A Better Biden Doctrine, w/ Matt Duss and Stephen Wertheim | Un-Diplomatic Podcast Ep. 138

How's Biden doing on foreign policy? Where is the "Biden doctrine" going wrong? Matt Duss and Stephen Wertheim--leading voices in progressive foreign policy--come on the pod to hit all the issues with Van and Kate--Ukraine-Russia, a disastrous defense strategy, Iran, Saudi-Yemen war, China, Afghanistan and counter-terrorism, and more.

[jason]

Has Biden ever uttered the phrase "multipolar order" in public? He's spoken of autocracies vs. democracies, but the rest of the world sees the conflict in terms of unipolarity vs. multipolarity. The US is seen (particularly in the Global South) as an autocracy in the global order, there is no such thing as global democracy aka multipolarity. Sheldon Wolin argued that the nature of American Superpower is such that it does not accept limits on its power except what it imposes on itself. And it's clear from this discussion that even the IR establishment sees no defined or limitable agenda to US foreign policy other than unofficial party platforms and campaign politicking. Billions of dollars of military spending for Ukraine gets buried in a discretionary fiscal budget and passed without any debate among the American people. We can hardly say there is democratic control or limits on US foreign policy. Meanwhile, as Biden leads a crusade for liberal democracy in Ukraine and Taiwan, he pursues a new realpolitik in places like India and Saudi Arabia. This is not to mention Israel's turn toward ethnonationalism without any fear of losing its global status as America's 51st state. In American propaganda, China and Russia are autocracies that must be contained and a red line drawn via proxy in Ukraine and Taiwan. But most of the world sees China as a leading model of multipolarity. China does business with everyone, doesn't interfere outside its own interests, doesn't preach about democracy, doesn't aspire to global hegemony and doesn't even have the ability to be a global hegemon. If the US would simply start taking the lead toward a multipolar order, it would be able to compete with China across the globe, because no country wants to be dependent on China alone. This would allow the US to renew its idealism and give the world an example of a true democracy in a multipolar order. But American Superpower is something different from the old empires. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin wrote in the 2010s about the political economy of American empire. Far from being an imperial hegemon in the old Marxist sense, the US in fact is the global guarantor of the international capitalist class. The primary function of US foreign policy is to ensure the free flow of capital, which is not to be confused with free markets. The global system today is not (as Marx would have imagined it) a system of inter-imperial rivalry and national monopoly capital. The old empires (US, UK, Japan, Germany, France, etc.) were integrated after 1945 into interconnected regimes of capital accumulation and complementary value chains. The founder of the Taiwanese semiconductor company TSMC spoke at an official US event in Phoenix recently launching its new semiconductor fab and $40 billion investment, which is part of Biden's new anti-China industrial policy. The TSMC founder was quoted as saying "free trade is almost dead, globalization is almost dead." This was at an official US event. Even if free trade and globalization are dead, you can be assured that the flow of capital will be stronger than ever, which goes to show that the international capitalist class will protect its interests with or without free markets. Biden's turn toward industrial policy is not about pivoting from neoliberalism or reforming American power in the world, it's about creating new complementary international regimes of capital accumulation and reversing China's inclusion in those regimes, which began in the 90s and its accession to the WTO and ended around 2013 and the Obama/Clinton pivot to Asia. China is leading the way in multipolarity, while the US is clinging to its global autocracy aka unipolarity.