Past experience of Donald Trump is fuelling intense anxiety among the allies and partners of America; that oddly fearful collection of wealthy supplicant states. As Trump’s prospects of electoral success seem to fade, the issue becomes, will Kamala Harris carve out a different foreign policy path as president from Biden’s failed doctrine?
For American commentators like Jessica Mathews at the Carnegie Endowment, “the past four years have witnessed remarkable achievements in foreign policy”. Mathews believes Biden has shown “that the United States can be deeply engaged in the world without military action or the taint of hegemony”.
From the myopic Beltway perspective, the Biden Doctrine has been a success. Mathews perceives a move by Biden away from an approach that previously saw “the United States as ensconced in the centre of everything with other countries arrayed around”, to Biden building a “latticework” of relationships based on shared “geopolitical and economic interests”.
This is a strangely flawed assessment. While the American hegemony has shrunken in reach, it has been delineated more sharply during Biden’s time. Allies and partners like Australia, who take their policy positions and talking points on geopolitical issues from the Americans, have become far more entwined in the global American military force posture during the Biden Administration and are more committed to fighting America’s wars at Washington’s behest.
Biden still sees American leadership at the hub of the array of alliances and insists that he was responsible for the revitalisation and expansion of NATO. Having forced his vision of an “inflection point” into the NATO discourse, it is conspicuous that since the advent of the Biden presidency the language of democracy versus autocracy, as a way of framing geopolitics, has not only emerged among leaders of allied and partnered nations, but has been used to shape economic and trade relations globally.
The Biden Doctrine might be best understood as “survival of the fittest”; an obsession with the idea that either democracy or autocracy will dominate the coming decades with the result that the loser will fade. Will Harris persist in the hegemony-promoting subterfuge of insisting American leadership is essential for the good of the world, and that America has to privilege its own economic and military strength over justice, humanity, and international laws to ensure that leadership is sustained?
By creating an external military threat and a sense of a world on the precipice, Biden has been able to drive military cooperation among allies and partners to new levels, and to facilitate their increased militarisation with a clear focus on supporting American coercion of China. For example, in all bar its constitutional arrangements, Australia has become the 51st state of the United States. This is evidenced most starkly by the Australian Government’s abandonment of the obligation to provide for the independent defence of the nation, acquiescence in the colonisation of Australia by the American military, and the surrender of the sovereign responsibility to declare war. A process repeated in Europe, Japan, and South Korea.
Much of America’s loss of influence elsewhere outside of the allies and partners can be attributed in good part to the display of incompetence over the past four years. The capacity to apply coercive force — military, economic, and diplomatic — and to display intangibles like moral suasion and demonstrated competence and credibility are essential to hegemony. A good argument can be made that Biden’s mismanagement of foreign policy has devastated any reputation for competence.
Biden’s real legacy sees a vast portion of the Earth now inaccessible to American influence. Eurasia is now well outside America’s sphere of influence. The increased assertiveness of African nations, and their rebuff of American threats and blandishments to line up against Russia and Israel, shows America’s helplessness. America’s inability to find international support for Israel in its criminal assault on the population of Gaza also epitomises the evaporation of American influence outside of Europe and a scattering of allies in the Western Pacific. The stubborn resistance of India and the ASEAN states to declare for America in its strategic competition with China is further evidence of the contraction of American influence.
The disorganised departure from Afghanistan simply reinforced the impression of fading competence. Even allies were not consulted and were left scrambling to manage the fallout. As America’s lack of competence in managing the operation was evident, so was the moral failure of leaving behind thousands of Afghans who had worked loyally with the American occupation. The spectacle of Blinken shuffling back and forth to the Middle East, while having no impact on the Gaza genocide, is a high-profile example of diplomatic and moral ineffectiveness.
To many outside the hegemon’s sphere, Ukraine looks like the sacrifice of a nation in a proxy war with Russia. As the spectacle of the Ukrainian drama began to unfold, America’s drip feed of weapons seemed designed to drag out the conflict, ignoring the enormous cost in Ukrainian casualties. Biden tried to pull into an anti-Russian sanctions regime the states outside of NATO that weren’t tied to its apron strings. The rest of the world not only resisted, but resented the costs imposed on them.
Biden’s re-energised injection of America into global affairs was clumsy, incompetent, and detrimental to the interests of many people outside of America. Rewriting Biden’s legacy in America will not recover its reputation. The so-called Biden Doctrine was simply a re-militarisation of Europe and parts of East Asia and the Pacific to prepare for the war inherent in Biden’s shallow understanding of the lessons of history.
The Biden Doctrine is quintessentially about maintaining the hegemony by gaining more direct access to the military potential of allies; it is hegemonic and it is militaristic. In Europe and East Asia-Pacific, American pressure on the allies has seen increased defence budgets and deeper integration into preparations for military confrontation with China. It is to be hoped that Harris will base her policies on tolerance, cooperation and conciliation, and not be obsessed with preparations for a disastrous war. Her nomination acceptance speech isn’t necessarily reassuring.
Mike Scrafton was a Deputy Secretary in the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment, senior Defence executive, CEO of a state statutory body, and chief of staff and ministerial adviser to the minister for defence.