Fire away…

Will Biden’s foreign policy sap his domestic policy?

In his first 100 days, President Biden has rolled out elements of his “build back better” domestic reform agenda, including the American Rescue Plan, his $2 trillion infrastructure bill and a family plan soon to come. Simultaneously, he has turbocharged his “America is back” foreign policy, exchanging insults with Russia and China, striking at Iranian militia camps in Syria, rejoining the Paris climate agreement and more. Both at home and abroad, his initiatives must overcome strong opposition. The larger question is whether the foreign policy will sap the energy, attention and resources needed to rebuild the United States at home.

The scope of Biden’s domestic ambitions has been a pleasant surprise. The president has called for new industrial policy to address the climate calamity, long overdue investments in infrastructure and housing, fair trade and “buy American” policies, tax hikes on the wealthy and corporations, bolstering economic rights, and beginning to redress racial inequities.

At the same time, Biden has long held that the United States remains the “indispensable nation” across the world. Although his national security aides acknowledge the priority of rebuilding the United States’ strength at home, they also say that the nation must lead. Climate, pandemics and global economic structuring are new priorities. These are in addition to an emerging great power faceoff with China and Russia, an effort to rally democracies against authoritarianism, a continuing war on terrorism, and a renewed commitment to enforce the “rules-based international order,” which translates into the United States continuing to police the world.

Biden’s “brightest and best” foreign policy managers say that they can balance these commitments by the exercise of what Hillary Clinton dubbed “smart power.” A renewed engagement of allies can share the burdens. Using drones and Special Operations forces, as opposed to major troop commitments, in the war on terrorism can reduce the costs.

The Defense Department, of course, will use the China threat to help lobby for bigger budgets, but the Biden team also clearly hopes that foreign threats can provide impetus for domestic reforms. For example, the growing faceoff with China — what Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin calls “our pacing threat” — justifies industrial and trade policies to revive U.S. manufacturing, investment in R&D to retain our technological edge, and progress on racial justice and electoral reforms to display democracy’s blessings.

The wisdom of “smart power,” however, is but an illusion. Allies may share burdens, but they can also disrupt plans, as illustrated by Israel’s suspected responsibility for blowing up facilities at an Iranian nuclear site even as the U.S. administration seeks to revive the Iranian nuclear deal. Adversaries disrupt unexpectedly, as illustrated by China’s new assertiveness in the South China Sea.

And while Biden asserts that “diplomacy is back” — promising to use military force only as a “last resort” — the president inherits a global posture unknown to most Americans. The United States is committed by treaty to the defense of about one-fourth of the world’s population. It maintains nearly 800 bases in more than 70 countries. And U.S. Special Operations forces operated in 138 countries in 2016. Not surprisingly, the U.S. military budget is greater than those of the next 10 nations combined, most of whom are our allies.

This level of constant military engagement generates an unending series of crises where the United States is already involved. “Smart power” offers no answer, as Clinton’s ”smart power at its best” — the disastrous intervention in Libya — demonstrated.

There is no easy way out. Surely, Biden’s team would be well advised to lower its sights. Reduce our commitments abroad, end the forever wars, shutter much of the empire of bases. Make it clear to allies that America’s priority is rebuilding its strength at home. Engage China and Russia in efforts to address climate change and contagion and to curb the accelerating nuclear and cyber arms races. Focus the competition on which country best provides for its people.

Every modern U.S. president and Congress perpetuate the U.S. military as the most potent in the world. A truly groundbreaking president would rein in the military operations that distract and drain us. It is clear that the United States cannot afford to be the “indispensable nation” across the globe and rebuild a vibrant democracy and economy at home. Great nations decline when they refuse to adjust to new realities. In his first days in office, Biden’s domestic policy reflects that awareness. The question is whether his national security policy will have a clue.

FDA, CDC call for pause in use of Johnson & Johnson vaccine after six reported cases of rare blood clots

Federal health officials on Tuesday called for a pause in the use of the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine, saying they are reviewing reports of six U.S. cases of a rare and severe type of blood clot in people after receiving the vaccine.

All six cases occurred among women between the ages of 18 and 48, and symptoms occurred six to 13 days after vaccination, according to a statement issued by the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC will hold a meeting Wednesday of its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to review the cases and assess their potential significance, the statement said. The FDA will continue to investigate the cases.

“Until that process is complete, we are recommending a pause in the use of this vaccine out of an abundance of caution,” the statement said. “This is important, in part, to ensure that the health care provider community is aware of the potential for these adverse events and can plan for proper recognition and management due to the unique treatment required with this type of blood clot.”

It’s been reported in Europe as well, but I think they had more cases. I’m wondering if J&J shouldn’t be used by those who have underlying conditions. Or perhaps some of the women were taking oral contraceptives.

The Real Migration Crisis is in Central America

A sudden surge in migration across the U.S.-Mexican border has presented U.S. President Joe Biden with one of the toughest political challenges of his new administration. In the month of March alone, U.S. Border Patrol agents encountered 172,000 unauthorized migrants, primarily from Central America and Mexico. That was an increase of more than 70 percent from February and a 20-year high (although a fair number of these migrants may have sought to cross more than once and been double counted as a result).

Politicians and pundits have been quick to label the surge in migration a “border crisis.” But although the numbers are higher this time around, Biden is hardly the first president to deal with an influx of migrants at the southern border. President Barack Obama did so in 2014 and again in 2016, as did President Donald Trump in 2019. Each time, the United States, overtaxed and underresourced, has struggled to handle the flow of people headed north from Central America and desperate to get into the United States.

As this cyclical pattern suggests, the real crisis isn’t at the U.S.-Mexican border but rather in Central America. Crime, violence, corruption, and economic devastation in the region have propelled people to the border, and U.S. policies—during Democratic and Republican administrations alike—have failed to deal adequately with these persistent push factors. The United States and Central American countries need a new approach to migration—one that addresses the drivers of these boom-and-bust cycles and helps manage the overlapping crises thousands of miles south of the U.S.-Mexican border.

Spikes in migration across the United States’ southern border have occurred periodically since 2014, when homicide rates in El Salvador and Honduras rose markedly. But each of these spikes has been slightly different in composition and motivation. In 2014 and 2016, unaccompanied children from Central America were the most visible group arriving at the border. Nearly 70,000 minors tried to cross from Mexico into the United States in the 2014 fiscal year, for instance, a 77 percent increase from the previous year. These new arrivals taxed the U.S. government’s limited resources for housing minors and locating their families, leading to lengthy backlogs for asylum hearings and overcrowding in U.S. Department of Health and Human Services facilities.

By the 2019 fiscal year, when U.S. authorities apprehended over 850,000 migrants, families made up 56 percent of those arriving in the United States, and many of them were seeking asylum. Again, the U.S. government struggled to meet the needs of these people, who cannot be legally detained for more than 20 days with their children. To get around that rule, the Trump administration briefly implemented a family separation policy but quickly rolled it back in the face of massive public opposition.

Now, migrants are once again flocking to the border, this time led by a mix of unaccompanied minors, families, and single adults. The Biden administration has left in place a Trump-era public health order, known as Title 42, which allows the government to expel anyone who arrives at U.S. borders without authorization to enter. However, the administration made an exemption for unaccompanied minors, partially fueling the monthly increases in child arrivals that will likely eclipse the three previous migration spikes if this trend holds. Mexico’s new policy in one part of the country of refusing to accept families with small children expelled from the United States has added to the number of arrivals, effectively forcing the United States to admit such families when they reach U.S. soil.

The recurrent nature of these migration surges, and the fact that they have occurred during Democratic as well as Republican U.S. administrations, suggests that the current so-called border crisis is really a symptom of a much larger crisis rooted in long-standing problems in Central America. No past U.S. policies, whether tougher or more humane, have addressed these underlying causes effectively enough to stop this cycle of migration that spikes every two to three years. In fact, one irony of the current immigration surge is that it is happening even as the United States continues to enforce one of its most restrictive measures ever, Title 42.

The current influx, like past ones, is driven in part by persistent crime and violence. El Salvador and Honduras have among the world’s highest homicide rates, and parts of Guatemala are equally violent. About one in five residents across these countries report being victims of crimes every year. And nearly one-tenth of Hondurans and Salvadorans experience extortion annually, paying gangs and local crime groups just so they can live in their homes or run small businesses. This spate of crime and violence has been linked to migration; researchers at the Center for Global Development have shown that every 60 additional homicides led to 37 apprehensions of unaccompanied children at the U.S.-Mexican border.

The real crisis isn’t at the U.S.-Mexican border but rather in Central America.
Corruption is another important driving force behind migration. All three of the Central American countries mentioned above rate among the most corrupt in the world on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. High-level corruption undermines people’s faith in government, encouraging people to migrate. So does more mundane corruption among criminals, the police, and low-level public officials that makes life difficult on a day-to-day basis and contributes to the decisions of many to seek better lives elsewhere.

Economic stagnation, which is made worse by corruption, is another force pushing migrants to the U.S.-Mexican border. GDP per capita in El Salvador and Guatemala is less than half what it is in Mexico, and in Honduras, it is less than a quarter. Each year, young people enter the labor market, fail to find jobs, and decide to migrate instead. In 2020, the economic pressures were even more extreme, as GDP contracted by three percent in Guatemala and over eight percent in El Salvador and Honduras. That same year, projections from the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean suggested that more than half of Guatemalans and Hondurans and 40 percent of Salvadorans live in poverty.

These economic crises intensified in November, when two enormous hurricanes devastated Central America, further eroding people’s livelihoods. The storms were harbingers of a final problem driving people away from the region: climate change. Longer periods of drought combined with more frequent hurricanes seem to be hitting farmers particularly hard and changing their way of life. In Guatemala and Honduras, which have predominantly rural economies, these changes have caused food insecurity among farmers. Recent research has shown that climate change and food insecurity drive migration from Honduras.

None of the problems driving migration from Central America is inevitable. Hundreds of thousands—and often over a million—Mexicans once sought to reach the United States every year. But this trend started to fall after 2007, and the number of Mexicans in the United States has dropped from 11.7 million to 10.9 million since 2010. Mexican migration northward scaled back as Mexico’s population got older, democracy took root, and the economy grew.

The conditions in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras can also change. In fact, the three countries’ populations are already starting to age, as Mexico’s did a decade ago. El Salvador is the first country in the region to experience a significant decline in birthrates, with 26 percent of the population now under the age of 15 (similar to Mexico). That number is 30 percent in Honduras and 36 percent in Guatemala. The result is a diminution of labor-market pressures that could eventually spell a reduction in economic migration. Honduras may follow that demographic pattern in a few years and Guatemala a few years after that.

Economic conditions in these countries could also improve with the right investments and policy decisions. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, poverty rates were dropping in El Salvador because of investments in education, public security, and jobs. Those investments created greater opportunities and more hope for its citizens. Guatemala and Honduras could follow this path, but only if their governments pass smart and timely reforms that support small businesses, help farmers become more productive, and strengthen the rule of law.

But changing the conditions that are driving migration from Central America will also require changes in Washington. Through a combination of smart development aid and investments in institutions that support the rule of law, Washington could help alleviate violent crime, corruption, and economic malaise. The United States will need to cooperate with the governments in the region while also supporting civil society organizations that have been struggling for greater government transparency and accountability. In particular, the United States will need to invest in the independence and capacity of prosecutors and the courts.

As it seeks to improve conditions in Central America to reduce the incentives to migrate, the U.S. government should also build more legal pathways for people from the region to travel to the United States for seasonal work. In the 2020 fiscal year, 244,000 Mexicans came to the United States for seasonal work, but only 5,000 people from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras did. The U.S. labor market—260 million workers in all—could easily absorb a few tens of thousands more Central American seasonal workers, especially as the U.S. economy recovers, without displacing American workers. Allowing Central American migrants to enter for seasonal work is preferable to having them enter the labor force without authorization—as so many of them currently do. U.S. policymakers should consider creating a special regional visa for Central Americans as part of a package of immigration reforms. But in the meantime, they should expand the current seasonal visa programs (H-2A and H-2B), the clearest existing pathways to enter the United States for seasonal work.

The U.S. government should also improve the asylum system at the border, making it more efficient and fair, and design new humanitarian protection mechanisms for those fleeing violence. For instance, it can help enact measures within countries to protect those displaced by violence, such as providing bodyguards for journalists under threat or relocating people to safe housing. The goal should be to protect people before they migrate and have to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexican border.

None of these policies will solve the Biden administration’s current problem at the U.S.-Mexican border overnight. But together, they can lay the foundation for a more proactive regional system for managing migration—and reduce the chances that the boom-and-bust cycle of migration continues in the future. Such an approach would also shift attention away from the so-called crisis at the border toward where it belongs—on the unresolved crises in Central America.

As one can tell from the discourse, this was penned by an establishment journal (Foreign Affairs ). But despite some of the white washing there is some truth to the superficial roots of the problem.

Biden’s Foreign Policy Starts at Home

Soon after President Donald Trump took office, Jake Sullivan and Ben Rhodes were in Myanmar helping an NGO prepare for peace talks between the government and ethnic armed groups. Sullivan had been a senior adviser to Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and had played a key role in Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Rhodes had served as deputy national security adviser in the Obama White House. The two men were still reeling from Trump’s victory, and spent time commiserating over what had gone wrong. By his own admission, Rhodes was “wrecked, angry—and I hadn’t even been on that campaign.” Sullivan was more clinical, Rhodes told me, dissecting a Democratic playbook that had made a reality-TV star seem like the superior choice. They talked about their party losing touch with Americans living in the upper Midwest, states that proved Clinton’s undoing. What Sullivan grasped, Rhodes said, was that “the consensus of the Democratic Party on foreign and domestic policy had in some way become untethered from those people. Not in a trite, ‘Hey, let’s go to a diner and talk to white working-class people’ way, but, ‘Hey, what is the goal of our trade and industrial policy?’”

Trump’s unexpected rise set in motion a rethinking of American foreign policy’s basic purpose in the post–Cold War era. Among Democrats, that inquiry would culminate in the Biden administration’s effort to cinch foreign and domestic policy more tightly than in any period since Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency. Underlying the approach is an idea that Sullivan and Rhodes explored in Myanmar: that foreign policy has grown ever more detached from the interests of working- and middle-class Americans. Biden’s aim is to orient foreign policy so that it serves those who have lived through a succession of trade deals and overseas wars and wonder what, exactly, was in it for them. Antony Blinken distilled the idea in his first major speech as secretary of state, which was all the more remarkable given that the department’s arena is the world outside America’s borders. “More than at any other time in my career—maybe in my lifetime—distinctions between domestic and foreign policy have simply fallen away,” he said. “Our domestic renewal and our strength in the world are completely entwined, and how we work will reflect that reality.”

For skeptics, this shift is more about branding and rhetoric than substance. What guidance does it offer, they ask, when North Korea expands its nuclear capabilities or Russia mounts a cyberattack? Richard Goldberg, a former National Security Council official under Trump, told me that tying foreign policy to middle-class interests is “a nice phrase, but I don’t really know what it means. The middle class doesn’t want a terrorist attack on U.S. soil. The middle class will be harmed if there’s a crisis that increases energy prices.”

If you wanted to find an original text for the Biden administration’s foreign policy, it would be an 83-page report by a Washington think tank released in the thick of the 2020 presidential race. In 2018, midway through Trump’s term, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace set out to reimagine U.S. foreign policy. The institution assembled about a dozen specialists in economics and international affairs who’d worked in Democratic and Republican administrations. Among them was Sullivan, a senior fellow. He made a point to talk with labor leaders. “The fact that he was reaching out to me when I was at AFL-CIO was a sign that he was trying to expand his horizons,” Thea Lee, who was then deputy chief of staff at the labor federation and is now president of the Economic Policy Institute, told me.

In a 2019 Atlantic article, Sullivan laid out some of the principles that would inform the Carnegie report, employing language that Blinken would echo in his foundational speech. America’s standing in the world, Sullivan wrote, “requires domestic renewal above all, with energetic responses at home to the rise of tribalism and the hollowing-out of the middle class.” He went on: “The American people want their leaders … to focus on how strength abroad can contribute to a strong economic foundation at home, and not just vice versa. And they’re right. The country’s entire national-security strategy—the resources it allocates, the threats and opportunities it prioritizes, the events and circumstances it tries to shape, the relationships it cultivates—should more explicitly be geared toward reviving America’s middle class.”

The Carnegie report flowed from interviews with hundreds of people and an examination of economies in three heartland states—Colorado, Nebraska, and Ohio. Its conclusion could not have been more stark: “After three decades of U.S. primacy on the world stage, America’s middle class finds itself in a precarious state. The economic challenges presented by globalization, technological change, financial imbalances, and fiscal strains have gone largely unmet.” For the country to play a leading role in the world, it needed to “redress democratic deficits and social, racial, and economic injustice at home while seeking to reclaim the moral high ground abroad. The United States must get its own house in order.” (Soon after the report’s release, William Burns, the president of Carnegie, wrote an article for The Atlantic describing its findings.)

Word spread throughout Biden’s postelection transition team that everyone had to keep the needs of America’s working and middle class front and center. Crossover between domestic- and foreign-policy shops is rare. The people holding these jobs tend to stick to their turf, and happily so. Biden wanted that to change. This much was evident in one of his most prominent hires. Susan Rice spent decades working on foreign policy, holding jobs as national security adviser and ambassador to the United Nations in the Obama administration. She’s back in the White House—this time as director of the Domestic Policy Council. “The message came down on high in very clear terms that we have to do things in a new way,” a Biden-administration official told me, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk more freely about the transition. “We heard time and time again that we needed to know our domestic counterparts. We needed to have joint meetings. We needed to review each other’s papers. That’s not how we normally operate.”

People are policy. Contributors to the Carnegie report are now in charge of Biden’s foreign-policy apparatus. Sullivan is Biden’s national security adviser; Burns is his CIA director. Last month, the White House hired another contributor, Jennifer Harris, to focus on international economics and labor. Salman Ahmed, a co-editor, is director of policy planning under Blinken.

That many of the same people executing Biden’s foreign policy are the ones who conceived it strengthens the odds that it will take hold. When I spoke with Sullivan recently, he made a point of explaining how he was rethinking the role of national security adviser: “I believe passionately in integrating the National Security Council with the other components of the White House—with the National Economic Council, with the Domestic Policy Council, with the Office of Science and Technology Policy. I put a lot of my effort here into making sure that we have an integrated approach. Increasingly, foreign and domestic policy are intertwined, and whether it’s on issues related to domestic investment, or supply chains, or pandemics, or climate, our work is just tied up in the work of other senior leaders in this building. I intend to be a national security adviser almost unlike any predecessor in the intensity with which I will pursue and engage with them.”

When the White House issued a national-security memorandum in February, one of the directives included “Implementing a Foreign Policy for the Middle Class,” phrasing that mirrors the title of the Carnegie report (“Making U.S. Foreign Policy Work Better for the Middle Class”). The memo calls upon various agencies to send a memorandum to Sullivan by the first week in May spelling out “specific actions” that further a “foreign policy agenda focused on benefiting the American middle class.”

The middle class isn’t the only audience Biden wants to impress. Equally important is America’s chief foreign competitor and adversary: China. Biden has framed this period in history as a mortal struggle between democracy and autocracy. “A strong economy and strong social cohesion at home set an example for the effectiveness of our system in the eyes of other nations,” Robert Hormats, an undersecretary of state during Barack Obama’s first term who has served in Republican and Democratic administrations, told me. “The Chinese are making a case for the strength and qualities of their system. We have to demonstrate that ours is effective in meeting our major domestic objectives.”

For the Biden administration, passage of the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill was an important step toward that goal. The COVID-19 package, Sullivan told me, “will have a profound domestic-policy impact, but it will have a foreign-policy impact as well. Because it will show the world that the United States is capable of doing big things and Joe Biden as president is capable of delivering on his agenda. That will give him further capacity and credibility on the world stage, particularly with allies and partners who will be buoyed by his ability to accomplish things.”

Next up is Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure bill, his sweeping plan to rebuild aging roads, bridges, and ports and propel the nation toward renewable energy. The administration believes that the two bills will lift the economy—the relief package over the next year, the infrastructure bill over the long term. This, the White House argues, will strengthen its position in trade negotiations with the Chinese.

Linking foreign and domestic policy is not a novel concept. In his 1946 “Long Telegram” assessing the Soviet threat, the diplomat George Kennan wrote, “Every courageous and incisive measure to solve internal problems of our own society … is a diplomatic victory over Moscow.” One of President Eisenhower’s selling points for creating the interstate highway system was that it would improve the nation’s security, allowing troops to move quickly in the event of an attack. “Whether they know it or not, the Biden people are walking a path that was laid out by their noble predecessors,” Daniel Fried, a former U.S. ambassador to Poland, told me. “It’s a retooling of a strategy that worked for America and was long forgotten by [Bill] Clinton, and Obama as well. They tinkered with it, but Biden is much more committed to this.”

Every presidency is in some ways a reaction to the last. Trump came to office promising a retrenchment after nearly two decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said he’d bring soldiers home and rewrite unpopular trade deals. Distracted by crises, many of his own making, Trump couldn’t deliver. “Trump didn’t really get beyond the top note of ‘You’ve been screwed. Trade policy stinks,’ and then slapping some tariffs here and there at random because someone gave him the stink eye,” Thea Lee told me. “That’s not what we’re talking about.”

Biden knows that Trump’s diagnosis appealed to many Americans. His ambition is to succeed where his predecessor failed: pursue a foreign policy that provides tangible benefits for middle-class Americans. It might also have the side benefit of winning back the white working-class voters who had gravitated to Trump.

It isn’t hard to imagine that Biden’s grand plan could also collapse. Overseas crises have a way of hijacking a president’s agenda. At one point, overhauling public education seemed likely to be George W. Bush’s defining legacy. Then came September 11 and his ill-fated decision to invade Iraq. “It’s clear that Biden’s focus—and I don’t disagree with it politically—is domestic,” John Bolton, a former national security adviser to Trump, told me. “That will change. Because it always does.”