14 The New York Review
US bases in Iraq—seemingly designed
to avoid US casualties—adequately
avenged his death. Americans can ex-
pect more retaliation, possibly major
cyberattacks, in coming months. And
while neither side wants a war, Trump
is in the unenviable position of having
inflamed an enemy that can act to hurt
him at any point during the coming
campaign.
Events in the Middle East in the days
immediately following Suleimani’s
death shifted Democratic primary vot-
ers’ attention from domestic issues to
the responsibilities of the commander
in chief. With impeachment looming,
and with news cycles these days that
are often only hours long, it is impos-
sible to predict how long this will last.
Candidates’ reactions were true to
form. Sanders and Warren highlighted
the danger of being dragged recklessly
into another war. Biden, Buttigieg, and
Amy Klobuchar focused on the lack
of any discernible strategy in Trump’s
Iran policy or of a responsible process,
including consultation with Congress
and with allies, in the decision to act
when he did.
So far, the crisis has strengthened
the former vice-president and longtime
chair of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee: voters feel reassured by
Biden’s years of experience. The flip
side of experience, however, is the re-
cord of judgment, in this case Biden’s
vote in favor of George W. Bush’s inva-
sion of Iraq, which Sanders (who voted
against it) and to a lesser degree But-
tigieg now raise more forcefully. The
new focus may also be a double-edged
sword for Buttigieg: although he can
point to his military experience, his
youth may give voters pause as they
contemplate a renewed danger of con-
flict in the Middle East.
Relations with Russia and China are
also dangerously unhinged. Both of
these US adversaries now see Trump
as an asset. Thanks to administration
inaction and to Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell’s refusal to move for-
ward legislation to strengthen election
security, Russia will be able to repeat
in 2020 at least some of its 2016 success
in intervening on Trump’s behalf. The
Russian journalist Alexei Venedik-
tov, interviewed in The New Yorker,
explained precisely why: Russia sees
in Trump a producer of “turbulence.”
“A country that is beset by turbulence
closes up on itself—and Russia’s hands
are freed.”
From Syria, Ukraine, Northeast
Asia, and a shaky NATO uncertain of
American commitment for the first
time in its history, to an American so-
ciety polarized as never before and be-
coming inured to being fed a diet of lies,
Trump has produced bounteous gifts
for Putin. Having pulled the US out of
the INF treaty limiting intermediate-
range nuclear weapons and refused to
extend the New START treaty limit-
ing strategic nuclear weapons, he has
raised the specter of a world wiped
completely clean of superpower arms-
control agreements, the work of half
a century of painstaking negotiation.
The next president will have only a few
days after the inauguration before New
START expires to reverse a decision
made on the absurd ground that the
treaty should not be extended because
it does not include China. The treaty
limits Russia and the US to 1,550 de-
ployed strategic nuclear weapons each,
while China is believed to have about
three hundred. Someday, a trilateral
treaty may be necessary and achiev-
able; meanwhile, confidence embodied
in verifiable arms-control agreements
between the two nuclear superpowers
must be preserved. Beginning again
from nothing would be vastly more dif-
ficult. Living with nothing risks a re-
sumed nuclear arms race.
Trump’s China policy has focused
single-mindedly on trade. After mak-
ing the almost meaningless bilateral
trade deficit his measure of success and
talking blithely of how easy it is to win a
trade war, he has backed down, signing
a n i nter i m dea l that a mou nts to ver y l it-
tle. More important structural changes
in market access rules and intellectual
property protection have been shunted
to postelection negotiations. Chinese
officials recognize weakness when they
see it. Meanwhile, despite the admin-
istration’s contentious rhetoric about
Sino–US conflict, it has had little to say
about the democratic upheaval in Hong
Kong or the incarceration of huge num-
bers of Chinese Uighurs. While there is
broad agreement in the US on the need
for greater toughness against unfair
Chinese trade policies and intellectual
property theft, experts see only danger
a he a d f ro m a n ap p ro a c h t h at do e s not h -
ing to preserve a degree of mutual trust
in the bilateral relationship and fails to
recognize the necessity for cooperation
on global issues ranging from climate
change to nonproliferation.
Trump’s bizarre, self-defeating re-
jections of American alliances are
welcome gifts to Beijing, as they have
been for Moscow. In his erratic talks
with Kim Jong-un, Trump consistently
ignored South Korea and Japan, both
directly threatened by Pyongyang. He
then demanded, out of the blue, that
South Korea quadruple its contribution
to the cost of stationing US troops on
its soil, a demand that makes no sense
economically or strategically. To top
it off, he ignored a simmering dispute
between these two allies, the corner-
stones of America’s strategic position
in the Pacific, so that 2019 ended with
Beijing stepping forward to mediate
between them, which only a few years
ago would have been inconceivable—
and still should be.
The arena in which Trump’s policies
have done the greatest damage while
being least recognized is his across-
the-board weakening of multilateral
problem-solving and therefore the rule
of law. He has pulled the United States
not only out of the Paris climate accord,
the Iran nuclear deal, and the INF in-
termediate-range nuclear forces treaty,
but also the Trans-Pacific Partnership
on trade, the UN Human Rights Coun-
cil, UNESCO, and the Arms Trade
Treaty, and he appears ready to kill
New START. By refusing to approve any
nominees to fill vacancies on the World
Trade Organization’s panel of judges,
he has damaged, perhaps irretrievably,
the world’s foremost body for resolv-
ing trade disputes. The irony of this
is that over the years the US has won
more WTO trade cases than it has lost.
The greater damage is that the WTO,
with only a single judge left, cannot act
on behalf of the more than 150 other
states that continue to support it. The
message is widely understood: the US
now prefers to address trade disputes
bilaterally, through the raw power of its
economy, rather than through the mul-tilateral, rule-governed mechanisms it
has spent decades building.Notwithstanding the enormity of this
set of challenges—and they are only
the most immediate of what Trump’s
successor will face—the Democratic
candidates have had relatively little to
say about them. It has become an arti-
cle of faith for many Democratic politi-
cians that Americans will only support
a foreign policy if it is tied directly to
their economic well-being, especially
that of the middle class. It is impos-
sible, however, to tie the importance of
stopping the spread of nuclear weapons
to middle- class pocketbooks, for in-
stance, or to describe US strategic in-
terests in Ukraine or Japan or the need
for a balanced, long-term China strat-
egy as a matter of near-term economic
benefit. The belief that it is necessary to
do so, or else to avoid foreign policy en-
tirely, shunts aside a necessary conver-
sation. It likely also underestimates the
American voter who may be resentful
of domestic policies that have created
staggering levels of economic inequal-
ity and of foreign policies that seem
overly militarized or without clear pur-
pose, but who may be perfectly willing
to support a foreign policy they feel
makes sense.
Warren’s foreign policy proposals
square this circle by transposing her
domestic economic pitch to the in-
ternational level. Endless wars in the
Middle East, bad trade deals, global
financial risks, and belligerence from
Russia and China are all, in her tell-
ing, caused by “champions of cutthroat
capitalism” nourished by worldwide
corruption. The villains in nearly every
case are greedy corporations. What-
ever one thinks of this worldview, the
seriousness with which Warren has ap-
proached issues during her campaign is
admirable. Her website lists sixty-nine
policy plans. Unfortunately, the pur-
suit of details too frequently leads to
utterly impractical results. Her plan for
achieving fairer trade deals, for exam-
ple, includes making negotiating drafts
public; adding more advisory commit-
tees and labor, environmental, and
consumer representatives to existing
ones; and promising to seek congres-
sional approval of trade agreements
only “when every regional advisory
committee and the labor, consumer,
and rural advisory committees unani-
mously [emphasis added] certify that
the agreement serves their interests.”
Good luck with that.
Warren and Sanders agree on many
things, but while she errs in saying too
much, he barely touches on foreign
policy. You have to scroll far down the
Sanders website to find the little he has
to say about it. He speaks cogently on
the stump about the need to “privilege
diplomacy,” to work more closely with
allies, and to favor a posture of “part-
nership, rather than dominance,” but he
has not gone beyond such generalities
except in calling for changes in the US–
Saudi relationship and ending US sup-
port that prolongs the killing in Yemen.
His long-standing opposition to Ameri-
can interventions in Latin America and
his approval of governments that pro-
fess concern for the poor have led him
to express support for highly repressive
leftist regimes in the likes of Nicaragua,
Venezuela, and Bolivia. This could well
prove to be heavy political baggage in a
presidential election.Warren and, to a lesser degree,
Klobuchar are the only candidates
who have had the courage to address
the country’s mushrooming defense
budget ($738 billion for the coming
year), which now consumes more than
60 percent of all federal discretionary
spending.^1 The defense budget, in War-
ren’s words, “has been too large for too
long.” Yet she says only that it should
be cut to an undefined “sustainable”
level. Klobuchar warns of the “false
logic that higher defense spending au-
tomatically leads to a better military or
a safer nation,” and correctly notes that
the defense budget is riddled with “du-
plicative and unnecessary programs.”
She wants a “much clearer look at how
money is being spent” and on what, but
she leaves it at that. Buttigieg hints that
the budget may be too big but avoids
reaching any conclusion. Instead, he
focuses on outdated priorities, criticiz-
ing a budget that spends “more on a
single frigate than on artificial intelli-
gence and machine learning.”
Rather than take on the defense bud-
get, it is politically easy to promise to
do more for veterans, and most of the
candidates do so. Because of his mili-
tary service, Buttigieg would be the
first Democratic candidate in decades
to be entirely comfortable talking to
and about the military—a significant
asset for the Democratic Party, espe-
cially in contrast to Trump’s infamous
“bone spurs.”^2 Buttigieg’s 2019 Veter-
ans Day speech, in which he went off-
text to add that it is “better late than
never to say thank you—and welcome
home” to those who served in Vietnam
and were not treated appropriately
when they returned, is a powerful re-
minder that personal service confers a
legitimacy in addressing military topics
for which there is no substitute.Given the length of time that Biden
has held senior positions in govern-
ment, it is not surprising that he hasn’t
been able to avoid the trap of looking
backward on foreign policy. Too often
his default answer is “I was the one
who” did this or that ten years ago.
Worse, his oft-repeated call to “place
America back at the head of the table”
suggests that he believes that the world
has scarcely changed since the cold
war. More surprising is how mushy and
off-key many of his principal propos-
als seem. He promises, for example, to
convene a global Climate Summit in
his first hundred days in office, at which
he would use “our moral authority” to
persuade attendees to “join the United
States” in making more ambitious
pledges to cut emissions. Quite apart
from the fact that a serious global con-
ference cannot remotely be readied in
one hundred days, this proposal seems
oblivious to the enormous amount of
technical work done by members of the
Paris agreement for their regular meet-
ings, to American withdrawal from that
agreement, and to domestic policies
of the past three years promoting coal
and fossil fuels generally, all of which(^1) See my “America’s Indefensible De-
fense Budget,” The New York Review,
July 18, 2019.
(^2) Biden received student deferments
and was then exempted from military
service because of teenage asthma;
Sanders applied for conscientious ob-
jector status because of his opposition
to the Vietnam War.