Richard Beck is  a senior writer for n + 1 magazine. He's also the author of the forthcoming book Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life, which is coming out in September. He recently wrote an article in the New Left Review called "Bidenism Abroad," a vitally useful analysis of Joe Biden's record internationally.  This article is a must-read for everyone who wants to understand what Biden and his administration thought they were trying to do and what they have actually done. Note: this interview was conducted in July 2024 prior to Biden's withdrawal from the presidential race.

nathan j. Robinson

Your article is a really nice one-stop shop for understanding the recent history of American foreign policy, for contextualizing what people might see in the news, and for understanding the world view of those in the Biden administration—what they think that they are doing and then what they are actually doing. But your book, as I understand it, is sort of a book review. You write about a particular book by a Politico reporter, The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy after Trump, building all of this analysis around discussion of this book. Let's start with what you think makes this book so interesting. 

richard Beck 

Well, the piece wasn't designed at the outset to be a review of this book. I read The Internationalists in the course of doing research for the article, which was just commissioned, and intended it to be a synthesis of Biden's foreign policy as a whole. But of the various books and articles that I read getting ready to put a draft together, The Internationalists seemed more than any of the others to really give you a sense of how people inside the Biden administration saw their own foreign policy aims themselves, and I thought that was an important starting point. How do they understand their own aims and goals? How are they prioritizing the weighing of these goals against each other? And the piece ultimately winds up being a pretty negative critique of the administration's foreign policy, but I think the best starting place is, how do they understand what they're doing? 

Robinson 

Now, to be clear, the reporter who wrote the book didn’t think that he was writing an indictment of the Biden administration, as I understand it. This is one of those cases where the book is more revealing than the author necessarily intends it to be. 

Beck 

Yes, Ward's portrait of the Biden administration is admiring, bordering in places on fawning, or if not fawning, then at least the admiration gets so intense that I do think it clouds his judgment. He's not so much impressed with Biden personally, but he is clearly impressed with Jake Sullivan, Antony Blinken, the whole Biden foreign policy team. So my read of it wasn't to take Ward's perspective on the Biden administration and just repeat it. What I ended up doing with the book was to see Ward, Blinken, Sullivan, Biden, and this whole complex as part of the same project. I tried to read that whole project against the grain.

Robinson 

What does the author of the book find so admirable about this coterie of human beings?

Beck 

I think it's a fairly standard center to slightly center-left set of reasons for finding the Biden administration so admirable. He's very clear that what the Biden administration is trying to do is not just to maintain the America-led "world order” but also trying to find a new footing after four years of Trump, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and this growing confrontation with China. The whole project is, how do we keep America on top in a world beset by the crises that Biden faced the first year that he took office? 

Robinson 

Maybe you could elaborate. You mentioned in one of your earlier responses this question of how the Biden administration conceives of what it is doing, what the ideas are that animate its foreign policy. Tell us more about that.

Beck 

There are two slogans that the Biden administration has used to frame all of its foreign policy actions, and I think as Ward documents, it uses these slogans to try and help them decide what to do with respect to foreign policy. And so one guiding principle is "a foreign policy for the middle class," meaning that the U.S. should not undertake foreign policy projects unless it can plausibly sell them to the American public as benefiting the middle class, and then the second is the issue of autocracy versus democracy. It's this idea that you have the U.S. and its allies, which represent the free world, global democracy, free enterprise, that sort of thing, and what they are confronted with is a global authoritarian axis, and the two important nodes of that axis, obviously, are Russia and China, but also Iran and North Korea—the standard cast of American adversaries populates that second group. And those two ideas, as Ward lays out, are supposed to be the guiding principles of Biden's foreign policy.

So when Putin invades Ukraine, mobilizing Europe in defense of Ukraine and sending huge quantities of arms is considered part of defending global democracy from autocracy. The second comes in with respect to an adversary like China, where Biden actually retained a lot of Trump's tariff program if not in specifics, at least in principle, with the idea that we need to start shutting China out of the America-dominated portion of the world economy, or at least making it more difficult for them. And that's justified, in the Biden Administration's view, as a defense of the economic foundation of the U.S. middle class. 

Robinson 

The two ideas stated rather abstractly—a foreign policy for the U.S. middle class, and the support for democracy against autocracy—you can see why, stated in those terms, someone would admire that. Someone could say, well, there's been the chaos of the Trump foreign policy, and finally, we have some principles around which we are orienting our foreign policy, and those principles sound good and defensible. Would you draw our attention, then, to a problem with the principles, or what the application of those principles means to those applying them?

Beck 

A thing to emphasize is that these two slogans—I use that word advisedly; advisedly, they are slogans in the sense of advertising—were ideas that Jake Sullivan and others who came to take positions within the Biden foreign policy administration had worked up while Trump was in office. They'd expected to be getting into office back in 2016 when Hillary Clinton was supposed to become president. Trump's election is a devastating, humiliating surprise. They're "in the wilderness"—I believe that's the title of the first section of Ward's book. And they spend those four years asking themselves, how can we win an election? So I don't think those are actually the organizing principles of American foreign policy under Trump or under Biden. I think that the organizing principle is the defense, maintenance, adjustment, reestablishment of America's global economic leadership. That's the foundation of its lone superpower status. That's what the Biden administration is actually trying to protect. 

Robinson 

One of the things that you argue in the piece is that the Biden administration policymakers, in many ways, have subscribed to a series of illusions or fantasies. I'll just quote what you wrote: 

One was the idea that the U.S. could disentangle itself from the Middle East without ceding some measure of control over the region's power dynamics. Another held that America remained the only real protagonist in international affairs. The rest of the world would sit tight and wait to be remade, rather than trying to make something happen on their own. The third was the fantasy that American foreign policy could be revitalized and a new century of U.S. hegemony secured simply by coming up with new ways to advertise the old foreign policy. 

Perhaps you could elaborate on that. It does sound, from what you say, like you think that mostly these are new ways of advertising the old foreign policy. 

Beck 

Yes, and Jake Sullivan is not someone with new ideas for what the U.S. should actually be doing with respect to foreign policy, and part of the reason he's been so successful at such a young age is because the previous generation, people like Clinton and someone like Biden, have viewed him from the outset of his career as a "once in a generation talent." Now, when everyone 30 to 40 years older than you thinks you're a once in a generation talent, what they mean is that he thinks like they do, in terms of the fantasies that I talk about. The chief irony of both Ward's book and I think of Biden's first and possibly only term is Ward’s book was published, I believe, in February of this year, but as far as I can tell, the text was totally finalized and locked before October 7. 

Robinson 

Yes, this gives it some remarkable qualities. 

Beck 

In the book, Ward writes about how part of what Biden was trying to accomplish—and the withdrawal from Afghanistan plays a role in this, too—was to pivot the U.S. away from the Middle East; we need to put the Middle East on the back burner. And what that means in concrete terms is that the U.S. really wants to de-emphasize direct military and economic supervision of the region. To do that, the withdrawal from Afghanistan had to be accomplished, and that's also why Biden took up the Abraham Accords that Trump established and why he was also very excited about the prospect of Saudi Arabia's normalizing diplomatic relations with Israel for the first time. The idea, I think, was that the U.S. could really shore up its alliances with reactionary regimes around the Middle East, give them as many weapons as they need to keep Iran and Palestine and other malign actors in line, then the U.S. could pivot to the two really important challenges, which are China and Russia, and to a lesser extent in the administration's view, though obviously most importantly from the view of everyone else, climate change. So they didn't have a plan for resolving the Palestinian question that they were going to expend any energy pursuing. They would deliver the standard line when asked about how the U.S. supports a two-state solution, but they did less than nothing to bring a two-state solution anywhere closer to reality. At the same time, their plan was based on the assumption that the Palestinians wouldn't do anything on their own, that they would essentially acquiesce to further continue decades of occupation, and all of that just exploded on October 7 last year.

Robinson 

Right. You quote one of Ward’s sources saying that the thinking was that we're really not going to get involved in Israel-Palestine; we're going to let this go by. Well, how did that work out?

Beck 

Right. And that comment, I believe, was from an incident back in 2021, but that was the mindset of the administration's foreign policy people as a whole. And it's very clear that not just Israel, and not just America's allies, but the U.S. itself was taken completely off guard by October 7, and what's happened since is this kind of desperate scramble to contain Israel's war, to try and keep it from spreading elsewhere in the region, while at the same time not doing anything real to restrain Israel militarily. Across party lines—Trump sees it this way, Biden sees it this way, Obama saw it this way—Israel's belligerence is not, in their view, particularly a downside once you actually tally up what matters. It causes problems here and there, but its most important function is that it's a guarantor of U.S. control over the region. I think I said in the piece somewhere that the U.S. views Israel as this kind of snarling dog, and it really doesn't want to tug on the leash too hard, because if it does, then it loses the deterrent benefits of Israel's habitual, regular aggression toward its neighbors.

Robinson 

But at the same time, what has happened since October 7, as you note, has created a serious political problem for Joe Biden. One of the things you note that's quite interesting is they're using the old playbook for defending Israel. That is to say, the idea that criticism is antisemitic and Israel has the world's most moral army. And you have some great lines in your piece, like "how is one to believe the old line about the IDF being the world's most moral army when each week brings new photographs of Israeli soldiers giggling like fraternity creeps as they fumble a lingerie they found in Palestinian homes?" That's not an exaggeration or caricature on your part. There have been endless reports. You can see it all over TikTok, of Israeli soldiers essentially gleefully carrying out crimes against Palestinians. Israel is essentially unwilling to do the minimum that the Biden administration, I'm sure, wishes it would do, like pretending to care a little bit more about saying they believe in a two-state solution, or whatever, or maybe not even that, but a pathway—all you have to do is say is something like a pathway. But instead, they're saying, no, we have to wipe out Gaza. Talk about the problems that this creates for the Biden administration.

Beck 

Yes, you've seen the Biden administration's attempt to contain the political fallout at home from the war. You've seen the approach change as time has gone on, where in the immediate aftermath of October 7 and during the first couple months of the war, it was the standard rhetorical playbook. Hamas and the Palestinian resistance are not political actors in their own right, and they are simply a horde of barbarian savages who like to murder Jews because of their adherence to a transhistorical antisemitism; Israel is a beleaguered nation mired in a sea of hostilities just trying to defend the existence of the Jewish homeland; it has the most moral army in the world. Plus, the constant propagandistic exaggerations of what the Palestinian resistance did on October 7 in terms of war crimes, sexual violence, that kind of thing. That wasn't sustainable beyond a few months because all of our phone and laptop screens were just filled every day with images of the atrocities committed by the Israeli military in Gaza and by settlers in the West Bank. So you saw this shift over time into, yes, we'll acknowledge that too many Palestinians have died; all civilian deaths are tragic. Each week's new horrific incident would prompt one of those ghoulish Defense Department spokesmen to say, yes, we've put this to the Israeli government—

Robinson 

We're waiting for a response. 

Beck 

They're undertaking an internal review; oh, it's not for us to tell them how to fight their war, and we can't judge what happened; we're so far away, how could we know? You've seen them try to adjust the plan bit by bit as time has progressed, and you feel that what the Biden administration would most like to happen—and it's kind of like a fantasy of how the rest of 2024 plays out—is that Israel would get to a point where it could claim at least to have achieved victory in Gaza, and Netanyahu could be ejected from office. It seems still almost certain that he will be once the really intense stage of the war has ended, and then some unknown actor can take his place, or unknown at least to the vast majority of Americans, and though he'll share Netanyahu’s politics almost entirely, maybe he'll be just a little bit more invested, at least, in pretending to care about Palestinian civilians. He'd be someone onto whom the Biden administration could project its fantasies of the kind of Israeli leader they would like Israel to have. So one of the contradictions I think that the Biden administration has been running into recently is that Netanyahu doesn't show any sign of going anywhere before the election, which is bad news for Biden's prospects in Michigan, among other states. In addition to him sticking around, there have been half-hearted attempts to portray him as some kind of uniquely amoral or bloodthirsty leader and not representative of the Zionist project as a whole. Unfortunately, Netanyahu is a perfect representative of the Zionist project as a whole.

Robinson 

And when you look at polls of Israeli Jews and ask them, do you think there is too much or the right amount of force being used in Gaza? There may be disapproval of Benjamin Netanyahu's personal morality, but the brutality of the war has widespread approval in Israel.

Beck 

I don't think the disapproval within Israeli society is even particularly of Netanyahu's morality. I think it's rage at Netanyahu for allowing October 7 to happen. And we keep getting new bits of reporting, new documentation, that in fact, the IDF really was asleep at the switch. I believe there was a report within the last day or two that the IDF had documents laid out where they knew about the Palestinians plan for attack in some degree of detail. So it's rage that he allowed it to happen. But yes, the survey that I cite in the article—I forget when it was from; it was early this year or very late last year—showed pretty clearly that, on the whole, Israeli society supported the way that the IDF had been conducting the war.

Robinson 

Now, there's a question we can ask, which is, to what extent are there disjunctions between the president's foreign policies versus an overall continuity. How are the projects different, versus how is it part of one project? You point out that the people in the Biden administration think of themselves as a departure from the Trump administration. You point out how fickle, unprincipled, and unpredictable Donald Trump can be. So to what extent was the Biden administration's foreign policy a departure from, versus continuous with, the Trump administration?

Beck 

I think the biggest difference has to do with Europe and with NATO. What I say about Trump's foreign policy is that the important thing to remember about it is that it doesn't exist. He does not have a strategy. He does not think strategically. He has no plan for, what will America's position in world politics be 25 years down the line? He doesn't give a shit about that. He is a purely transactional politician, and so if the U.S. is spending more on defense than NATO allies, that means that the U.S. is getting ripped off. If Trump had won a second term and then Putin had invaded, I think the big difference is you would have seen the U.S. support for the defense of Ukraine at a much lower level, materially, than what Biden was able to muster. I don't think you would have seen this rhetoric of civilizational defense against Putin's maniacal militarism.

Outside of Europe and NATO, the story is more of continuity than of disjuncture. And I don't even think that people within the Biden administration see themselves as all that different from Trump on countries outside of Europe. I think they prefer not to talk about it. But I think that Ward gets some quotes where he says, we looked at Trump's plan for China, and we saw a lot to like there. I think for Trump's plan for the Middle East, Biden took it up enthusiastically. I think with China, the administration's view was that the way Trump pursued this goal of confronting China was stupid and haphazard, but they like the idea in principle, so they’re just going to do a more systematic, smarter version of it.

And one other area of disjuncture between the two is Trump sort of handed off Latin America to John Bolton, and John Bolton spent a few months fantasizing about rolling back leftist governments across the continent, saying things like, the Monroe Doctrine is alive and well, and tried to help foment that coup in Venezuela. Biden, I think, said we can pull back from that. But neither Trump nor Biden have done much to try and compete with China in terms of economic partnership and political allegiance in Latin America and in Africa. Both have been treading water while China has continued to forge ahead in deepening those connections.

Robinson 

I want to talk a little bit more about the administration's policy towards China. There was a news report from Reuters that I'm sure you saw recently, which was about this really horrible scandal where the US military spread disinformation about Chinese vaccines in the Philippines. It's one of these things that sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it's true, just like everything the CIA did in the Cold War. It's one of these things where you go, that's so fucked up and horrible. How could that happen? But essentially, they saw that China was doing a really good job of vaccinating people around the world. We were not doing a good job of that. So instead of saying, hell, with that all-American can-do spirit, we could give vaccines to half the world, they decided on the strategy of trying to convince people that the Chinese vaccine is unsafe in the Philippines, a country that had a really disastrous COVID response and people distrusted vaccines. So I think it's a huge scandal, or should be in a sane and moral world. The news about that came out after your article was published and seems like a very extreme version of a kind of tendency that you're describing there, which is that China tries to forge these partnerships in the global south and the U.S. does not take the same approach.

Beck 

You see this dynamic all over the place once you start looking for it. The striking example that I write about in the article has to do with electric cars. One of the things that the Biden administration has undertaken is levying tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, trying to prevent semiconductors from getting into China so that they can be used in the manufacture of them, among other things. But the fact of the matter is that China makes the best and cheapest electric cars in the world. It has for a few years, and I think that today, six out of the 10 best-selling electric cars in the world are made by Chinese companies, and that's with those cars more or less locked out of the U.S. market. This didn't make it into the piece, but I read an article a month or two ago on the website of an auto industry publication. An American reporter had gone to China for its biggest annual auto show, and when he came back, the headline of his article was just something like, America's auto industry is cooked, it's over. The stuff that the Chinese companies are turning out, which the reporter just spent a few days sitting in and driving around and looking at, is so much better than anything any U.S. automaker is putting out, and it's about half to two-thirds the price. The U.S. doesn't stand a chance. You have this country that is making cheap, well-made electric vehicles, and considering the importance of getting fossil fuel engines off the road, you would think that Biden would want to embrace that. Instead, they're talking about these cars as "national security threats" and saying we're not going to allow this little hatchback to send your personal information back to the Chinese Communist Party. It's just another example of how everything Biden wants to do in foreign policy is just beset with contradictions.

Robinson 

This is important because you have the great passage about the contradictions that it leads to in his climate policy. Because, obviously, if you're going to ban all the cheap electric cars, and you're also going to commit to emissions reduction, you're forced into this very weird place where you're trying desperately to stop the one thing that could very seriously help you in your mission. 

Beck 

I think that with Biden's approach to climate change, he's seeing it in nationalist terms. I think the most succinct description you can give of Biden's plan to address climate change is nationalist green Keynesianism. It's the idea that this is part of an ongoing search for what's going to get global economic growth back to the levels we saw in the 1950s and '60s, when stuff was really good for the U.S. The wave of production that pushed the U.S. to the top of the global power hierarchy has crested and is fading. Growth is slowing. What's the next thing?

One obvious answer is renewable energy and green technology. So with Biden, during the campaign and in office, there's this rhetoric all the time about how we're going to win the green transition. We're going to establish ourselves as the primary manufacturers of the technology that will help us to decarbonize the global economy and that will secure American power through the end of the 21st century. The problem is that climate change is not a crisis that can be addressed productively at all in nationalist terms. Just at the outset, the way he's framing the solution is incoherent. 

Robinson 

Well, there’s the irony of the book being called The Internationalists. Let me ask you to elaborate on one thing. Most Americans are not told anything about reality. The things we get are the talking points, the slogans. And so what people will hear about China, for instance, is that the electric cars are going to send your data to the Chinese Communist Party, or things like, we're engaged in trying to build an economy for the middle class or whatever. But one of the reasons that your article is so useful is that you help us understand what is really going on, and the impression that I get, and maybe you could put this in more articulate terms, is that that you were writing about the fact that beneath all the slogans and beneath the apparent discontinuity of Biden and Trump, there is a hegemon trying and failing to preserve its power as it slips away. For presidents living with this illusion that they can control the world, their measures to try and maintain that control, in fact, are self-defeating and potentially suicidal—that's not the term you use. Tell me how you would put it.

Beck 

I don't think what you're seeing is necessarily a hegemon failing to maintain its power. I think you are definitely seeing a hegemon failing to maintain its hegemony. I can explain the difference. The difference I'm using is in the sense that Giovanni Arrighi used in his book The Long Twentieth Century, where he discusses the sequence of hegemons that have led the economy since capitalism came into existence. He starts with the Italian city states, and then it's the Dutch, and then it's the English, and then it's the Americans.

I'm going to butcher how he puts it, but basically, he defines hegemony as always based substantially on coercive force, but also, in order to be hegemony, it has to be semi-consensual. The hegemon has to be able to argue with a straight face that its power, its supremacy, provides enough benefits to the non-hegemonic countries that it's worth tolerating. And during the 1950s and '60s, when global growth was just absolutely soaring, that argument was plausible. Even into the '70s, when the current structural crisis that the U.S.-led economy is in emerged, growth was still high enough. Industry was growing in Japan and Germany and other American allied states, and the U.S. could make a case for why it should be allowed to remain on top.

Arrighi says that growth has now slowed enough, and by the end of the 20th century, the U.S. could no longer maintain its position of global supremacy through economic means through providing Japan or Germany with a powerful industrial economy. What you get with the war on terror, essentially, is the transition to relying primarily on the military and on coercive force. I think that his description of that sequence of events is basically correct.

Part of hegemony, as well, is not just making the case to people in other countries, but it's making the case to your own citizens that it's good for the world if we're the most powerful country in it. Since October 7, all of this rhetoric about how the U.S. supports freedom and human rights looks absolutely ludicrous. And I think the Biden administration hoped that it would get a big moral boost from its defense of Ukraine because Putin's attack is, yes, savage and unjustified.

I think what you got since October 7 is a new segment of the American public realizing that American power is not based on its ideals, principles, or the fact that it makes life better for the rest of the world, that instead its foundation at this point is primarily militarism, coercion, and violence.

Robinson 

Well, I highly recommend that people read "Bidenism Abroad." As mentioned at the outset, I think it's so useful in helping us discern the ideology underlying policy and the reality of the situation. You have a book coming out in September. Tell us a little bit about that.

Beck 

The book is called Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life. I have been trying to write it for probably about 10 years, but it is a domestic-focused history of the War on Terror. It's a book about how the War on Terror changed life inside the United States and how the various crises that the War on Terror either provoked, exacerbated, or fueled led, I think, to the election of Donald Trump in 2016.  [...] I started writing the book in 2021, so it was written entirely during the Biden administration—the research portion was before that. I'd been keeping notes and keeping my thoughts collected about what Biden had been doing, even if it wasn't going to be in the book. This article was a chance to organize those and get those down.

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.