Senator Kamala Harris is a “big slasher of funds for our military”, says President Trump. If only. The truth is that Harris, like the person who selected her as his running mate, is a mainstream advocate of globe-spanning US military dominance. Last month she voted against cutting the $740bn annual military budget by a mere 10%, though she said she supported reductions as a goal.
This November, US voters, facing an uncontrolled pandemic and economic collapse, will choose between one ticket that insists on spending more on the military than the world’s next 10 countries combined – and another ticket that might, after careful deliberation and under the right circumstances, be willing to outspend just seven or eight.
For the progressive left, this is a disappointing, even dizzying outcome. As of January (that pre-pandemic idyll when all one had to fear was war with Iran), the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination was Senator Bernie Sanders. He promised a reckoning with decades of bipartisan military interventions and led last month’s effort to cut the defense budget. (Full disclosure: I voluntarily advised his presidential campaign on foreign policy.) A Biden-Harris ticket represents a serious setback for those who believe the United States should abandon its quest for global military dominance and invest instead in building communities at home and combatting climate change and infectious disease around the world.
The longer the view one takes, however, the less grim the prospects look.
When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, he defined the Democratic party, from the grassroots to the White House. Although Obama promised to end the war in Iraq, he also pledged to prosecute the war on terror vigorously, especially in Afghanistan. In office, he delivered, and then some. Despite striking a bold nuclear accord with Iran and opening relations with Cuba, the Obama administration expanded the forever war through drones and special forces, intervened in Libya and Syria, and aided Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen. He handed over to Trump command of 200,000 troops stationed around the globe. And because Obama inspired deep loyalty in the Democratic electorate, he faced little pressure within his own party to be more peaceful. The chorus of criticism came instead from the foreign policy establishment, whose “Washington playbook” Obama himself derided for being reflexively militaristic.
But four years have made a difference. A President Biden is likely to face more intense and sustained pressure against military intervention than Obama did. Many Americans, left and right, now say that the biggest foreign policy problem is that their own country is waging “endless war”. It’s a remarkable development. Americans have opposed specific wars in the past, but rarely have so many voiced a general complaint that their country is waging warfare continually and unjustifiably. Three-quarters of Americans agree on little today, but roughly that number, according to the latest poll, favor bringing troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq. Twice as many Americans say their country spends too much on the military as too little. A mere one in four believe that military interventions in other countries make the United States safer.
Democratic voters are adjusting to 21st-century realities faster than their party elders. Climate change now stands alone as Democrats’ top national security priority. Capping a decade of steadily rising concern, 88% say it constitutes a major threat to the United States. The percentage drops into the 60s for terrorism and the countries perceived to be the most threatening, China and Russia. New candidates for Congress reflect these priorities. In June, Jamaal Bowman, a middle school principal from the Bronx, ousted the chairman of the House foreign affairs committee, Representative Eliot Engel, a hawkish 31-year incumbent who supported the Iraq war. “We don’t need to be the world’s policeman,” Bowman argued, urging dramatic cuts in military spending and investments in a global green new deal.
Bowman is likely to enter Congress with growing ranks of like-minded colleagues. Regardless, a Biden administration, already committed to a “clean energy revolution”, will have to confront reality: the planetary threat of climate change can be met only by mutual coexistence and cooperation with China rather than a new cold war. China is both a major problem, as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and an essential partner in any solution, as the world’s leading producer of low-carbon energy technologies. An intense military rivalry would make the problem worse and prevent a serious solution.
This year’s Democratic primaries tested where the party lay. Would the presidential aspirants hype threats from China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, and complain that Trump was too eager to make deals and withdraw from conflicts, as Democratic leaders in Congress have frequently done? To the contrary, the left defined what debate there was. The candidates competed over who would end endless war and combat climate change. On stage, Biden pledged to treat Saudi Arabia as a “pariah” and stop selling weapons to the kingdom. He has also vowed to “end the forever wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East”, though he currently supports bringing home only the “vast majority” of troops from Afghanistan and advocated drone strikes and special forces raids as vice-president.
Such cop-outs – can you end a war but keep fighting it? – indicate the obvious: the Biden-Harris ticket is not inclined to transform US foreign policy. The campaign’s extensive circle of advisers, drawn extensively from the Obama administration, reinforces the point. Although Democratic foreign policy hands are shifting left along with the rest of the party, it won’t be enough to put the same people back into power and expect them not to make the same mistakes. The administration would benefit from bringing in new voices who understand the bipartisan failure of US grand strategy over decades.
Even so, the coming years may offer more opportunity than defeat. Biden is not the future of the Democratic party, and everyone knows it, including him. Those who seek realism and restraint in military affairs, and peaceful engagement on common challenges, should see his potential administration as an invitation. Candid criticism and sustained pressure might just move the pragmatic occupant of the Oval Office. It will also deepen the ferment for change that began in support of diplomacy with Iran and matured in the transpartisan effort to stop US participation in the destruction of Yemen.
The Biden camp has its own reason to take heed. Trump has exposed, and accelerated, the crisis of American global supremacy. Forged generations ago in the face of totalitarian conquerors, military domination no longer serves the interests of the American people, as they are increasingly aware. Any attempt to restore the status quo simply won’t last, and will leave Trumpian nativism and fearmongering as the only alternative.
Stephen Wertheim is deputy director of research and policy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and research scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. His book, Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy, comes out in October from Harvard University Press
