Tuesday, May 28, 2019

Biden and foreign policy

What is remarkable about the announced current Democratic candidates for the 2020 election is that almost all of them have little or nothing to say about foreign policy. They are focused almost entirely on domestic issues - health care, college costs, abortion issues, and the like. Except for sniping occasionally at Trump, they so far have said little about trade policy, national defense, or alliances. This suggests that Peter Zeihan is correct that we are moving toward an America largely withdrawn from the rest of the world.

Now it is interesting that Joe Biden has been leading the polls by a significant margin ever since he announced, which suggests among other things that the majority of Democratic voters are not thrilled with the far left candidates, much as the media hypes them.

But it does raise an interesting question. One for the few things that Trump seems to have done right is to overrule and clean out the neoliberal Washington foreign policy establishment that was dedicated (disastrously) to "liberal hegemony" - using American power to try to spread American-style democracy and capitalism into cultures neither ready for such a transformation nor particularly interested in making such a transformation."Nation building" has not worked out well for us, as the endless Middle East wars demonstrate.

The question is, if Biden were to be elected, would he bring back into power that neoliberal establishment?  One assumes he would surround himself with much the same experts that Obama did, and that Clinton would have used if she had been elected. If that were to happen, would we fall back into the same disastrous policies? It is an interesting question to ponder.