In the footsteps of Harry

A Biden doctrine?

“American leadership is what holds the world together,” Joe Biden said last Thursday. The president had just returned from Israel, where he promised America’s backing in that country’s war against Hamas. He linked this support to American aid to Ukraine in its war against Russia. Israel needed America, Biden said. Ukraine needed America. The world needed America. “We are the essential nation.”

I had a high school teacher who liked to joke about the slogan on the wrappers of Ivory soap bars. “99 44/100% pure,” it said. He rejoined, “Pure what?”

Essential to what? one might put to Biden. If the answer is “essential to holding the world together,” a reasonable response might be to ask how that’s going so far. Except during the world wars, the world has hardly been more divided than it is today. America has been trying to broker peace in the Middle East for three generations. It has fought three wars in the region, plus smaller armed incursions. And peace appears more distant than ever. American aid to Ukraine has kept Ukrainian forces fighting, but they seem farther from their goal of ejecting Russian forces than they were a year ago. Biden didn’t mention China in his Thursday speech, leaving till the next day a request for new funds to counter Chinese expansionism, with Taiwan understood as China’s most conspicuous target. The prospect emerged of American involvement in three foreign wars at once.

Biden expressed confidence that America could handle the load. “We are the United States of America—the United States of America,” he said in his Oval Office address. “And there is nothing—nothing—beyond our capacity if we do it together.”

If we do it together: there was the catch. Conceivably the United States could engage in three wars simultaneously, assuming only one—presumably over Taiwan—entailed direct involvement of U.S. armed forces. But there is little evidence American voters have the stomach for such unprecedented action. There is stronger evidence they do not have the stomach. Republicans are already restive about the war in Ukraine. If that conflict remains unresolved during the 2024 campaign season, as appears likely, the Republican candidate almost certainly will make it an issue. Democrats haven’t done well in the past in similar circumstances. They lost to Dwight Eisenhower when the Korean War was about as old as the Ukraine war will be by then. They lost to Richard Nixon when the Vietnam War showed no signs of ending.

The partisan lineup on the other wars is more confused. Republicans can’t say or do enough in support of Israel, while the left wing of the Democratic party thinks America has long been doing too much. As for Taiwan, Republicans dislike China somewhat more than Democrats do, although it’s a Democratic president—Biden—who has stated most clearly that the United States will fight China over Taiwan if necessary.

Merits of the separate cases aside, supporters of the president should consider whether they want to afford such an opening to Donald Trump in the event he wins the Republican nomination. Voters in 2016 responded to his call to scale back America’s ambitions abroad; and this was before the current wars in Ukraine and the Middle East broke out. It’s fair to say most Democrats fear for the future of democracy in America should Trump win again in 2024. Do they want to endanger democracy at home in the name of democracy abroad?

Foreign ventures have had that effect in the past. Woodrow Wilson led America to war in 1917 saying American belligerence against Germany was needed to make the world “safe for democracy,” only to watch the war stifle the democratizing progressive movement at home. The Korean War mugged Harry Truman’s Fair Deal, and the Vietnam War kneecapped Johnson’s Great Society.

Fans of the “essential nation” concept point to the absence of World War III as proof of the beneficence of American global leadership. They might be right, but they might be wrong. There has been no World War III yet, but there’s no compelling reason to believe there would have been one had American policy been less expansive.

And there is evidence that American leadership led to wars that made certain things worse. Vietnam would have been unified in the 1950s absent American intervention, which also destabilized Laos and made Cambodia the bloodiest killing field since World War II. America’s war in Iraq increased Iran’s malign effect in the Middle East—an effect that includes the funding of Hamas. America’s war in Afghanistan ruined that country before returning it to its previous oppressive rulers. America’s overthrow of the Guatemalan government in the 1950s sparked a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands.  

In March 1947 Harry Truman challenged Congress to approve aid to beleaguered governments in Greece and Turkey lest they fall under the control of Soviet communism. “It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures,” Truman said. Congress gave him what he wanted, despite worries that the president was responding to a specific problem with an overly broad solution. Who knew which “free peoples” might be threatened next? Sure enough, what came to be called the Truman doctrine led the United States to war in Korea and then Vietnam.

No one is yet calling Biden’s proclamation of the United States as “the essential nation” a doctrine. But it has the sweep of a doctrine. The question now is whether Biden can persuade Congress to vote the aid he wants. It’s going to be an uphill battle. Tom Cotton, a Republican senator from Arkansas aligned with Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, pronounced Biden’s aid request “dead on arrival.” Bills sometimes rise from the dead; Cotton’s summary verdict might have been a bargaining ploy.

If the aid request stays dead, there won’t be a Biden doctrine. But if Congress can be persuaded, at least in large part, its approval will signify substantive agreement with the president’s global vision. A Biden doctrine will elevate his stature among presidents: Monroe, Truman . . . Biden.

Whether it will be good for America and the world is another question.