The Biden Foreign-Policy ‘Master Class’ That Wasn’t

By Noah Rothman

Friday, July 12, 2024

 

The president’s diehards are fooling themselves if they think his NATO press conference put an end to questions about his fitness for office.

 

Desperate for some evidence that their eyes have deceived them and Joe Biden is sharper than he so often appears, Democratic partisans spit-polished the president’s performance at what should have been a routine press conference ending NATO’s Washington summit. The president’s non-sequiturs and meandering digressions into cognitive cul-de-sacs were, Biden’s allies and courtiers assured us, a rare species of genius.

 

“No, Joe Biden does not have a doctorate in foreign affairs,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates playfully assured the spectacle’s viewers. “He’s just that f***ing good.” Maybe we should expect that sort of obsequiousness from someone in the president’s employ, but it’s another thing to hear these same sentiments from ostensibly objective commentators.

 

“There have been other presidential press conferences that have exhibited mastery at different points by some presidents,” MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell noted. “But on foreign policy, this is as good as it gets with an American president.” These sentiments were echoed by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. Biden maintains “a startlingly impressive command of the issues,” Maddow said in remarks the Biden campaign itself promoted far and wide. The president is “just fundamentally right” when it comes to foreign affairs, she added. “He is a master of the foreign-policy field and has been for decades in his career.” Among the president’s boosters in the punditocracy, the consensus is that Biden treated the nation to a “master class” in international relations.

 

Audiences with fewer psychological incentives to grade the president on a curve didn’t see a sophisticated, reassuring presence on that stage. They saw a figure who filibustered his way through relatively straightforward questions in the vain pursuit of a cogent thought. Granted, the majority of the questions with which reporters peppered the president were focused on his manifest incapacity and the revolt of his fellow party members against his continued leadership. But when foreign policy was broached, the president’s capacity to navigate the issues was anything but adroit.

 

For instance, when Biden was asked how Ukraine can possibly defeat Russia given the limitations Washington has imposed on the use of American ordnance in attacks on the invasion’s staging areas inside Russia, his response, to the extent it lent itself to transcription, was hardly satisfying.

 

“We have allowed Zelensky to use American weapons in the near-term, in the near-abroad into Russia,” Biden replied. “Whether or not he has — we should be, he should be — for example, should Zelensky — he’s not — if he had the capacity to strike Moscow, strike the Kremlin, would that make sense? It wouldn’t.”

 

“And so, our military is working — I’m following the advice of my commander in chief — my, my — of the — the chief of staff of the military as well as the secretary of Defense and our intelligence people,” Biden continued. “And we’re making a day-to-day basis on what they should and shouldn’t go — how far they should go in.”

 

Let’s be generous and strike from the record Biden’s confusion over who in his administration is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. On reflection, Biden’s comments were not a clear-eyed statement of national purpose but a clumsy attempt at obfuscation.

 

In late May, the White House belatedly granted Ukraine permission to use U.S.-provided weapons against targets inside the Russian Federation, but only in the regions that border Ukraine’s Kharkiv Oblast. Neither Kyiv nor America’s European allies believe this is sufficient. Ukraine does not seek authority to use Western arms against political targets in Moscow (though it has hit such targets in the past with less sophisticated ordnance). It wants the capacity to hit sites from which attacks on Ukraine originate. “We are nearly completely deterred right now,” retired general Philip Breedlove said this month. “We need to step up and have the courage to address this.” Biden didn’t quite defend this policy. Rather, he invented a strawman and set it alight. It’s bizarre to find anything enlightening in this act of rhetorical misdirection.

 

The president was then pressed for his thoughts on how the Western allies might “interrupt the partnership between China and Russia,” who, together with a constellation of rogue states in their orbits, are emerging as a new geopolitical axis. Other NATO member states had also raised concerns about China’s involvement in Russia’s war in Ukraine, Biden replied, “in terms of accommodating, facilitating.” An extended soliloquy followed in which the president maintained that China’s interests are purely economic, and offered a variety of details on Chinese protectionist policies. From there, Biden launched into a disquisition on foreign access to the Chinese market and the impact of U.S. tariffs on Chinese electric-vehicle exports.

 

What any of that has to do with the question that was asked only the president knows. Although it seems to have dazzled the cheapest dates in the liberal-media ecosystem, we can surmise that Biden’s plan to deter further Sino–Russian cooperation involves the application of economic sanctions and incentives. But what if states are motivated, as Russia is, not by material concerns but by irredentism, and are willing to pay a great price to achieve their aims? Sanctions have a terrible track record of altering their targets’ behaviors. Protectionist trade policies change behaviors only insofar as they render the nations subject to them more belligerent.

 

The White House transcript of the conclusion of this exchange reads as follows:

 

I think you’ll see that some of our European friends are going to be curtailing their invol – investment in Russia – I mean, in – excuse me, in – in China, as long as China continues to have this indirect sic- – se- – help to Russia, in terms of being able to help their economy as well as –as well as help them in – as a consequence that their ability to fight in – in – in Ukraine.

 

The ineloquence notwithstanding, there’s nothing satisfying in this response unless Biden’s audience was determined to be satisfied from the outset.

 

Asked if he thought he could artfully manage relations with America’s near-peer competitors “now and three years from now,” Biden dodged the question. “I have no good reason to talk to Putin right now,” the president insisted smartly enough. But not two minutes later, he seemed to reverse himself. “I think that I’m prepared to talk to any leader who wants to talk,” he said, “including if Putin called me and he wanted to talk.” Despite the president’s desire to avoid answering the question directly, at least he cleared up any lingering ambiguity about his ability to deal with America’s adversaries now and in the future.

 

When the president was offered the opportunity to heap scorn on the Israeli government by an NPR reporter, he jumped at the opportunity. Biden accused Israel’s wartime government of being “less than cooperative” when it comes to distributing aid to the Gaza Strip — less cooperative even than Egypt, which has transferred only a piddling amount of aid across its borders into Gaza compared with Israel’s transfers across its own borders, and then only in fits and starts.

 

The president confessed that he has been disappointed that some of his proposals, like the Gaza pier, “have not succeeded” (which should not have come as a surprise). Then, he digressed again to remind voters that he was “totally opposed to the occupation and trying to unite Afghanistan.” With that, the president mischaracterized the U.S. mission in Afghanistan as an occupying force while also refreshing the public on the misapprehensions that led him to conclude his bloody, botched withdrawal from the country. And to top it all off, Biden pulled from thin air the demonstrably false claim that Hamas “is not popular now” in Gaza. If this mendacity had a point, it is to smuggle into the conversation the implication that Israel can let up on its campaign to eliminate the group responsible for the October 7 massacre.

 

Scintillating stuff. Downright Churchillian in its masterly command of the facts.

 

The last 14 days have been agonizing for Democrats. It’s easy to understand why Biden’s diehards want to breathe easily again after spending two straight weeks white-knuckling it through events in which the president is expected to speak extemporaneously. But they’re only kidding themselves. They might be able to convince themselves that Biden’s press conference signaled an end to the crisis in which his presidency is mired, but I have no idea why they should expect anyone else to buy what they’re selling.