We shortly will be back to Barack Obama in our foreign policy.
Connecticut U.S. Senator Chris Murphy is out as presumed
President-elect Joe Biden’s Secretary of State and Anthony Blinken, “a defender
of global alliances and President-elect (sic) Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s closest
foreign policy adviser,” is in, according to a report in the New York Times. The Times’ ballot for “President-elect” Biden
is premature; a candidate for president does not become “President-elect”
until electors meet on December 14 to cast ballots for president and vice
president.
Murphy had been touted in Connecticut’s media as a possible Secretary of
State appointment. The senator, blushingly modest, said at the time he had no
intentions of leaving the Senate and planned to run for reelection to Congress,
but this is the usual demurral of young and ambitious congressmen on the make,
and few political watchers, even among the most credulous of Connecticut’s
reporters, believed Murphy would spurn a cabinet position offered by Biden.
Murphy’s experience in foreign policy is much narrower than that of
Blinken, a layover from the administration of “lead from behind” President
Barack Obama. Blinken was former deputy secretary of state under Obama
and, according to the Times, he is “expected to help calm American diplomats
and global leaders alike after four years of the Trump administration’s
ricocheting strategies and nationalist swaggering.”
Jake Sullivan, Biden’s likely national security adviser, according to
the Times, was once the head of policy planning at the State Department reporting
to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the Obama administration.
“Together,” the Times reported, “Mr. Blinken and Mr. Sullivan, good
friends with a common worldview, have become Mr. Biden’s brain trust and often
his voice on foreign policy matters. And they led the attack on President
Trump’s use of ‘America First’ as a guiding principle, saying it only isolated
the United States and created opportunities and vacuums for its adversaries.”
So then, it is a virtual certainty that President Donald Trump’s
“America First” doctrine will be shelved during a Biden administration because
it troubles America’s allies. One can only hope that the Biden administration
will place the national interests of the United States at least second in its
foreign policy calculations.
During a 2015 speech at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS),
Blinken unveiled his understanding of the role the United States should play in
a fractious world of foreign policy intersectionality.
“In times of crisis or calamity,” Blinken said, “it is the United
States that the world turns to first and always. We are not the leader of first
choice because we’re always right, or because we’re universally liked, or
because we can dictate outcomes. It’s because we strive to the best of our
ability to align our actions with our principles, and because American
leadership has a unique ability to mobilize others and to make a difference.”
CNAS loomed large in the formation of Obama’s foreign policy prescriptions.
Michèle Flournoy and Kurt Campbell, two founders of CNAS -- a
Washington DC think tank established in 2007 that specializes in national
security issues, irregular warfare, the future of the U.S. Military, the rise
of Asia as a global power, and the implications of “natural resource consumption”
-- served respectively as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and
the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.
Biden has chosen former United States Secretary of State in the Obama
administration John Kerry as his climate envoy. The “Winter Soldier” of the
anti-Vietnam War era recently tweeted, “The president-elect (sic) is right to
rejoin the Paris Agreement on Day One. And he is right to recognize that Paris
alone is not enough. All nations must raise ambition together, or we will all
fail together. And failure is not an option.”
Kerry’s sentiment is a clumsy reworking of Benjamin Franklin's comment
at the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence: "We must
all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately."
Murphy should not be too dispirited. Biden has obviously decided to
resurrect a moribund Obama foreign policy, and he is drawing from a stable of
political actors with broad experience in ‘leading from behind” nations presumed
allied with the United States, a posture that, during the Obama administration,
led to the rise of Iran as a Middle East purveyor of terrorism, the boosting of
troops to Afghanistan and the withdrawal of troops from Iraq; Afghanistan, Obama
said, was a “war of necessity” and Iraq a “war of choice.”
The withdrawal of troops from Iraq and the abrupt disposal of “Guide of the First of September
Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya” Muammar
Kaddafi -- “We came, we saw, he died,” Secretary
of State in the Obama Administration Hillary Clinton memoably said at the time
-- created a vacuum in North Africa and northern Syria soon filled by a
resurgent ISIS. One wonders whether the CNAS think tank thought at the time that
the Obama administration had failed conspicuously to align its actions with the
historic principles of the United States.
George Washington did after all warn of entangling alliances, and John
Adams did say that the United States was the friend of liberty everywhere, but
the custodian only of our own. Both would have been considered by the New York Times in the post-modern period as nationalist
Murphy, not a serious foreign policy actor, is well out of it.
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