President Biden’s world of modest means and modest ends will exclude grand ideological pursuits

File image: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

“I’m looking into your eyes,” the man who opinion polls say will be the next President of the United States claims to have told President Vladimir Putin in 2011, as he toured the Russian leader’s lavish Kremlin office: "I don’t think you have a soul”. In the years since, Joseph Biden has attacked Russia for backing President Bashar al-Asad’s often-savage regime in Syria; been angered by Moscow’s interference in Ukraine; has expressed rage with President Putin’s use of cyber-warfare and disinformation to influence politics and elections across the world.

But then, there’s this: Biden also wants to negotiate an extension to the last, surviving Cold War disarmament treaty with the man without a soul. New START, capping nuclear warhead stockpiles, expires in February 2021—and President Donald Trump has been holding its renewal hostage to China also committing to freeze its nuclear arsenal.

In spite of his dislike of Putin, Biden is focussed on avoiding a nuclear arms race that would financially cripple Russia—because he believes it wouldn’t serve the United States, either.

Like Prime Minister Narendra Modi — and many other old-school press-the-flesh politicians — Biden accords a key place to developing personal relationships. “Look,” President Barack Obama's former vice-president told his staff, “for every time you want me to call a foreign leader to ask for something, make sure I call him three times just to say Hi.”

The key to understanding Biden’s world lies in what he does when charm isn’t enough to get his way.

Last year, European élites responded with stony silence as United States vice-president Mike Pence called for them to spend more on defence, join in the trade war on China, and get behind efforts to bring Iran’s missile programme to its knees. The cheers at the Munich Security Conference were reserved for Biden, who promised renewal of the American commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, to the principles of liberal internationalism, and “to shoulder our responsibility of leadership”.

“The America I see is not in wholesale retreat from the interest and values that have guided us,” Biden argued. “The America I see values basic human decency.”

Elements of Biden’s agenda are already known: he has promised to rejoin the 2015 Paris Climate Accord and the World Health Organisation, end President Donald Trump’s ban on Muslim immigrants and stop work on the border wall with Mexico.

Like raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, human decency is a heartwarming thing, but three cold realities will in fact shape Biden’s foreign policy. Ever since the end of the Second World War, the United States has pursued what strategists call ‘overmatch’— pithily described country’s 2017 National Security Strategy to mean capacities so superior to those of all potential adversaries that “America’s sons and daughters will never be in a fair fight”.

Even though the United States remains the world’s preeminent military power, though, its relative superiority has been diminishing. Today’s United States military budgets, adjusted for inflation, exceed those seen at the height of the Cold War, but force capacities have declined: the Air Force’s inventory, for example, is at all-time lows, while the Navy has had to walk back on its ambitious plans for a 355-ship fleet.

In a post-COVID-19 world, it’s profoundly unlikely that the resources needed to ensure ‘overmatch’ will be available. Instead, scholars like Eric Gomez and others have noted, Biden will have to develop a “prudent military strategy that can protect United States interests without turning into an open‐ended pursuit of anachronistic, grand goals”. “The United States cannot be the world’s police force or coast guard”, they conclude.

The next United States president might well be hawkish on Russia. Led, in the course of long one-on-one walks with President Xi Jinping, to the conviction China’s leader was an instinctive authoritarian, he is also said to be repelled by China’s treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang and its aggression on its peripheries. Like many Democrats, he’s broadly backed President Trump’s efforts to force China to reform iniquitous trade practices.

Biden is profoundly unlikely, though, to risk military conflict on behalf of allies in Europe or Asia. In essence, Biden will push back against the United States’ geopolitical competitors where he must— but, at once, cooperate with them where he can, to secure the country’s core economic and strategic interests. Inexorably, the interests of smaller powers, like India, will be sacrificed when necessary.

A second reality is this: the élite consensus that underpinned American foreign policy has changed. “The US government does not have the American people’s consent to act on the world stage as it once did,” Mark Leonard has noted. “They appear to have rejected the elite consensus on trade, defence spending, and diplomacy.”  The post-Second World war liberal internationalism nurtured in Princeton, Yale and Harvard are increasingly irrelevant to the stuff of American politics.

The reasons for this are not hard to find—and Biden knows them better than most. Economists Christopher Kurz, Geng Li, and Daniel Vine have noted that millennials — the generation born between 1981 and 1996 —have lower median incomes, less access to healthcare, and greater debt than their parents, an historical situation without precedent since the Great Depression. America is more riven by race and class than in decades.

“Its 320 million citizens no longer understand why they should have to protect 500 million Europeans,” Leonard concludes. “While Trump and Pence crudely state what today’s America wants, Biden is selling a vision of America that it no longer obtains.”

Third, Biden’s experience as vice-president has taught him that the use of force, even for the most laudable aims, is a high-risk enterprise, with unpredictable outcomes. From being an advocate of arming Bosnian Muslims in 1993, the vice-president turned into one of the early critics of the United States 9/11 war in Afghanistan.

Biden argued, in essence, that no United States strategic interest was served by an open-ended commitment that was unlikely to yield a stable, self-funding Afghan state. Instead, he argued for light, counter-terrorism focussed operations, as well as negotiations with the Taliban. This, of course, is now policy pursued energetically by President Trump.

“I don’t have any doubt if we put 200,000 forces in Syria—although we might have a war with Russia — we could control the place, settle it down,” Biden said, explaining his opposition to so-called humanitarian wars. “But the moment we left, we’d be right back exactly where we are today.”

Even though liberal interventionists like Susan Rice will likely play a key role in a future Biden administration — their ideological influence pushed forward by the Left-wing of the Democratic Party — their desire for a human-rights focussed use of American military resources will almost certainly be tempered by the new President’s deep-rooted scepticism about ideological pursuits.

“You don’t put in 160,000 forces inside Iraq without a conceptual notion as to how you’re going to put Humpty Dumpty back together again,” Biden has argued. “Well, you know how long you would keep them there? Forever?”

The world under Biden, then, will likely see less United States involvement—and this may not be an unmitigated ill.  The policies of President Bill Clinton and  President Barack Obama, after all, destabilised swathes of Asia, leaving country after country with fragile governments, or none at all. They engendered arms-races, and disrupted geopolitical equilibria India, like many of the United States’ allies across Europe and Asia, has borne the costs, in the form of the rise of new jihadist movements, massive refugee flows and insecurities over hydrocarbon resources.

Trump took his America First sledgehammer to this world —threatening to bring its pillars down on everyone’s head. The world under Biden will likely be quieter, shaped by negotiation and compromise, not grand ideological pursuits. India may, under President Biden, see an easing of H1B visas for skilled workers, and less pressure on tariffs — but there may also be insistence that New Delhi act to reduce the risks of a confrontation on Pakistan, and move forward on restoring democracy in Kashmir. China may, in turn, face pressure on its trade policies, but there’s unlikely to be expansive commitments to an Asian alliance to contain its rise.

For better or for worse, India will have to live in the world President Biden makes: a world of modest means and modest ends.