A mixed assessment emerges of Biden’s policy effectiveness and success:

• A welcome warming in tone and action towards alliances and international cooperation lacks a clear vision and goals, as well as a demonstrated understanding of U.S. limits.
• Multilateralism and implementation of muscular trade controls seeks to restrain China and Russia, but some uses of these economic tools may also undermine America’s cherished self-image as a defender of free trade and the rules-based world order.
• Notable actions in support of some key WMD non-proliferation regimes and improved transparency and accountability of conventional arms assistance are offset by weakened commitments and unfulfilled promises in other areas, as well as an underappreciation for security challenges beyond China and the war in Ukraine.

Among the key challenges to tackle and opportunities to seize they found:

• Maintaining focus on competition with China while managing the realities of regional dynamics in South Asia
• Making good on promises to center accountability, transparency, and human rights in America’s security cooperation, arms transfer, and military assistance enterprise
• Providing fresh thinking on the security challenges of the 21^st century and applying creative approaches to the emerging multipolar world.

America Needs to Ask More of Its Allies

President Joe Biden has rightly made revitalizing U.S. alliances and security relationships a cornerstone of his foreign policy, but his administration’s “back to the future” approach is out of step with 21^st-century geopolitics. The United States needs to reform and rebalance its entire alliance network to reflect today’s emerging multipolar world rather than reinforce the highly asymmetrical security dependencies of the Cold War era.

Biden has sought to win back America’s “old friends,” having vowed to stand “shoulder to shoulder” with them. And he has turned those words into action. Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the White House has sent an additional 20,000 U.S. forces to the continent, bringing the total to more than 100,000 US military personnel in Europe. Washington has also deepened security ties with Indo-Pacific allies and partners, signing new security partnerships and scaling up military exercises.

The Biden administration’s shift in tone was a welcome correction. A foundation of trust and mutual respect, not gratuitous taunts and insults, should be the basis of US security relationships. But in trying so hard to prove itself a reliable ally, the Biden administration has inverted the Trump-era pathologies — the problem is no longer that US allies may have reason to doubt credibility of U.S. security commitments, but that they believe Washington’s promises too much. 

Allies are so confident of America’s security guarantees that they continue to free ride. Tokyo recently unveiled a record defense budget, but Japan will still only spend about two percent of its gross domestic product on defense, and it will take five years to get there. Many European allies have announced spending increases since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but they continue to lag behind the United States in providing financial and military support to Ukraine. 

It’s not clear the White House sees free riding as a problem. Its own National Security Strategy, for example, never addressed equitable burden sharing. The Biden administration seems to want to keep to the old formula — American dominance, and allied dependence. And U.S. allies are still happy to oblige — all that money they might otherwise have spent on “guns” can be put towards “butter.”

But this arrangement is no longer sustainable. China is now the “pacing threat,” one that requires more American resources and attention, while Russia remains a weak but dangerous adversary. The administration insists that the United States is still powerful enough to “walk and chew gum at the same time.” But it is bluster. The United States is dangerously overstretched, and the Biden administration has done little to address the problem. 

The obvious solution is to insist that America’s allies and partners step up their defense efforts, starting with larger and more sustained defense spending. To make that happen, the White House needs to have frank discussions with America’s allies and partners about the limits of U.S. support. If these security relationships withstood the Trump years, they can surely survive some tough but necessary talk about burden sharing.

An Instinct to Do More

President Biden has navigated the most challenging foreign policy crisis of his presidency: Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. He wisely concluded that a direct confrontation between the United States and NATO versus Russia would be disastrous, and deflected proposals — like a no-fly zone — that would have led in that direction. The risk of a catastrophic escalation is ever-present, however, and thus all focus should be on ending the war.

President Biden also deserves credit for extricating the United States from the 20-years-long war in Afghanistan. That conflict was not advancing U.S. vital interests and it diverted attention and resources away from more urgent priorities. Joe Biden made the necessary but courageous decision to turn the page, something that his predecessors failed to do.

Alas, these moments of relative restraint have not translated into a foreign policy that aligns objectives with available resources. Biden’s instincts mostly seem to be pushing him to do more — and spend more. The Pentagon’s budget continues to break records, and U.S. foreign policy remains overmilitarized.

The Biden team has dropped the ball on some easy diplomatic wins. They failed to bring the United States back into the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — aka the Iran nuclear deal — despite candidate Biden’s promise to do so. Trump’s maximum pressure campaign was a total failure. The path to getting US-Iran policy back on track was clear, but Biden refused to take it. With Iranian hard-liners now engaged in brutal crackdown on peaceful protesters, there may be no going back.

Biden has drawn the United States even closer to Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, even though the U.S. intelligence community concluded MBS was responsible for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. And Biden limited, but did not terminate, U.S. military assistance to Saudi Arabia as it was waging war in Yemen. The warm embrace of the Saudis is doubly puzzling given the president’s stated commitment to advancing democracy.

The most consequential decisions over the long term, however, pertain to U.S. policy toward China. The president has sent mixed signals on the U.S. stance vis-à-vis Taiwan, and has generally pushed a confrontational approach toward Beijing, even while claiming to want to avoid a new Cold War. The decision to limit Chinese access to certain technology has prompted concern that the United States is engaged in a thinly veiled form of protectionism in the name of national security. Subsidies and “Buy American” provisions within the Inflation Reduction Act for funding the green energy transition have similarly elicited consternation. We should expect more such blowback in the future. The country that claims to be a champion of the rules-based order, and assumes allies and partners will follow its lead, can’t expect to defy the rules governing global trade without others noticing.