Biden’s Foreign Policy Chiefs Aren’t Boring—Unfortunately
Joe Biden has begun staffing the upper ranks of the U.S. Treasury and Council of Economic Advisers with union-doting, tax-loving, spending-happy economists sure to raise the blood pressure of anyone wistful about the American free market. Some reckon Biden might even nominate his abortive socialist ex-rival, Bernie Sanders, as labor secretary. (Cringe.)
Compared with all the ado over Biden’s domestic-policy chiefs, his top foreign-policy appointees have been met with a collective “whatever.” Graeme Wood of The Atlantic called the first three nominees Biden announced “the equivalent of a warm cup of Ovaltine with a melatonin chaser.” Yet secretary of state hopeful Antony Blinken, expected secretary of defense nominee Michèle Flournoy, and prospective national security adviser Jake Sullivan are all exciting picks. And not in a good way.
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Despite his humdrum characterization of these old-hand bureaucrats, Wood fleetingly acknowledges their past failures. Blinken, Flournoy, and Sullivan all worked in the Obama administration in the agencies to which Biden is respectively appointing them. And yet, after imputing to them a wizardly “hypercompetence,” Wood writes, “The bad news is that 2016, the last full year in which this hypercompetent team was in power, was a bit of a nightmare, particularly in the Middle East. The Obama administration… tried supporting Libyan rebels with weapons but not nation building, and supporting Syrian rebels with neither weapons nor nation building. Both countries devolved into apocalyptic messes.”
In a rare show of sensibility, then-Vice President Biden himself opposed intervention in Libya. Blinken, who had previously served for six years as a Senate aide to Biden, encouraged the Obama administration’s adventurism there. Now, as the president-elect builds his foreign-policy team, he is suggesting he will embrace Obama’s crude quasi-hawkishness.
Flournoy has meanwhile received an outpouring of endorsements from far-left members of Congress for her support of partial, gradual nuclear disarmament. In particular, she wants to extend the New START treaty with Russia, which is set to expire in February. New START has hampered America’s ability to maintain its deteriorating nuclear-weapons system while Russia, the agreement’s cosignatory, has proceeded to develop its nuclear-weapons capabilities. Michaela Dodge of the National Institute for Public Policy has rightly warned that sticking with New START and neglecting America’s arsenal modernization would amount to “disarm[ing] by attrition.”
Sullivan, who served as Biden’s national security adviser when the latter was vice president, has made some reassuring remarks regarding greater accountability for China, whose misconduct in matters of commerce, international security, and global health has been on glaring display. But when he says “the United States and the rest of the world will not accept a circumstance in which we do not have an effective public health surveillance system, with an international dimension, in China and across the world going forward,” that should seem a bridge too far to anyone with an appreciation for government’s proper limits.
And it gets worse. Biden has named as international climate czar, a de facto cabinet-level official who will not require Senate confirmation, his longtime Senate colleague John Kerry. The former Massachusetts senator and secretary of state has always rigidly hewed to an anti-warming orthodoxy that, if realized, would cripple the economy in Space City and beyond. But matters of his character are even more disturbing.
Before he became a senator or a failed 2004 presidential candidate or secretary of state, Kerry was a high-profile attestant of the Winter Soldier Investigation. In April 1971, he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that his fellow American servicemen regularly committed atrocities against Vietnamese civilians, testifying that the Americans, among other heinous acts, destroyed the homes of innocent villagers. He insisted these were “not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.” He thus misplaced culpability for most of the incidents he described. As Norman Podhoretz, an opponent of the war, detailed in his 1982 book Why We Were in Vietnam, the Viet Cong routinely used civilians for human shields and rural hamlets for redoubts.
Kerry’s smearing of his fellow veterans was not an attempt at mending what he deemed the uncharacteristic sins of a great nation. Nearly a year before he testified before the Senate, he had met with representatives of the North Vietnamese Communist government in Paris. Now, for the second time, a president-elect hopes to make a high-profile diplomat of someone whose allegiance to America cannot bear basic scrutiny.
Biden’s White House will be many things, but it won’t be dull.
