https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/03/13/biden-trump-choice-world-geopolitics/
The real problem with the Trump-Biden choice
By Robert Wright. WASHINGTON POST March 13, 2024
Robert Wright, whose books include “The Moral Animal” and “Nonzero,” publishes the Nonzero Newsletter and hosts the Nonzero podcast. This essay originally appeared in the Nonzero Newsletter.
Super Tuesday has come and gone, leaving in its wake the harsh reality of this year’s presidential election: In less than eight months, America will have to choose between an 81-year-old who sometimes seems older than his age and a 78-year-old who sometimes seems younger than his age — like 12, maybe 13 years old.
Not surprisingly, polls show that there is less enthusiasm within each party for its candidate than there was during the last matchup between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. But that doesn’t mean voters aren’t revved up about the election. True, an NBC News poll found that 62 percent of Biden voters say they’re more anti-Trump than pro-Biden — but it’s possible to be really, really anti-Trump, and a lot of Biden voters are. In a polarized country awash in “negative partisanship,” you don’t have to love your party’s candidate to be gripped by a paralyzing fear that your party’s candidate will lose.
If you suffer from this syndrome, I have some free therapeutic advice: Consider the possibility that whether your candidate wins doesn’t matter as much as you think. And I mean that in the most momentous sense possible. Maybe when it comes to keeping the world from spiraling toward catastrophe, neither Trump nor Biden is up to the job.
There — feel better? Not yet? Well, give me a few more paragraphs.
The source text for this sermon is a recent piece in the Financial Times written by historian Adam Tooze. It begins:
Looking to the future much of the world is frozen in horror at the prospect that American democracy will, by this time next year, deliver a second Donald Trump administration, hell-bent on tearing up the international order. But what about Joe Biden’s record on that score? Clearly, the manners of the Biden administration are less disruptive. It does not indulge in climate denial. It plays nicely with Europe. But …
After the “But,” Tooze notes, among other things, that under Biden the United States “has poured resources into Ukraine and the Middle East, but is unable and unwilling to broker a satisfactory peace.” And “in relation to China the Biden team has, if anything, escalated the tension” even beyond the level that Trump carried it to while he was in office.
In critiquing Biden’s prolific and often unilateral use of sanctions and other economic weapons against China (and against other adversaries), Tooze notes an irony that is typically noted in the context of U.S. military interventions: “Washington is seeking to defend what it likes to call the rules-based international order with a series of unruly self-interested interventions.”
And Tooze has an interesting explanation for this economic variant of the United States’ rules-based hypocrisy: It grows out of a dawning pessimism — the waning of the post-Cold-War belief that an economically interconnected world is a fundamentally good thing. National security adviser Jake Sullivan and other policymakers of his generation “pay lip service to global prosperity, but see globalization as undermining America’s middle class, opening the door to Trump and propelling the rise of China.”
The problem with this Gen X critique of globalization (and this is me talking, not Tooze) isn’t that it’s wrong on the specifics. Free trade has indeed hurt some American workers — by sending American jobs to China and other low-wage countries — and therefore has helped Trump; and certainly it has helped China. The problem, rather, lies in the United States’ atavistic reaction to the resulting challenge — a reaction that was less surprising in the case of the avowedly nationalist and proudly primitive Trump than in the case of Biden.
The reaction involves:
Meanwhile, the thought of actually sitting down and having sustained discussions with China about working out our differences seems like a quaint idea from a simpler time. More alien still is the idea of building international institutions to systematize such rationality. Indeed, the United States has abetted the decay of multilateral bodies — like the adjudicatory tribunals of the World Trade Organization — that for one bright shining post-Cold-War moment were actually resolving international disputes.
Even if the confrontational approach to China practiced by both Trump and Biden doesn’t lead to war, the next worst thing — a prolonged Cold War — is something we can’t afford, given the number of non-zero-sum problems the world’s nations need to collectively address: climate change, pandemics, the proliferation of nuclear and biological weapons, the militarization of space, threats posed by artificial intelligence, and so on. These dangers, if unaddressed, could in various combinations prove truly catastrophic.
“Non-zero-sum” is a concept that never deeply penetrated the character of either the Trump or Biden White Houses. Sure, the basic idea — that the world is full of non-zero-sum games, and you should seek win-win outcomes and avoid lose-lose outcomes — is one that Sullivan and others in Biden’s administration can recite. But the actual harnessing of international non-zero-sum dynamics is, for them, typically in the service of some zero-sum confrontation; cooperation is something you do with some countries to thwart other countries. Biden adviser Daleep Singh writes that the United States should “attract nonaligned countries into its orbit with positive inducements, and in doing so … gradually isolate China before any conflict unfolds.” (Reminder: Isolation has been known to cause conflict.)
I suspect that if you confronted Sullivan and other Biden officials with Tooze’s diagnosis — that they’re undermining the rules-based order because they “no longer believe in the optimistic historical vision that once framed those rules” — they’d insist that there’s a kind of optimism they retain: faith in the power of America to spread democracy — a distinctively neoconservative version of American exceptionalism, most recently trumpeted by Biden in his State of the Union address. But this claim rings hollow when, with U.S. democracy in disarray, we can’t promulgate our model by example and so must rely on various forms of coercion, none of which seem to work.
But this will involve reviving a virtue that has more or less vanished from U.S. foreign policy: humility. We’ll have to give up on reshaping other countries in our political and cultural image (which often backfires anyway) and concentrate instead on pursuing interests we share with them. If we accurately perceive those interests and truly grasp their importance, there will then be enough impetus to achieve the elusive prerequisite for pursuing them effectively: putting war — both hot and cold — aside.
Doing this will take a kind of revolution — an uprooting of paradigms that dominate the U.S. foreign policy establishment, a transformation of political discourse. And that won’t be accomplished before November or for that matter during the subsequent four years. It’s a bigger project than that — and, besides, it won’t find sympathy in the next occupant of the White House. For one thing, neither Trump nor Biden could abide the required national humility. And neither man has a serious interest in international governance (even though, in a deeply non-zero-sum world, it is the only way to fully serve the U.S. interests that Trump claims unswerving devotion to).
This doesn’t mean one candidate isn’t better than the other, or that one candidate couldn’t be much, much worse for the country than the other. I have my views on that, and I’ll vote accordingly. But it does mean there are better ways to spend the next eight months than obsessively following the polls or soaking up the self-righteousness in your particular election-year echo chamber. Namely: Spend the time thinking about, and talking about, what has to happen if we’re to have a better choice the next time around.