Japan and South Korea. The Biden team appears to have settled into such an overall approach by mid-late 2023, and could be expected to keep it.

Finally, I would conclude with an admonition to the Biden team to elevate the fentanyl crisis in the U.S. to a top-tier national security concern. With over 100,000 American overdose deaths a year, Republicans are right to prioritize the matter, even if their proposed solutions rarely sound promising. Nonetheless, Biden must do more to sense the national security imperative on this matter, and therefore not treat the U.S.-Mexico border question primarily as a matter of human rights or immigration policy alone.

So even if an 82-year old second-term president elect might be expected to opt mostly for continuity in national security policy, the world may not afford Joe Biden such a luxury.

Michael O’Hanlon is the Phil Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy at the Brookings Institution, and author of “Military History for the Modern Strategist: America’s Major Wars Since 1861.”