Dr Adam Garfinkle on “Biden’s Burden – The Political Occlusion of Policy”

Dr Adam Garfinkle, founding editor of The American Interest, Senior Fellow and member of the Board of Advisors at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and Distinguished Visiting Fellow at RSIS (till June 2021), contributed this article as part of the commemoration of 25 years of RSIS/IDSS.

Executive Summary of Article

The essence of American politics today is that the formerly semi-autonomous domain of policymaking has collapsed into the political maelstrom. Donald Trump, a man who uniquely in American history saw the presidency as a vehicle for serving his personal interests as opposed to the commonweal, neither saw nor acknowledged any distinction between the state and the personal, nor recognised the centrality of rule-of-law in principle or practise. All policy, domestic and foreign, was liable to be bent to his narrow conception of the personal-political if Trump thought he could get away with it. In this respect he modelled an unusual type of political debasement:  He knew exactly what he was doing and barely bothered even trying to disguise it; yet he could not imagine it conceptually.

In a polarised and closely divided polity, Joe Biden has no choice but to also reduce the policymaking function to its political impact: lose the political battle in 2022 and then 2024 and the policymaking function becomes moot.

Moreover, because many and perhaps most Republicans – political class elites and rank-and-file voters alike – see the Democrats not in “loyal opposition” to Republicans but as evildoers whose political triumph would mean the extinction of Republican political power and hence the destruction of the country as they understand it. Democrats must therefore do all they can to prevent another four years of Trumpist government, for they doubt that America’s classically liberal, law-based order could survive GOP exertions to take control of the United States as a minority party. In other words, because the Republicans have turned US politics into a existential binary ideological battle, the Democrats get pulled into the roiled current whether they like it or not.

Foreign and national security policy have little impact as sources for the current predicament, but they will be profoundly affected by its outcome. Three basic vectors of that impact can be foreseen, with a fourth less likely possibility worth mentioning.

First, the longer the deep and increasingly uncivil philosophical divide between the sides endures, with neither able to emerge as the settled victor for an eight or twelve year period, as has been typical in most of American political history, the more unstably oscillatory and hence unpredictable and unreliable US policies and pledges will be. Adversaries will be tempted and allies will hedge, leading many regions to behaviours that will be both more fluid and accident-prone. Any residua of the former US grand strategy of providing common security goods to the global commons in order to temper local arms races, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and violence will be shredded, even if formal US alliances and alliance structures endure on paper.

Second, if the Republican Party in its current form prevails in 2022 and hence likely in 2024, the United States may become a rogue superpower — mighty and selectively covetous, but tied to no close allies or liberal-internationalist norms and institutions. Common global problems, like zoonotic disease and environmental challenges, will become far harder to manage; violence and even hegemonic wars will be more likely.

Third, if the Democratic Party in their present form – meaning its more traditional “liberal international order” dispensation – prevails, the post-Cold War status quo may linger in outward form, but changes in the world and the lack of US constructive imagination will make that posture an increasingly wasting and hollow asset for the world at large. The situation may give the appearance of continuity to those disposed to lazy and superficial thinking, but the substance will mainly have gone missing. This is an ideal formula for surprise, and shock, when those who know what they want seek to seize it.

Of the three most likely outcomes, this is the best, for it buys time for improvisation and eventual wise adjustment. None of the three, however, is cause for celebration.

Finally, if “woke” leftwing Democrats prevail in due course, however unlikely, we are bound for an idealist, even millenarian foreign policy focused overwhelmingly on end-of-the-world climate paranoia, global anti-“racist” crusades, and “human rights” campaigns defined according to the basic criteria of critical theory. This would cause counterproductive chaos by inciting Hobbesian wars of aggrieved groups against other groups wherever it touches ground worldwide, in accord with its core view that human social nature is only and ever conflictual. True believers would get their fights for absolute social justice and then be forced to ask themselves, Goethe-like, why they ever wanted them in the first place.

About the Author

Adam Garfinkle was engaged at RSIS as a non-resident Distinguished Fellow when he wrote this essay. Aside from being Founding Editor of The American Interest, he has served as Editor of The National Interest, as Principal Speechwriter to the US Secretary of State while attached to the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department, was chief writer of the Hart-Rudman Commission reports, and has taught at several institutions of higher education including SAIS/Johns Hopkins. His PhD in International Relations is from the University of Pennsylvania.