Friday, February 26, 2021

Biden’s Cynical ‘Foreign Policy for the Middle Class’

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, February 26, 2021

 

God save this country from the middle class.

 

The middle class has held domestic politics hostage for generations, which is why the federal government’s main activity is transferring money to the middle class, which is the principal beneficiary of the major entitlement programs that account for the largest share of federal spending — and of much of the so-called discretionary spending, too. And now Joe Biden has taken foreign policy hostage on behalf of the middle class as well, promising a “foreign policy for the middle class,” which is how you say “America First!” without sounding like the Tangerine Nightmare.

 

President Biden, who in the past has resorted to plagiarism in order to compensate for the fact that he never has had an original thought or produced an interesting sentence, is a plodding vote-counter who ought to be retiring from the Wilmington Zoning Commission rather than getting started in the White House. But Americans are politically unserious people, and Biden won the gold in the Clown Olympics in November, so, here we are.

 

Biden is a flatterer and a panderer, which is what the market demands just at the moment. And so he declares: “There’s no longer a bright line between foreign and domestic policy — every action we take in our conduct abroad, we must take with American working families in mind.”

 

Working families?

 

If we were to pretend for a moment that this is an actual idea rather than a rhetorical pose, it would be interesting to consider how it might be applied: An Iranian nuclear weapon detonated in the San Francisco Bay presumably would incinerate a fair proportion of the nation’s most irritating idle rich, out there kayaking around or whatever it is they do all day, but it also would inconvenience some “working families,” assuming the blast radius and prevailing winds were sufficient to reach the plebs out there in Manteca or wherever. I suppose that preventing the atomic ayatollahs from stockpiling and deploying nuclear weapons would be in the interests of “working families” in exactly the same way it would be in the interests of the rich guys on Sand Hill Road and the derelicts in Berkeley. It is not clear where the middle class’s particular interests enter into it.

 

There are many things the federal government can and should be doing around the world that would provide no immediate material benefit to the American middle class — and that might even cost that middle class, to the relatively modest extent that middle-class Americans are ever asked to pay for anything. If the United States intends to stand up for the Uyghurs on the theory that the grateful clients of our human-rights patronage are going to turn around and buy a lot of Buicks, then Americans are going to be disappointed. All of the stories about real-world economic payoffs from action on human rights or climate change are fairy tales. If you want action on those items, then you’d better be pursuing that action because you think it’s right, and you’d better be willing to pay for it — because it is going to be expensive.

 

Biden’s reliably primitive analysis notwithstanding, the American middle class does not have an undivided economic interest when it comes to foreign relations. Biden has not learned from the Trump administration’s errors, because Biden’s economic- and foreign-policy thinking are based on the same assumptions even if they are couched in more conventional diplomatic language. Some American workers would be better off if there were less competition from abroad, but many would be worse off: The Trump administration’s imbecilic misadventures with China cost American farmers dearly — and if there is a definition of “working families,” it is farmers — while recent attempts to put Washington’s big fat thumb on the scale of international trade in steel and aluminum punished American manufacturers of everything from construction products to ice-cold cans of domestic beer. Trade with China is a challenge for Americans who want to manufacture cheap sneakers domestically but a boon for working families of modest means with a need for new shoes. There is no magic formula by which Americans get to enjoy the benefits of globalization without also enduring the tradeoffs.

 

As Wolfgang Münchau put it in a useful essay, “maximizing your trade surplus is not a strategy,” because strategy means choices, and choices mean tradeoffs. “If you reduce your strategic perspective to trade and investment alone, you confuse welfare maximisation with strategy. Strategic choices are usually not economically optimal ones.”

 

But Biden’s formulation (“a foreign policy for the middle class”) insists that foreign policy be made subordinate to a very narrow set of economic considerations, considerations that just happen to coordinate with short-term Democratic political ambitions.

 

There is strategy at work, true. But it is only an electoral strategy.

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