Reprinted from The Realist Review:
Joe Biden’s presidency may ultimately come to be seen as a cautionary tale. Here was a president who showed little interest in entertaining arguments that might have contradicted his most deeply held assumptions.[1] And there were precious few within the upper ranks of the administration who might have attempted to do so, after all, only policy hands and political operatives who had come up through the ranks of the Clinton and Obama administrations or had longstanding ties to the citadels of the foreign policy community were invited into the fold.[2]
The message BidenWorld sent early on was that heterodox voices, even tepid ones, were not welcome. Consider the case of a respected expert on Russian affairs, Dr. Matthew Rojansky, who was then serving as the director of the Kennan Institute at the Congressionally-funded Woodrow Wilson Center. Rojansky had been denied a position on the Biden NSC because he was viewed as “soft” on Russia. Administration officials feared that appointing Rojansky would, as a contemporaneous report by Politico put it, “signal a conciliatory U.S. policy toward Moscow.”[3] The incident had echoes of the 2009 Freeman affair, when a foreign lobby (Israel’s) mobilized its allies in the media and on Capitol Hill to block an appointment it deemed threatening to its agenda. This time around, another foreign lobby (Ukraine’s) slammed the door on Rojansky. From the start, Biden’s White House was a closed circle – new names, new faces, and new thinking were not welcome.
The parallel one reaches for to best describe the inner workings of the Biden White House is that of the Reagan White House. Back then, a chief executive of questionable sentience relied on a tight circle of political operatives to run the day-to-day operations of the White House. During Reagan’s first term, that job fell to a “Troika” consisting of Chief of Staff James Baker, Counselor to the President Ed Meese, and Deputy Chief of Staff Mike Deaver. Meese did policy, Deaver was the image-maker. Baker was in charge of everything else. Joe Biden had a Troika of his own: White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, Counselor to the President Steve Ricchetti, and Deputy Chief of Staff Bruce Reed. Klain and Ricchetti were longtime centrist Democratic operatives. Reed was the policy wonk. No friend of progressives, Reed came up through the ranks as a centrist policy adviser to Senator Al Gore in the 1980s. He later served as a domestic policy adviser to President Clinton.
On the foreign policy side of the ledger, what was old was new again. Like Presidents Carter and Clinton – and his erstwhile Democratic rivals Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders – Biden embraced a vision of the world divided between democracy and authoritarianism. While the script had been slightly updated since the end of the Cold War, the story was a familiar one: The US and its NATO allies were now said to be threatened by an “authoritarian axis” led by Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia. The axis is also said to include Iran, North Korea and other revisionist powers. Discussions regarding our putative “friends” and “allies” that also happen to be authoritarian (Saudi Arabia, Turkey) or ethno-nationalist (Israel, Ukraine) are usually excluded from the schema. In December 2021, Biden hosted a ‘Summit for Democracy’ that brought together leaders from over 100 countries in support of a rather amorphous strategy to “defend” democracy – a cause that Biden claimed was “the defining challenge of our time.”
More thoughtful men than Biden saw things rather differently. George Kennan, for one, felt that there was nothing “more egocentric than the embattled democracy.” The problem, as Kennan correctly foresaw, was that an embattled democracy will tend “to attach to its own cause an absolute value which distorts its own vision to everything else. Its enemy becomes the embodiment of all evil. Its own side is the center of all value.”[4] While Kennan wrote those words in 1961, it would be hard to find a better description of the politics of the New Cold War. The main deliverable of Biden’s “democracy” conference was the creation of a Presidential Initiative for Democratic Renewal, which, at a cost of nearly half-a-billion dollars to US taxpayers, would seek to promote “democracy, fight corruption, and defend human rights worldwide.” [5]
As with so many of the ideas and programs championed by the Democratic establishment since the end of the Cold War, the “autocracy vs. democracy” paradigm borrowed liberally from the neocon playbook. Biden’s old friend, the late Senator John McCain, had long called for the creation of a global “League of Democracies.” Speaking at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution in 2007, McCain said the new league would, “form the core of an international order of peace based on freedom.” It would be able to “bring concerted pressure to bear on tyrants in Burma or Zimbabwe, with or without Moscow’s and Beijing’s approval.[6] McCain’s proposal might just as easily have come from the pen of Samantha Power. As with the men and pigs at the conclusion of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, when it comes to the neocons and the Democratic elite, it is now impossible to say which is which.
*****
The Great Betrayal: How The Democrats Became The Party of War, hailed by Professor Richard Sakwa as “a brilliant, timely, and important achievement,” is available now from OR x Nation Books.
