Grading Biden's Foreign Policy with Alexander Ward

Whoever you vote for, Biden or Trump at this point, you are voting for a radically different vision of American foreign policy.

Alexander Ward

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A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com.

Alexander Ward is a national security reporter at Politico and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is also the author of the book The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy after Trump.

Key Highlights

• Introduction - 0:20
• A Foreign Policy for the Middle Class - 2:47
• Crises - 20:13
• Ukraine - 27:56
• The Grade - 40:32

Key Links

The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy after Trump by Alexander Ward

Learn more about Alexander Ward

Follow Alexander Ward on X @alexbward

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Transcript

After Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020, it was reported he told our European allies that America was back. He meant it had returned to a position of global leadership. If Trump was a nationalist, then the Biden team represented the internationalists and they were back in power.

More than three years later, we are in a position to assess how they have performed. How did they react to different crises? Did they showcase American leadership? But also did they follow through on the goals they set for themselves?

Alexander Ward has followed the Biden Administration closely as a national security reporter at Politico. He is also the author of the book The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy after Trump.

My conversation with Alex explores what the Biden administration hoped to accomplish through its foreign policy and how events abroad have affected its strategies. We talk about all the hits from the pullout of Afghanistan to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine and even the terrorist attack on October 7th and Israel’s response. But we also try to answer whether its foreign policy was a success or a failure. I get Alex to give the Biden administration a grade for its foreign policy, but I’d love to hear from you as well. So, after the episode feel free to comment on Spotify, X or through email. I’d love to know what you think.

The podcast is sponsored by the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, part of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. The Kellogg Institute was founded by Guillermo O’Donnell, one of the giants of democratic thought, more than 40 years ago. It continues to sponsor research on democracy and human development. Check them out at Kellogg.nd.edu. You’ll find a link in the show notes to their website. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor or would like to discuss ways to partner with the podcast, please send me an email to jkempf@democracyparadox.com.

But for now… This is my conversation with Alexander Ward…

jmk

Alex Ford, welcome to the Democracy Paradox.

Alexander Ward

Yeah. Thanks for having me. Love being here.

jmk

Alex, I really loved your book. It's called The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy After Trump. It's not what I expected from the title.

Alexander Ward

Okay.

jmk

Because when I saw the title, I'm thinking of a foreign policy team that is looking to bring American foreign policy back to what it was in the past. But in the opening chapters, I got the impression that Jake Sullivan didn't want to restore American foreign policy so much as redefine it after Trump. That was not what I expected, even based on what I know about the Biden administration. So, I felt like I learned a lot from your book. It made me rethink some of the events that have happened in the past. But it caught me off guard a little bit, especially with the title.

So why don't we start there with Jake Sullivan, who, by the way, is probably the most fascinating character within the book, I mean, if we call people in a nonfiction book characters. But he's the most fascinating person that you discuss and he's somebody who I thought I knew a little bit about, but I didn't know as much as I thought I did. So why don't we start out where you explain what his vision was for an American foreign policy that would come after Trump.

Alexander Ward

Well, thank you for reading the book and then seemingly liking it. The subtitle is in of itself, kind of an odd one. Restore American foreign policy would suggest that going into the past would be the right course of action, but a couple of things there. One is no administration really ever goes back. I mean, foreign policy is a continuation. It has its history. Everyone's building off of each other. The other part here is that Jake Sullivan also did initially feel like Trump was so bad and he had strayed so far from foreign policy orthodoxy that there needed to be a restoration. That there needed to be a sense that if we go back to the old ways, by old ways, I mean, pre-2016 days, that things would be better.

Then they realized a couple of things. One is the world was very different over those four years and on top of that, they also come to realize that Trump wasn't wrong about it or at least he was on the right track on certain things, namely China, the Abraham accords. But Jake Sullivan who… I should say your discussion about characters - I had that issue too, with writing it. I was like these are real people and I report on them every day and I'm a news guy. So, I wanted to write effectively one long news story until I realized that it's a book and I should try to narrativize it a little bit. But it was hard to consider the people as characters, but you're right.

Once you put it in the perspective that they are characters in our larger American story, then it's sort of easier. So, Jake Sullivan over the four years that he's not in power, because he's with the Obama administration, he's Hillary Clinton's right hand man in the campaign against Trump. He's like, ‘Here I am this Minnesota middle class boy who's got five siblings and would play hockey on frozen lakes and we eat spaghetti dinners at kitchen tables. How did I get out populisted by the New York billionaire real estate magnate?’ And we should know that Jake, of course, went to Yale, Rhodes Scholar, so whatever. But still that's what his thinking was.

He and others create this idea of what they call a foreign policy for the middle class, which very simply put, there's a lot of elements to it, but very simply put, it is no American policy, domestic really, but especially abroad is going to work unless Americans are behind it, where they can really see some sort of tangible benefit from it. One of which would be if we invest in green technologies and that increases manufacturing jobs that's great because that means more jobs for people. But let's note, for example, how they talk about, I know we're skipping ahead, but let's think about Ukraine for a moment.

When they talk about Ukraine, they initially were like we're a democracy, we've got to defend democracy. That's all well and good. It's lately shifted to if the US doesn't stop Russia and Ukraine, then Russia attacks a NATO country, in which case we have to send your sons and daughters to Eastern Europe then that's bad for, just in general, the global economy, but of course, for the general livelihood of your families. Then the other aspect of it is we're actually sending our older weapons to the Ukrainians. This means we need newer weapons for our military which not only makes America stronger, but then that means actual manufacturing jobs for people in Texas, Ohio, Alabama, wherever.

So, they're trying in their rhetoric, at least, but a lot in their policy is that the US is doing things, because there is a way for the general American to benefit from it. There's no more this sense of America's out there democratizing the world or just doing free trade deals for the sake of doing free trade deals. There now needs to be a tangible way for everyone’s pocketbooks to get a little fatter. So that's where they are. I'm not saying they follow that to a tee, but during those four years that was the intellectual underpinning or that is the intellectual framework that now Jake Sullivan as national security advisor is using to underpin a lot of the work of this administration so far.

jmk

So, I remember Jake Sullivan's piece in Foreign Affairs and. It read the same way that a lot of pieces in foreign affairs do when they're written by politicians, like when I see a piece written by Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton or Mike Pompeo in the past. It always reads like they're trying to say way too much and be way too careful and they don't necessarily have a single strong argument. Sullivan's piece read a little bit more coherently, like it had a strong point behind it, but at the same time, it still came across as a lot of political rhetoric rather than being something that was a meaningful message behind it.

It seemed like something that you're trying to sell to people rather than something that is a real foreign policy issue idea in terms of theory and structure the way that an academic would approach it. Did Sullivan really believe that this was a fundamental change in terms of foreign policy or was a lot of this just rhetoric?

Alexander Ward

It can be both, right? Let's be clear that the Biden policy, this foreign policy for the middle class does not happen without a Trump victory. It was born from the trauma of Trump, where he, at least he being Trump, even though he was a one man red team of American foreign policy and said some pretty outlandish things, or at least some unorthodox things at its root was about I'm not doing anything until it helps you. That was effectively the message. Like these foreign wars aren't helpful. These trade deals aren't helpful. Immigrants are coming in and they're doing whatever they're doing. It isn’t helping and climate change is just going to hurt business. So, basically speaking, that was his core message. This was the liberal counter, let's say to that.

So, they tried to basically take elements of Trumpism and fold it into traditional American foreign policy, not only talking points, but also actual policy. I mean, like you can have both. Some of the best policies are political reframings. We can't deny that they are interconnected in that way, but we also don't think we can deny that the Biden team on the whole, not on everything, but on the whole has acted with that general concept in mind. I don't think you get the Inflation Reduction Act, you don't get Biden's full-throated endorsement of it, if you don't think that investing in green tech and manufacturing jobs are worth it to upset our European allies.

You don't do the Abraham Accords unless you think that a stronger partnership with Israel and a more peaceful Middle East means the US can spend less time focused there and spending more of its time on things that could actually help the general American voter. Look, it's such a broad umbrella term that you could sort of fit anything and I'm sure I could do it here now, but I don't think we can deny that it is the way they framed it and that matters in terms of policy, because it does give you the four corners that you can operate within, even if it doesn't always guide every decision.

jmk

When you were writing the book, and you're reliving a lot of the events that you were reporting on in real time, did you find yourself surprised at some of the continuation of Trump's policies, because I've talked to Bethany Allen, for instance, who was recently reporting at Axios. She talked a lot about how the Biden administration really embraced some of the bigger picture ideas on China that the Trump administration had been taking, not so much the trade war per se, but the way that we reframed and started thinking differently about China. A lot of that didn't have to do with Trump himself, but really the people that were on the Trump team and the Trump administration, the people behind those ideas that were actually executing them on a daily basis. Were you surprised to see as much continuity as you saw?

Alexander Ward

Yes, but also, I think that they were surprised. The team during those four years, in the book basically I termed the wilderness, spent a lot of time trying to figure out ‘what is it that we're going to use to counter Trump in the 2020 election?’ If we get into power, what are we actually going to do? China wasn't at the start of the conversation. They were really focused internally. There were issues about American democracy. January 6th hadn't happened yet, but polarization and then that kind of stuff. Russia was sort of there and China was sort of in the background, but it wasn't the big bad.

And almost within moments of Biden's victory, they start getting transition documents and they're talking somewhat to Trump's team. The Trump administration wasn't the greatest transition of all time, but they were doing some stuff and it became pretty clear that this China thing is big. I guess I should note that Jake Sullivan and then also Kurt Campbell, who was the top Asian person in the White House now Deputy Secretary of State, were thinking about Asia and China generally and their whole thing was compete, not conflict. Those ideas also permeated to the fore. Of course, when you have the national security advisor thinking these things, that's sort of what happens.

So, all this to say, I think they surprise themselves. Part of it is you get in the building, you get the documents, you get a sense of where the policies are, you start getting intelligence again, and then things become a lot clearer as to what's been going on. Then you sort of try to retrofit your campaign rhetoric into actual policy. That's how it usually goes. Look, I think if you talk to pretty much every major Biden player in the Trump years would they expect to be… Well, I guess the Abraham Accords came towards the end of the Trump years, but still would they expect to be pushing it this hard? Probably not. Would they have expected that they would be adopting a lot of the same general policies?

On China, which the Biden policy on China is basically plus allies - do everything Trump was doing plus allies. Probably not. So, others I could name, but that's where they ended up. I think part of it is because when you're trying to create whatever they're calling a foreign policy for the middle class, then let's be honest, there hasn't really been anything like that since 1945 save for Trump. So, you're probably going to borrow some elements from that. That's sort of part of this whole evolution and the greater part of this book, and in general, the way I've been thinking about things, is that American foreign policy, roughly speaking, has had a through line since the end of World War II.

In the last two years of Obama, you start to see a shift. This is mostly when the Trans-Pacific Partnership dies. That goes away. Then you have Trump and then you have Biden not doing a full break from the Trump red team and the end of Obama. So what I would say is we're at this place now where it's like I don't know what you want to call it: The Post-Cold War Post-Post-Cold War or whatever. But we're in this moment where the through line has been broken. Now we're shifting one way or the other and I think with Trump, you get a much more radical shift and with Biden you get a much more gradual shift, but it is a shift nonetheless.

American foreign policy is no longer what it used to be, even though as of this moment it has many of the same elements, but the emphasis is different. This could be cyclical. We could go back to a more traditional quote unquote era, but I don't think we're going there for a long time because at least on offer now is Trump and Biden again. They still present a general break from where we were.

jmk

That's interesting because it's got me thinking about American foreign policy after World War II where Truman's trying to figure things out, trying to figure out how to respond to the Soviet Union, and there's a lot of critique coming from the Republican Party during that period. They're criticizing him for not focusing enough on Asia and, at the same time, they're criticizing him for engaging in the Korean War and then fighting it wrong. There's a lot of debate about what to do and when Eisenhower's elected, you would think that there'd be a complete break from what Truman did, but in a lot of ways, he made some adjustments, but it wasn't that much of a break. I mean, he effectively maintained the containment policy that had been somewhat begun under Truman and you see a through line during that period that extends to Kennedy and so on.

We're in that phase right now where we don't completely know what our foreign policy is going to be, but we're making it up and establishing it based on different iterations from election to election, administration to administration. I mean, I can see the parallel there because when we normally think back to the post-war era, we normally think that there was this grand strategy and that we knew exactly what was happening, but there was a lot more uncertainty and I guess that's the same era that we're in right now.

Alexander Ward

That's sort of how I feel. There's a sense that the old ways, and by that post-1945 ways, worked for a really long time, but we squandered a lot of that into the immediate fall of the Soviet Union by being the unipol and going rough shot around the world post-9/11. We do two wars, both of which don't work out particularly well. We squander a lot of blood and treasure there. Now there's fatigue with American global engagement. There is a general concern about our ability to pay debts and keep our economy humming, et cetera. So, I think we're there. We're in this confused space. What I don't think people really have is the answer, but we're clearly stumbling for it.

Trump, I think in an odd way, and by that I mean an unintentional way, was truly a one man red team. He was like, ‘Okay. It's not working. Let's change everything about it.’ He had members of his team that kept us generally on a more traditional path. Biden again is continuing a bit of that. So, it's what are we sort of aiming toward? No one is willing to find that. Biden, I should say, has not done a particularly good job of that either, because the foreign policy for the middle class is well and good, you're talking about the domestic response to your foreign policy, but what are we trying to achieve?

Now that part hasn't really changed much because it's still about defending democracy or promoting it to a certain extent, make sure there's still liberal trade flow, have a strong defense. Okay, but to what? Is it to be the strongest country in the world? Is it to be… Again, I don't know what the goal is and I I didn't know what that was under Trump. I don't know what that was under Obama, but kind of with Bush to a certain extent I knew what it was. It was rid all terrorists of the world. Okay, fine. I knew what that was. But I think also part of the complication is that American policy has been a bit on autopilot. Why? Because we were unquestionably the strongest power. Yes, we had the Cold War with the Soviets because they had nukes.

Otherwise, we were still stronger. They fall and we're still the strongest. But the world we made or helped make after 1945, not necessarily out of the goodness of our hearts, worked beyond our wildest dreams. There are so many countries now that have power and influence and are willing to wield it and feel that they don't necessarily need us, and by us, I mean the United States. It was always this way. I mean, the US has never been able to do what it wants and tell everyone what to do and everyone falls in line. Foreign policy has always been complicated, but it's far harder now because of other country’s influence and the speed of change and technology, et cetera, et cetera.

So, we're also in this space where we're going through our own ideological transition and yet we still don't know how to deal with a world where we are the strongest power, but relatively we're not as strong as we used to be. That's hard. That's a hard thing to figure out and to navigate and I would argue, at least at the end of the day, this Biden team is an attempt to do that. Which is we have to limit what we can do. Our influence is limited. We can do everything we want to do up to the point where Americans effectively agree with what we're up to. That's the domestic focus. It’s natural for a politician to propose, but I don't think it's the final answer.

jmk

So, a foreign policy for the middle class definitely comes across as a proactive foreign policy. It sounds like we are in the driver's seat, but in reading your book, I get the impression that the Biden administration is far more reactive in terms of foreign policy than they are proactive - even in this conversation. As they come into power, they seem to be reacting much more to policies that Trump had in place than they are necessarily putting new ones in place. They're reacting much more than they expected to be. Then there are three big events that you highlight within the book that shape the foreign policy. One is Afghanistan - the pull out of Afghanistan. The second one is what happens when Russia invades Ukraine and our policy there.

The third one is surprisingly the Palestinians and the policy in Israel where Gaza erupts in 2021 and we completely forget about that, because of what happened on October 7th. It's remarkable that that comes up so strongly in the book because that's become one of the big inflection points since then, and your book obviously went to the press before October 7th, so it's again one of those areas of the world that is reshaping and forcing the Biden administration to react. I guess in the back of my mind, I'm thinking this foreign policy and the administration are much more reactive than proactive in terms of how it's approaching foreign policy. Do you have that same read?

Alexander Ward

Yes, but with the qualification that every administration is reactive. It's hard. You put out best laid plans and then what is that Mike Tyson quote? Everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the face. And the punch in the face is Afghanistan. But the interesting thing is that they felt the Israel, Gaza or Hamas fight, I should say, of early 2021 - The administration thought they had that handle. They thought that their policy was going to work. It was pretty strong because that fight ended after 11 days. It was still brutal and deadly and awful, but that fight ended only after 11 days in part with, and tell me if this sounds familiar, the hug in public, push in private strategy. So, because that worked arguably in 2021, it was used again in the post-October 7th context.

We should note, of course, that the context of that was a lot different. On October 7th, 1200 people died on one day. A horrific day for Israel. Secondly, a far right government that is not looking really to make any deals with Palestinians in general is in power and then you've got an Israeli public that is still reeling from the horrific attack and despite not liking Bibi Netanyahu, wants Hamas gone. So, there's a lot of space for the Israelis to stiff arm the US and even though Biden literally flew there and literally hugged Bibi, it's just not as influential.

But I do think the reactive mode kicked in with Afghanistan. There was a genuine attempt to prepare for what was to come. They'd gone through about four months of review. Biden was very clear. We're getting out of Afghanistan. We're probably going to do it very soon. It was noted that Trump had made a deal with the Taliban. The US needed to get out pretty soon. He makes the deal in April and the plan is to get out by September 11th. Then that timeline shrinks. But the sort of original sin of the withdrawal is that at the time Biden makes the call to leave the intelligence picture tells them that it'll take 18 to 24 months for the Taliban to take over. Now that is a lot of time. That's a year and a half to two years.

So, it's not like they slow walked or dilly dally to prepare for the withdrawal and get a bunch of diplomatic military stuff in order. It was just that they ran out of time. They had to improvise. Then that Taliban takeover timeline shrunk quite a bit. All this to say is that after that, and of course the horrors that came out of it, although we should hold it in our minds that even though 13 service members died, there was horrific, horrific humanitarian strife during that whole withdrawal. We also did work with other allies to get 120,000 people out. It was a pretty remarkable logistical feat, but still a horrible withdrawal.

So, then I think you'd get the Jake Sullivan's of the world, the Secretary of State Antony Blinken's of the world, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's of the world, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, going, ‘Okay, maybe we need to be a little bit better at this planning thing. Maybe we need to understand a bit more or at least intake more. We can't just assume that things are going to go…’ And it's not like they did. It's just felt like maybe we're not moving fast. Maybe we need to be a bit more reactive to things. In a way, I think as they head into Ukraine, they become more proactive to be reactive, if you get what I'm trying to say. They're preparing for things to get crazy, so they know how to react and so they can react.

But I think at this point, every administration wishes that they were the pitcher and not the batter. I think pretty quickly every administration realizes that they're the ones having to swing for the fences and that they can't be throwing curve balls. They just want fastballs that they can hit down the middle, but it becomes pretty tough when knuckleballs are in the air and on top of that, to make things more complicated, it's like 18 knuckleballs in the air that you've got to swing and try to hit. This happens with any administration.

jmk

One of the criticisms that Republicans have really put on the Biden administration, and I think that it's going to get even nastier as we approach the campaign, is that Putin doesn't invade Ukraine if we don't have such a horrible withdrawal from Afghanistan. Do you think that there's any merit to that? Do some of these choices that they make lead to events in the future?

Alexander Ward

There were definitely some people who felt that. I have a line in the book, something along the lines of like, ‘Putin, the ultimate geopolitical shark, smelt blood in the water.’ It wasn't a particularly good time. Europe wasn't doing too hot. Some elections were leading to questions about European concern for Ukraine. Obviously, Afghanistan happened. So maybe this moment was right for Putin to strike. Now, I have no intelligence to suggest it. I didn't hear it. I didn't see it. What I would say is it's definitely a theory and it's not necessarily implausible.

Now, you mention this to the administration and they would say, ‘Why would Putin want to invade when now America is more freed up to counter the Russians and also after all we did for those months in the lead up to stop them? Why would they assume that we didn't care or that we were too weak to do anything?’ It's a fair response actually. So again, I don't know the answer. I do know certain people in the administration still today feel that Putin took advantage of this pretty vulnerable moment. But we should note, just to make sure we get our timelines right, that before Afghanistan, Putin already had troops outside of Ukraine perched on the border and there were questions about whether or not he was going to invade in April of 2021.

So, there were questions about this beforehand. He does it for myriad reasons. Why he does it afterward, that could be Afghanistan, but there's this part of the conversation that always goes Putin saw Afghanistan and then started preparing. Well, no. The preparations were before, but maybe the decision to go in came afterward. But I don't know. I don't really have specific intel on that. I think I would be surprised if Afghanistan didn't feature in with Putin's calculation, but I'm not exactly sure how that would really feature. But he might've really gone, ‘They look bad now. Go in.’ But again, this is a debate for history and eventually someone will uncover, probably a hundred years from now, the trove from the Kremlin that was the intelligence document that shows why, but I don't have the answer right now.

jmk

So, the preparations to defend Ukraine really seem to be a shining moment. I mean, there are people who could criticize how we've handled Ukraine since then. But the way that the Biden administration was able to get allies on board to assist Ukraine and even after the invasion, especially after the invasion, able to really consolidate support and even expand NATO during that time by getting Finland and Sweden to be able to join, it really revitalized the alliance.

It highlights the strengths of what the Biden administration has been able to do in foreign policy, because I don't think that the Trump administration would have been able to bring the allies on board with the kind of tension and hostility that they had with Europe at the time. It just feels like this really kind of played into their strengths. Is that the kind of situation that you saw happening as you saw events kind of develop at the time?

Alexander Ward

Yeah, look, the response to the intelligence that they got that was very clear and specific to what the Russians were intending, I think it’s a success in the sense that they got Europeans on board with a defense plan, a military assistance and sanctions plan. They warned the Ukrainians, although I think actually one of the newsier parts of this book is that the Zelensky-Biden relationship was extremely tense. Zelensky wasn't buying a lot of what the U. S. was telling them, even though the intelligence was pretty clear and specific.

But the fact that they got the Europeans on board, sanctions were in place, the military assistance plan ready to go, the world informed of what the Russians were up to with this pretty strategic decision to pre-bunk some stuff with releasing intelligence, technically called downgrading intelligence. It doesn't sound good. It sounds like it's less true, but it just means basically declassified. But public releasing that, was well and good. The part we always sort of forget of the response was the diplomatic aspect, which was the Russians were saying, ‘We are worried about the Ukrainians tilting further westward and we're worried about NATO expansion.’ So, the Americans said, ‘Let's talk about it. Let's have a conversation and see if we can address your concerns at the table and not on the battlefield.’

I think the Americans were very clear that they didn't think this was going to work. They started talking to Sergey Lavrov, the foreign minister who, despite his title, has no power. There was sort of a sense of let's be caught trying. Let's legitimize our response, our pretty harsh response that we're planning for the Russians, by at least genuinely trying to have a diplomatic conversation that never really panned out. Now, the critique, and it's a fair one is you still didn't stop the Russians from invading. Did you? Which is a pretty big gap. The reason being, if you talk to the Biden team, they would say, ‘All of those concerns, all of those critiques stem from the fact that we didn't pump the Ukrainians full of weapons before the invasion and we didn't sanction the Russians before the invasion.’

Their argument, and I'm not saying it's the right one, I'm just saying their argument is if you flood Ukraine with advanced weaponry at the start, then you're really incentivizing the Russians to invade even earlier because it's better for them to attack a weaker Ukrainian military than a stronger one. So that would be their counter to that. The other counter to the sanctions is the sanctions are a deterrent. If you sanction the Russians early, then Putin has no sword of Damocles above his head. He's just going to go ahead and attack. That's their counter to the critique. But at the end of the day, and of course, they have no choice but to admit the Russians did invade the Ukrainians even though they tried to stop them.

There's a line in the book, and I wish I had it memorized - I should go back and read my own book, there's an official who basically says, ‘You know, we did everything right and we still failed.’ So, this is sort of where we're at. You've got people thinking that was a very strong, and I make the argument here, I think, about as good a response as one could have to this. In fact, one clear sign of success is the Europeans, who were definitely at the start of all this process skeptical about doing anything, blew through their list of sanctions right away, so fast that the Americans couldn't catch up and had to devise more sanctions to keep up with the Europeans. At the same time, Russia still invaded.

So, can you call it a success? I don't know. Maybe you can call the preparations a success, but you can't really call the policy overall a success because the intended result was a failure. But then you talk to some other Biden folks and they'll say Putin was going to do what Putin was going to do. There's only so much influence we have. We told him what was going to happen. The Ukrainians were clear that they would fight. Putin had all the information if he wanted it available to him to not do it and he did it anyway. In which case, the world reacted.

jmk

Let's go back to the part where you mentioned that one of the big reporting reveals that you had in the book was that the relationship between Zelensky and the Biden administration was a little bit tense before Russia invaded. I was really fascinated learning about that as well. It's something that I was not aware of, but to be fair, I wasn't really paying too much attention to Ukraine before Russia invaded. A lot of what I know about it is reading in hindsight through books and articles that are talking about what was happening in the past rather than following it at the present. I think it's particularly relevant right now because Zelensky is being described by many as being a more difficult ally than he was portrayed early on in the conflict.

I was listening to Ezra Klein just a week or two ago where he was talking to Richard Haass. They were describing Zelensky as somebody who is a much more difficult ally now and that's a critique that's coming from the left now rather than coming from the right. So, it's a different perspective on Zelensky than we had in 2022. Why don't you go ahead and refresh us on what that relationship was like before 2022 with Zelensky and members of the Biden administration?

Alexander Ward

Yeah, it was bad. It was like screaming match bad. As I noted, Americans had clear intelligence of what the Russians were intending to do. The US presented it not only to its European allies, but also to Zelensky and Zelensky did not buy it. He thought the Americans, partly because of the failure of Afghanistan, didn't necessarily want to have another failure, so he thought that the US was overreaching based on what they had. I should note that Zelensky wasn't alone. There were some European allies, namely the Germans and the French, who were not convinced at the start, but were ultimately convinced. Until invasion day, Zelensky was not convinced.

Now we have a couple of reasons for it. One was, ‘Hey, America, if you are genuinely this concerned that the Russians are about to invade my country, then why aren't you pumping me full of weapons? Why aren't you sending me everything you got? Because that would be commensurate with the urgency with which you're presenting this information. And also why aren't the allies doing that too? Why aren't you sanctioning the Russians?’ So basically, some of the stuff we talked about earlier, why aren't you doing this stuff? The fact was that the US wasn't, especially in partnership with allies. As long as it was, it was like maybe they're just freaked out, but not that serious.

Then there's also just the internal stuff for Zelensky, which the Ukrainians didn't have the intelligence. He was like, ‘I don't see what you're seeing.’ You know, we can talk about whether there's some Russian stuff inside the Ukrainian government that maybe hid that, but regardless, he didn't have what the US had. Then we have to remember that the political aspect for Zelensky before the war was pretty dire. Most of the public did not like him. He was fumbling on a lot of economic stuff, especially. So, now you have the US and some Western countries saying your country is about to be invaded and your economy is going to tank because everyone's worried about an invasion.

He's like, ‘Guys, stop saying this. This is freaking out my people. This is going to hinder investment. This is going to crush the country that I lead and I'm already not popular.’ Now he's not saying that, but that's obviously the subtext. Meanwhile, you've got Biden and Zelensky on multiple calls where Biden's like, ‘Dude, defend your country. What are you doing? Here's what's to come.’ And Zelensky's also mad I should note because right at the beginning of the Biden administration, lest we forget, their main focus was to put Russia in a box. Biden meets Putin in Geneva in the summer of 2021 to establish red lines. ‘Please do not cross this. We understand each other.’ The Biden team leaves figuratively and literally high fiving. Like, ‘We nailed it. He's not going to cross any lines here.’

Then Biden meets Zelensky at the White House. So, even though Biden calls Zelensky beforehand, this felt like a snub in Kiev. That the Americans don't really care. So also recall that Zelensky's pretty hurt by it. Anyway, all this is to say that it was bad, like really, really bad and rancorous. The Americans and the Ukrainians have never really been on the same page since the start. The Ukrainians always want more than the US is willing to give and so there's always been that tension.

It's not as bad today, actually, as it was before the invasion. And nothing sharpens the mind like having tanks rolling into your country. So, the second the Russians invade, Zelensky’s like, ‘Got it. Okay. This is happening. Where are my weapons? Where are my sanctions? What can you do for me?’ So that has obviously changed the scenario, but yeah, really one of the reporting big nuggets here is just how truly angry Biden and Zelensky were at each other.

jmk

I was shocked when I came across the line in your book, and I don't have it in front of me, but Zelensky actually expressed remorse that the Trump administration was gone, because at least they could show hospitality. He's referring to the fact that the Biden administration continued to punt on bringing Zelensky into Washington and when they finally did it was when nobody was there. So, he felt incredibly snubbed. Meanwhile, as you just mentioned Biden is meeting with Putin in a specific summit where he's giving Putin incredible respect and Zelensky's feeling that he's more focused on Russia than he is actually focused on Ukraine, who's supposed to be maybe not a formal ally, but kind of an informal one. It really shocked me that Zelensky was so frustrated with the Biden administration that he wished that the Trump administration was still in place.

Alexander Ward

Yeah, I mean, lest we forget Trump was willing to talk to anybody. He didn't like the Ukrainians towards the end for myriad reasons, but he talked to anybody. So, he would talk to Zelensky at the time. Also, even though Trump himself is against foreign wars and whatever obviously he's been pretty deferential to Putin and happy with him. His administration was particularly tough on the Russians by sending defensive weapons, some offensive weapons, to Ukraine by sanctioning the Russians after the Skripal murders in the UK. Trump the man was pretty acquiescent towards the Russians. Trump the administration far tougher on the Russians, and frankly showed a lot of love for the Ukrainians. They had a Ukraine envoy, Kurt Volker, although it was a halftime job, who did everything he could to get the Ukrainians on board.

There were genuine characters in the Trump years that were showing a lot of attention and care for the Ukrainian plight. Then the Biden team comes in and they're just not that interested. It's Russia that gets most of the attention up front. Now you could argue that makes a lot of sense. You have to renew New Start which was the nuclear deal there that got done. Then, of course, the Russians were still in Ukraine and they had done the SolarWinds cyber hack and Navalny, et cetera. So, Biden and his team calculated if we get the Russians to really understand what our red lines are, then we can put the Russia problem in a box and then we can start to deal with the externalities of that.

That's a fair case to make. Start with the bigger guy and work your way down the list. Of course, that doesn't necessarily make the Ukrainians feel good and it hinders you down the line. Of course, I think if the administration had a rewind button, they would reverse it knowing what they know now, but policy is not made like that. It's made directly in a timeline. But all this is to say that the fact it took Zelensky a long time to meet one on one with Biden for Kiev to at least feel, not necessarily see, but feel that the Biden team cared about them. It took a really long time.

That may in part, I should note, be yet another reason why the critics are saying that maybe Putin saw this. He saw they met with me. Then it was Zelensky afterward. Afghanistan's happening, Europe's weak. Maybe they don't care. Maybe, for some reason, there were folks in the Trump years that cared more about Ukraine than Biden does. That's speculation, but it has definitely been brought up as part of why did this happen.

jmk

So, the last few years, it feels like foreign policy, and not even foreign policy, but just world events are really capturing our imagination much more than events happening within the country. That's really put a strong focus on what the Biden administration does, what Jake Sullivan does, what Antony Blinken does, what all of the Biden foreign policy administration is actually doing. Do you feel that foreign policy has ultimately been a strength or a weakness of this administration?

Alexander Ward

I mean, I've been on record basically giving the Biden team like a B minus leaning to B within the period of the book mainly because of Ukraine. I think that actually weighs it pretty strongly, but Afghanistan, that's like a C minus, maybe D.

jmk

Extend it out to the present day. What grade would you give them with everything that's happened in Israel and the continuing efforts in Ukraine since then?

Alexander Ward

Yeah, I think a C would be the highest, yeah. Look, the Ukraine stuff isn't exactly on them. This is Congress. But maybe you could argue that they should have seen this coming. They should have planned for that. Israel, Hamas, I don't think you can call a success for the clear fact that they, like the Trump team, focused a lot on the Abraham accords. It’s all well and good. A great idea to have the Israelis normalize ties with Middle Eastern countries and improve their relations. The problem there, of course, is you leave the Israeli-Palestinian issue to fester, if you don't solve that, something like on October 7th could happen. I'm not saying that's why it happened. Hamas didn't have to do what it did. That's its choice. But if you don't resolve that crisis, there's always the opportunity for it to get worse.

Ukraine is where it's at. Afghanistan, yes, we're out of it. Life there has gotten a lot worse, although we haven't seen any, as of today, as of this recording, terrorist attacks necessarily emanating out of it. We could also argue that the Biden team has ignored African policy. There are genuine crises happening there. They did get involved in a diplomatic effort between the DRC and Rwanda and seems to calm that down a little bit, but there's stuff happening in Sudan and elsewhere and they pretty much ignored that. Latin America policy, I'm not sure it exists. I haven't seen it. They've got a lot of hostages out. We can't deny that. But some high-profile ones like Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan remain in Russia. So, yeah, there's a lot of problems.

Also, this is my own thing, I love the North Korea problem more than anything else. That's my favorite thing to cover. So, anytime I call the administration, I'm like, ‘That's a failure, right? I mean, the North Koreans have gotten stronger on your watch.’ And they say, ‘Well, no, we've gotten closer to the Japanese and the South Koreans and we brought them together and that's a big success.’ I go, ‘That's great. I'm not knocking that. But the North Koreans have more nukes now than before.’ And they kind of go, ‘Well, you're looking at that through too narrow a picture.’ I'm like, ‘I'm not. That is the issue.’ So, anyway, I think it's a C. It's just for lack of foresight, some execution issues.

But I'll be honest, you get any administration and before they take over you say you get a C, a passing grade, for foreign policy, I bet they take it. They go sure. Everyone wants an A and everyone wants a B, but the way the world is, you'd be like sure. I'll take a C where we messed up some stuff, but we did some stuff great. We'll take it, so we can focus on the things that most people vote on anyway, which is domestic policy. But if you look at the record, I think it's probably better than the Trump administration record.

But not by much, really not by much, because Trump had some genuine successes and some things that he did, again, that were unorthodox, but that ultimately were not as disastrous as people expected them to be in which case that I think you actually get more points for that because he went against sort of the conventional wisdom and the conventional wisdom as it often is, was proven wrong.

jmk

So, some of the things that surprised me in the book and surprised me about this conversation is what's not being discussed. We've said very little about China and yet every administration says that they're going to pivot to China, every administration since Barack Obama. And yet China doesn't seem to occupy as much of our foreign policy as I would have thought it would. Then secondly, Biden talks a lot about democracy, the need to defend democracy. And other than Ukraine, it doesn't seem like there's much focus on democracy within their foreign policy. I mean, there's some rhetoric, but it doesn't seem to occupy key events or key focuses or really strategies that you see. What does that say to you - the fact that neither of those issues is as important as we would have expected when the Biden administration came into power?

Alexander Ward

Well, one thing when you write a book about crisis is that crises take over everything. Again, everyone comes up with best laid plans, but life happens. In a way I admit in the book I didn't focus on China too much, but part of it was because narratively speaking, if I'm writing a story, the problem with China is that it is in everything and therefore it is nothing. Everything is literally about China. We got a strong economy. Why? Because we got to beat the Chinese. We're doing the Inflation Reduction Act. Why? Because we got to beat green tech. We've got to deter the Russians from going further into Europe. Why? Because the Chinese are watching.

I couldn't write a thing about China because China was everything. It would feel really weird narratively speaking to be like, ‘Oh, and China…’ I'm sure there'll be books, other books coming down the line that will be more focused on China and if you care just about that relationship, check those out. But this book is really about a team that comes in with this grand plan to defend democracy at home and abroad, to improve on the Trump years, or at least what they thought needed to be improved on in the Trump years, and then get punched in the face with crises and how they dealt with those.

Now to your point about the democracy bit, I actually think it's hidden in a lot of its agenda. Defending Ukraine is part of that. Defending Taiwan is a big part of that. Working to get Sweden and Finland into NATO, although those were their sovereign decisions, a part of that. Working to take on the Chinese in the manufacturing space and also keeping sets of technologies away from them, that is also a part of this, because then they won't be able to subjugate democracy. In the same way that China is in everything, democracy is in everything. But you're right, it is not as big a focus.

I think you'll see it more now with campaign time simply because it helps Biden make a contrast with Trump and especially his foreign policy. I think just today, the day we're recording, Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, who just met with Trump in Mar-a-Lago said that Trump basically committed to not spending one penny on Ukraine. Big contrast. That is not a small-d democratic foreign policy, because you're not defending a democracy. But you'll have the Trump team go, we're focusing on our democracy in the US because we're not spending resources on a foreign country. Anyway, different definitions of what that may be, but I think you'll see Biden care more about the small-d democratic angle of his foreign policy as the 2024 election heats up.

jmk

You mentioned that during the Trump years foreign policy was incredibly relevant and I don't want to take anything away from that. But it did feel during the 2020 election that foreign policy took a big backseat to domestic policy in terms of the campaign. This year it feels very different. It does feel like foreign policy is front and center in the minds of a lot of voters in a way that it didn't really feel in 2020 and even in 2016. Trump might have talked about the needs to pull out of foreign wars, but it felt more part of a conversation about a bigger sense of who we were as Americans and in terms of American policy rather than foreign policy.

This election does feel a little bit like it could be somewhat of a referendum on the Biden foreign policy. Do you think that the foreign policy might end up becoming a liability or do you think that it might become an advantage as things continue to develop over the course of the next year?

Alexander Ward

 I'm not sure the polls show that people really care about foreign policy here too much. It's usual, right? Foreign policy is never really at the top of anyone's mind when they pull the lever for their candidate. But as the adage goes, foreign policy can't make a presidency, but it can break one. So, in this case, I think you're right that when Afghanistan happened, we saw Biden's numbers tank. That does seem to be correlated. Of course, Biden bet it all really on the defense of Ukraine. As of this moment, it's not looking too hot for the next year. If the supplemental were to come to the floor, so goes the theory, it would pass. But Speaker Mike Johnson has a lot of say over whether that gets on the floor.

Anyway, it's possible that it becomes a liability if the Russians advance in Ukraine, if say the Chinese act more aggressively towards Taiwan, if there's a terrorist attack. There's a lot of time between now and November. There's a lot of time for things to go bad, a lot of time for things to go good. But what I will say is one thing that is for sure, regardless of what happens, and this is not me telling you to vote for, it's just for you to know what's going to happen. We are going to have a Biden or a Trump presidency at this point and they are going to change American foreign policy in different ways. With Biden, it will be gradations from the mean and Trump will be a near clean break, if not a full clean break from American the foreign policy mean.

So even if the foreign policy is not at the top of your head, whoever you pull the lever for, tick the box for, you are effectively voting for that future foreign policy direction for the United States. In a sense, I did not mean it this way because when I titled it The Internationalist, I didn't know Trump would be the nominee, but in effect you've got the internationalists versus the nationalists. Different outlooks, not necessarily that one is better than the other. They all have pros and cons.

They are wholly different views of America's place in the world and far more contrasted now than in 2020 where Trump still had more traditional minded folks in his orbit. Now they are more in Trump's line of foreign policy thinking, which means you get a more unorthodox American foreign policy. As people have termed it to me a conservative nationalist foreign policy. America first is too simplistic. It's different. But all this is to say is whoever you vote for, Biden or Trump at this point, you are voting for a radically different vision of American foreign policy. You may not like all elements of it, to be clear. Even if you vote for that person, you may wish that there were certain elements of the other guys, but ultimately, they are offering something that really cannot be reconciled. Sometimes you vote for someone and there's only slightly differences.

These are different guys at an important moment in our foreign policy history. So for that, I think foreign policy ends up mattering, but is it at the forefront? I don't know. I'm always skeptical. It feels like an elite level sport. You and I focus on this. But everyone is naturally understandably focused on kitchen table issues and maybe America’s standing in the world creeps into some of those conversations, but my bet is probably not.

jmk

Well, Alex, thanks so much for joining me today. The book once again is The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy after Trump. I really recommend it. It's surprising to me that a book that focuses on events that are so recent could really, really give a chance to be able to reflect on everything that's happened. It's surprising how much you discover that's new or that you remember that you've actually forgotten about over the past few years. So, thank you so much for writing it. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Alexander Ward

 Thanks for all, it was a pleasure.