Strategic Clarity: Statecraft
in Biden’s First 100 Days
Biden has bet big on defeating the coronavirus through
mass vaccination and a large stimulus with the goal of strengthening America at
home and abroad.
by Graham Allison Follow @GrahamTAllison on TwitterL
If
we compare President Biden’s
statecraft in his first 100 days with the nine presidents we have seen since
John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, objective observers should agree that he
has earned high marks. The essence of Biden’s success has been strategic
clarity. He took the advice of the great German strategist Otto von Bismarck who defined statecraft as listening for
the footsteps of God and catching his coattails as he strides by. After
listening carefully for the footsteps, Biden and his team recognized two
powerful forces striding by and are holding fast to both. They are counting on
momentum from these forces to transform the weak cards he was dealt to a new
and much stronger hand with which to address challenges both at home and
abroad.
First,
by driving the vaccination of Americans to defeat the deadly coronavirus that
took the nation into a long, dark funk last year, Biden is leading the nation back into the light. As
students return to school rooms in the fall, offices reopen, and companies
scramble to hire workers, he might even be tempted to repeat Ronald Reagan’s
declaration of “Morning in America.” Second, by doubling down with the largest stimulus any
national economy has ever seen—$1.9 trillion on top of two earlier injections
that together amount to more than $5 trillion, or one-quarter of GDP—he has
ensured not just that the American economy recovers, but that it roars back.
2021 will see the highest rate of growth most American workers have ever
experienced.
Biden
knows that a rising tide raises most boats. He is betting that the impact of
victories in both campaigns in his first year will be transformative: on
American psychology, American confidence, and American citizens’ belief that
Washington can deliver more than words. Abroad, as others see what an
American-invented, American-made, American government-certified gold standard
vaccine achieves, their views of the United States will change. Every leader of
every sector in the world has thought deeply about coronavirus—since it has
posed an existential threat to them personally and their families. Each of them
has thought about when he would get vaccinated and with who’s vaccine. Each has thought about when his country or company or
non-governmental organization will be open for life as we knew it before coronavirus.
With uncertainties surrounding Chinese and Russian vaccines, and repeated stumbles of the
European entry in this race, AstraZeneca, American success here could shape views as
profoundly as JFK’s sending a man to the moon did. And as the United States
overtakes China to
become again the primary engine of global growth this year, narratives about a
nation in irreversible decline will become suspect.
Take
a step back and try to remember the hand Biden inherited when he took office
just four months ago. Contrary to those who now want to imagine that the Trump era was just a nightmare from which we have now
awakened, Biden knows that Trump was as much symptom as cause. He has compared
his job to that of a captain who has boarded a ship that is listing, taking on
water, at risk of sinking.
Historians will judge 2020 one of the worst years in America’s history. U.S.
incompetence in responding to the coronavirus killed hundreds
of thousands of Americans unnecessarily—resulting in more
infections and more deaths than any other nation in the world. The U.S. economy shrank
by more than 3%, ending the year smaller that it had been at the beginning.
January 6 saw a real constitutional
crisis in which the orderly transfer of power was in doubt for
the first time in a century and a half. And the nation’s Capitol was attacked
for the first time since the British burned it in 1812—but this time by fellow
American citizens. The impact of all this on Americans’ sense of ourselves, and
other nations’ views of the United States, is hard to exaggerate.
Beyond
the unique failings of 2020, Biden recognizes that in a real sense, the nation
he was elected to lead is at risk: its polity so sharply divided that it has
become the primary threat to itself, its national government largely
dysfunctional, its economy failing a majority of its citizens so consistently
for a generation that they have lost confidence in the American dream of their
children having better lives than they do. He has internalized the fact that on
the bottom-line question—whether citizens believe that the nation is going in
the right direction or wrong direction—for a generation a majority of Americans
have answered: wrong direction.
Many
foreign policy experts would like to relegate all this to domestic
policymakers, as if that were a separate subject. For them, domestic policy is
essentially about providing the resources to deal with the foreign policy
challenges that really matter. But even though he is a foreign policy
aficionado whose first choice of committees when he was elected to the Senate
almost a half century ago was Foreign Relations, Biden knows better. As he
stated clearly in his Inaugural Address: the paramount challenge for this nation in 2021 and beyond
lies here at home. He frequently quotes Lincoln’s warning: “A house divided
against itself cannot stand.” As the leader of a nation more deeply divided
than at any time since the Civil War, he knows that what Americans do—or fail
to do—at home will have a greater impact on the world than any action outside
our borders. Unless the country can find ways to reunite its red and blue
tribes, restore confidence in its democratic institutions, and return to the
great American project of providing equal opportunities for all its citizens,
the nation will lack the foundation from which to play any significant,
sustainable role in the world.
On
the foreign policy front, has Biden essentially been hiding? Not quite, but the
quip captures a point. “Hide and bide,” of course, was the banner under which
Chinese foreign policy marched for decades before the arrival of Xi Jinping.
Deng Xiaoping’s guidance to “hide our capacities, bide our time, and be good
at maintaining a low profile” was widely applauded by American
policymakers. Few paused to ask: hide what, and why? Bide until when, and
then?
In
Biden’s case, the answers are clear. Biden is biding his time to allow the two
grand coattails of history he has latched onto to carry the United
States to new positions of strength. If his analysis of the structural
realities is right, visibly defeating coronavirus and bringing back an economy
that roars will deal him new cards in a much stronger hand. How he will use that to begin to reweave
Martin Luther King’s tapestry of our united destiny at home, and to engage
adversaries and competitors abroad from a position of greater
strength remains a work in progress.
Graham T.
Allison is the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at the
Harvard Kennedy School. He is the former director of Harvard’s Belfer Center
and the author of Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s
Trap?
No comments:
Post a Comment