Let’s grade the Biden administration’s interim strategic guidance

Let’s grade the Biden administration’s interim strategic guidance

By Dan Drezner

Props for getting it done so fast. The final guidance could use some revisions.

President Biden, right, attends a virtual meeting with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador on March 1. (Andrew Harnik/AP)

As noted in Monday’s column, the Biden administration issued an Interim National Security Strategic Guidance last week. Secretary of State Antony Blinken introduced it with his maiden foreign policy speech.

The simple fact that it was released at all is extraordinary. For the past 35 years, successive U.S. administrations have been required by law to regularly publish national security strategies (NSS). In this century, however, incoming administrations have usually taken a year and sometimes close to two before releasing them.

Biden’s interim guidance is not an NSS, but it kind of sorta is. The fact that they got it out less than six weeks after inauguration is a legitimately impressive feat, especially given the “slow and steady” vibe surrounding this administration. To use a teaching metaphor, this is like a student being assigned a term paper due in May and the student handing in a polished draft in February.

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These documents matter. There are a whole lot of national security and foreign policy bureaucracies in the federal government. After four years of taking a beating from the Trump administration, they need to know what U.S. foreign policy looks like in the post-Trump world. Which policies should persist? What issues should be prioritized? What language can be deployed? The interim guidance helps to provide a measure of certainty for policy operators and managers who loathe uncertainty.

To continue the academic metaphor, however, is the guidance any good? Spoiler Alerts has a long tradition of grading U.S. foreign policy documents and musings. So let me get out my red pen and go over this sucker:

Joe,

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This is very good for such an early draft, and I am pleased to see that you hit the high notes. Your secretary of state finessed the domestic turmoil in the United States quite cleverly by pointing out in his speech that, “I take heart from the fact that we’re dealing with our struggles out in the open. And that sets us apart from many other countries. We don’t ignore our failures and shortcomings or try to sweep them under the rug and pretend they don’t exist. We confront them for the world to see. It’s painful. Sometimes it’s ugly. But it’s how we make progress.” This ties into your theme of marrying international relations issues to domestic policy concerns.

Your hierarchy of threats also seems sound. I was pleased to see you focus on “non-agentic” threats like climate change and pandemic disease before discussing even a great power like China. Your assessment of the distribution of power jibes with external observers. For example, you write that China “is the only competitor potentially capable of combining its economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to mount a sustained challenge to a stable and open international system.” Even more dovish authors on China would concur on this point, so these are solid foundations to construct guidance.

You still have some work to do, however, and nowhere is this more evident than in the cognitive dissonance over foreign economic policy. To be blunt, both your guidance and Blinken’s speech are all over the map. The secretary of state noted in his speech that “there is no wall high enough or strong enough to hold back the changes transforming our world.” In your guidance you state, “We must also remember and celebrate that we are a nation of immigrants, strengthened at home and abroad by our diversity.” The document says that national security mandates the United States to “lead and sustain a stable and open international system.”

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This seems straightforward, but when your guidance gets concrete about foreign economic policy, it sounds very, very different. The secretary of state adopts a rueful tone about supporting past free trade agreements. The interim strategic guidance says, “Economic statecraft should be [one of] the leading instruments of American foreign policy” and “Our policies must reflect a basic truth: in today’s world, economic security is national security.” It also says, “We will make sure that the rules of the international economy are not tilted against the United States.”

This does not sound like the platform to erect an open international system! To be honest, it sounds a lot like your predecessor — which is surprising given the overall popularity of an open global economy.

The unarticulated thesis of your interim guidance is that the United States intends to build new rules of the game with allies, partners and as many countries not named “China” as the State Department can muster. That is a possible strategy.

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When you revise this interim document and hand in your final draft, however, you will need to articulate two things more clearly. First, under what conditions will the Biden administration be prepared to cooperate with China? You vaguely reference some issue areas — be more concrete.

Second, how will you persuade allies and partners to join in your coalition if you continue to articulate the neo-mercantilist beliefs of your predecessor? Why should countries like Japan or Germany or Chile get tougher with China while finding themselves on the outside looking in at the U.S. market?

You have done some solid work here. Take this draft and revise it back better.

Provisional grade: B.