David Klion on Alex Ward on Biden's Global Train Wreck
Critique, credulity, and Biden’s D+ foreign policy
Politico journalist Alex Ward has a new book out called, The Internationalists: The Fight To Restore American Foreign Policy After Trump. It’s based on extensive insider access to key players in the administration, especially Jake Sullivan.
Breezy, gossip-laced, insider-style tomes are enjoyable on their own terms, and they’re usually great source material for research. I also knew the book was going to elevate Alexander McCoy, an antiwar activist who’s also a former Marine, and a feature character in the book. McCoy is someone who deserves to be elevated because he’s out there doing god’s work (from our virtual interactions he’s also a good dude).
And yet, even though I was asked to review The Internationalists, I was reluctant to do so.
I’ve known Ward for a long time. I wouldn’t say we’re besties or anything, but we’re on friendly terms. He’s good at his job, and his job requires access to powerful folks. I didn’t want to impugn him for that—it’s the way the system works—and I found it hard to disentangle his narrative (Biden’s team is reasserting American “leadership” in the world) from his method (talk to Biden’s insiders and report out what they saw, thought, and did).
But whereas I struggled to navigate how to review something like this, David Klion’s new review of Ward’s book had no trouble. It’s excellent, fair, impersonal, but also critical. Klion and I share many friends in common but we’ve never met, and have never worked together. Klion’s review, both in its generosity and its critique, echoes thoughts I’d had:
the book’s publication…does not cover the October 7 Hamas attack or its ongoing, cataclysmic aftermath…the book’s resilient-comeback narrative has already been undermined by global events.
In a literal sense, the book is a function of bad timing, but the criticism is more fundamental:
The Internationalists would be more compelling if it looked deeper into the underlying contradictions that make US foreign policy so crisis-prone in the first place. One has to squint pretty hard to see what most of these overseas entanglements have to do with the well-being of the American middle class...
I’ve said before that Biden’s Best and Brightest are technically competent, but they are also perpetual crisis-manager types. They see themselves as reviving a gauzy, idealized tradition of American leadership in a world that Trump trashed. That view, of course, ignores the immense similarities between Biden’s foreign policy and Trump’s; it ignores the power imbalances and domination that get masked by euphemisms about “leadership”; and it fails to adequately probe the reasons why the world is as it is.
Most of Biden’s team—especially on Asia—are primacists committed to the ends and means of a strategy that is utterly at odds with the state of the world. These folks misunderstand basic power realities. They have been socialized into a tradition of romanticizing and rationalizing extreme imbalances of power that are unsustainable and that the world (and technological change) has refused to abide…even a crude reading of history would have anticipated as much.
Give Team Biden a mulligan for how they withdrew from Afghanistan. Set aside Ukraine as an exceptional circumstance that Biden’s team has actually managed pretty well in my view. And bracket off Biden choosing the wrong side of genocide in Gaza because 1) it happened after Ward’s book went to press, and 2) there is no way to talk about Gaza without indicting American power so thoroughly that it ends any sane conversation.
What we are left with is a Biden administration that has sided with repressive right-wing governments in Asia and the Middle East, deliberately allowed the North Korean nuclear issue to fester and grow, overlooked a burgeoning sovereign debt crisis, out-hawked Trump on every aspect of China policy, expanded the US security state that will be handed to a MAGA president one day, and failed to acknowledge (let alone address) the economic insecurity and informalization of the majority of workers in the world's most populous region (Asia). Facts.
The Biden administration has achieved little that we couldn’t have gotten from any cardboard cutout presidency. But unlike a cardboard cutout, it has accelerated the nationalist, militarist, and jingoistic forces that have been eroding international order—racing not toward the end of history but the end of humanity.
My report card on the Biden administration's Asia policy in particular is D+, where an F equals nuclear war. If you’re putting aside Ukraine and Gaza, the entire showcase of US foreign policy is Asia, and the administration’s Asia hands have proven themselves good at little more than selling weapons, writing press releases, and managing crises without ever reflecting on why crises keep happening in the first place.
None of this is an indictment of Ward’s book. But without criticism there can be no accountability. And so I find myself asking, as I tried to in Pacific Power Paradox: who benefits from the narratives our government promotes, and who is harmed as a result of them?
"also a former Marine"
Before they get here, I should note that Marines generally don't consider anybody who wasn't dishonorably discharged "former." "Retired" or "veteran" are generally preferred, unless he's using "former" himself.
So the withdraw from Afghanistan rates a mulligan and not a net positive in your view?
Not to praise the execution, but that is about the biggest show of restraint from a U.S. President since the withdrawal from Iraq. I'd argue it was a greater show of de-militarization than the Iran deal because there was a mutually beneficial outcome on the table there that wasn't in the cards with the Taliban since Bush botched the initial opportunities decades ago. The reason the withdrawal from Afghanistan didn't happen during the Obama administration was a sense by the crisis manager types of the fragility of the Afghan government.
I realize that's not the focus of your piece, but c'mon man. Addressing economic insecurity and informalization of workforce is a plausible path to a much better future for Asia, but that's also a long term solution that doesn't ensure an ability to bypass a range present day security dilemmas in the Pacific. Most any policy involving dramatic shifts in hard power is going to come with some ugly downsides. This is not to say it wouldn't be potentially worth it. I'm rather skeptical but you put together a robust argument in the Pacific Power Paradox that's worth considering.