Vox’s Alex Ward on the Pivot from Trump to Biden

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Show notes:

Michele Flournoy is ready for the spotlight, Alex Ward for Vox, 11/23/20
Tony Blinken, one of Biden’s most trusted aids, is reportedly chosen as his Secretary of State, Alex Ward for Vox, 11/23/20

Archival audio:

Biden Transition Team Meets With National Security Advisers | NBC Nightly News November 17, 2020
How will the Biden presidency impact US foreign relations? | US election 2020 DW, November 8, 2020
Biden expected to announce Antony Blinken, Linda Thomas-Greenfield to high-level positions CBS, November 23, 2020
Biden has big climate change plans. But can he get it done? PBS NewsHour, November 14, 2020
Joe Biden: fighting climate change "a top priority" - BBC News, November 9, 2020
#WashWeekPBS: Congress in a Biden administration, PBS Washington Week, November 14, 2020
Andy Card: 'Critically Important' That Biden Be Well Prepared On Day One | Andrea Mitchell | MSNBC, November 12, 2020

Transcript:

November 23, 2020

ALEX WARD: If you learn anything from the election, it's that there is a pretty big contingent of folks that voted either for him or for Trump who are attracted to a “rebuild America at home” kind of message.

MARK HANNAH: Hello, my name is Mark, and I'm your host for another episode of None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. Today, we're talking about Joe Biden's presidential victory and what it means for the foreign policy and national security challenges our country faces. We'll be digging into news about the Afghanistan war, Joe Biden's foreign policy priorities, and importantly, some of his cabinet picks which we're expecting tomorrow but which have started leaking out to the press.

We will give you a heads up on who his Secretary of State will be and learn more about his U.N. ambassador as well as his National Security Advisor. Of course, we'll be talking about how Joe Biden will navigate working with Congress to push his party's agenda ahead, especially if the Republicans maintain control of the Senate.

We have a very special guest here today to help make sense of it. He is Alex Ward, a reporter at Vox who covers everything from international security to defense. He also co-hosts a wonderful podcast, which we commend to you, Vox’s podcast Worldly. Check it out. Subscribe to that as well.

Alex, thanks for being with us.

WARD: Pleasure to be back.

HANNAH: Yeah. So Joe Biden is the victor, maybe not by the margins or not accompanied by the blue wave many had predicted. Last time we had you on None of the Above, it was back in April. We talked about Donald Trump and what his foreign policy legacy will be, what his outlook has been, and what the strategy was. And strategy and legacy is, of course, getting cut short by the onset of the Biden Administration in January. But he still has a possibility to make some impact on foreign policy. What do you think he's going to do on the foreign policy front in the weeks he has left in office? Obviously, he has asked some questions which have been reported in the media about potential kinetic strikes on Iran. There's been talk about a precipitous withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan that a lot of people think is overdue. What do you suspect is going to be the thing he tries to get done in the last weeks he has in office?

WARD: The general overview, I think, is he's going to try to do things that will be incredibly hard for Biden to reverse. And so, as you mentioned, if he strikes Iran, there's very little Biden can do to come into the presidency and go, “Oh, guys, calm down. It's a new guy in charge.” He would inherit a pretty big conflict there. You could see some extra sanctions on Iran as well. You could see growing tariffs on China, perhaps.

HANNAH: On Iran, there's it's been reported that, yes, in its last days in office the administration is going to slap on sanctions, and they're doing this particularly so that Joe Biden has a hard time reversing it and so Joe Biden has a hard time reinstating or expanding the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal. Is this just pettiness, and to what extent do you think Biden will feel political pressure not to reverse these sanctions?

WARD: Well, we know where Biden stands when it comes to the Iran deal. His stance is that we need Iran to come back into compliance and therefore, the United States will go into the Iran deal, which would then mean lifting the sanctions. So he's already at a place that is hard to actually take off those sanctions. If Trump were to add more, it shouldn't be too hard to take them off as part of a larger Iran nuclear deal. That said, if Iran does come back into compliance, you will still have more sanctions on Iran that Trump will have imposed, in which case the tensions between the two countries only escalate.

HANNAH: And Afghanistan. One of the biggest promises candidate Trump made to his voters in 2016 was that he was going to end endless wars. He's been in office nearly four years now. It’s not clear that there is an end in sight. We continue to muddle along in Afghanistan. What political headwinds do you think Donald Trump faces, if any, for bringing troops home from Afghanistan?

WARD: Well, I think Trump has been somewhat—it's been forgotten that he told Tucker Carlson he had been convinced he needed to keep troops in Afghanistan for a counterterrorism and intelligence force. That's what this is: twenty-five hundred troops, which we're drawing down to by January 15, five days before Biden's inauguration, is the floor for that kind of force. I mean, it is as small as you can get it from experts I've talked to. If you actually want to play Whack-a-Mole in Afghanistan and take out terrorists and keep tabs on them, twenty-five hundred is really the least amount of troops you can have. So this is consistent with what he said. Now, he did promise to end forever wars. We know that. And he said he would withdraw troops from elsewhere—Syria, Iraq—and bring them all home. He's not doing that, but I think what you've seen is the fight within the administration between the people he's placed at the Pentagon who wanted to go down to zero by mid-December and other folks who thought, “OK, well, how can we square the circle between that instinct and also keep with what Trump wanted?” And so I think the twenty-five hundred counterterrorism force is that squared circle.

HANNAH: So, Biden ends up inheriting a situation where he has twenty-five hundred troops on the ground. That's not sustainable over the long term, right? So, he ends up being in a position where he needs to finish the job and bring them home by May 1, as the U.S.-Taliban agreement would compel, or do another surge or a troop escalation, which he's been obviously loath to do when he was in the Obama administration. That puts him in a tough space, but it also gives him political cover to end the war because he can always point the finger back at Trump and say, “Well, this guy left me with this. This is what I inherited. This is the deal Zalmay Khalilzad negotiated.”

What do we end up with? Do you think Biden is relieved on some level if Trump follows through and brings home two thousand of the forty-five hundred troops that are there now?

WARD: Oh, I totally think this is a Trump gift to Biden—an unwitting one, but it is. Biden has been pretty clear that he's always wanted a counterterrorism force in Afghanistan, and twenty-five hundred is probably where he would have brought it, because I think if he had to square the circle—he's also promised to end forever wars but wanted that force—this is about where he would be. Trump faced a similar debate to what Biden is going to have. If I'm Biden, I'm probably looking at twenty-five hundred and thinking, “This is good. This is probably where I would keep that.” He might do a cosmetic, “We're going do an Afghanistan strategy review and see where we're at.” They might add a couple hundred because there'll be some general who says, “We missed a spot in Kandahar,” or whatever. That might go up to three thousand. But I feel this is where the U.S. troop presence is going to be forever.

Interlude featuring archival audio

WARD: By forever, I mean a really long time. I wouldn't expect all those troops to come home. I don't think the U.S. is going to give up on Afghanistan for years.

HANNAH: And yet people who are advising the Vice President, the soon-to-be President, including Susan Rice and Tammy Duckworth, have said after Trump's announcement that an immediate drawdown during the transition is just, quote, “prime ground for our adversaries to look and see what they can get away with while we're distracted.” There does seem to be a sense that some of the Biden advisers are stuck in this kind of mentality or this conventional wisdom that somehow a precipitous withdrawal is opposed to American interests or that it's going to be sloppy. It's easy to portray Donald Trump as haphazard and reckless, and I think they’re doing that. They're falling into the trap when in fact, they should appreciate this gift and write a thank you note, right? Is that essentially what you're saying?

WARD: Well, I guess what I would say is if you're looking at this from the highest level perspective, there's nothing hasty about a withdrawal after nineteen years. If you're looking at this from the current moment, there is something to be said for a fast withdrawal during this political moment. The Taliban and the Afghan government are in the middle of diplomatic talks. Taking away U.S. troops minimizes or at least somewhat lowers the Afghan government's leverage in those negotiations, and doing it in a two-month timeline… Yes, we can get those troops out. Yes, we'll be able to get some weaponry and infrastructure out, but they'll also be put in a position where they'll have to destroy some sensitive stuff, including certain bases. There's a lot of hasty things here. It's not the greatest withdrawal.

It also goes against Trump's own maxim of “never tell the enemy what you're going to do.” He is now quite literally telling us what he's going to do, and yet if you're in the Biden Administration I think it's hard to argue, “Oh no, this is really going to put us in a bad spot,” because this is probably what they were going to end up doing anyway.

HANNAH: Some commentators—really sober, smart ones I respect, including Barney Rubin over at the Center for International Cooperation—have noted, and Barney is no interventionist. He seems pretty sanguine about the war coming to a close and bringing American troops home. But he says Trump's decision, quote, “to withdraw troops from Afghanistan has nothing to do with ending endless wars and everything to do with his ego.” Thoughts?

WARD: I'm sure it's part of it, because this is something he said he would do.

HANNAH: It could be both, right? It could be both—the desperate need to fulfill a campaign promise and also have little confidence that Biden is going to do this and wanting to do it himself on the way out the door, right?

WARD: I guess if this were really about Trump's ego, he would just do the full troop withdrawal. He wouldn't be convinced by needing to keep a counterterrorism force. He can credibly say if he took them all out, “I took them all out.” I mean, that would be quite the ego boost. That would be quite a page in history. He does seem to hold or believe that he has a responsibility as the president to keep tabs on terrorists on behalf of U.S. national security. You can disagree with that assessment, but that is not an ego one. That is one I feel a president is either boxed into or feels like, up until now, he has to take in order to do the job correctly.

HANNAH: Yeah. And Joe Biden also has run on a platform to end America's forever wars. This is a very fashionable thing to do right now, and I don't think it's insincere, this commitment. In the Obama Administration he was a constant voice for restraint when it came to Afghanistan. He opposed the surge. He was baffled and bewildered by the by the Libya intervention.

What I want to get into here is with all the influence different progressives seem to be making in the Biden campaign and the inroads they seem to be making, where do we expect a Biden Administration to return us to this kind of restorationist, normal, American-led international order idea of the world? And where do we expect him to follow through on a more humble, modest, achievable, realistic foreign policy that he has expressed a desire to pursue?

WARD: Well, let's take a step back here for a second, because I think it's important to set the context when we're thinking about this. When Biden comes into office, he is going to have two massive challenges he’ll have to face that are not really foreign policy challenges: COVID-19, which has a foreign element—not denying that—but it's COVID. And he's got economic resurgence, bouncing back from this calamity. That's going to take a lot of his time and attention away from foreign policy, and frankly, I feel that the start of his war policy is going to be hosting meetings online on Zoom—as we're doing now—with allies and going, “America's back, baby. Joe's back, and whatever you need, we'll help you out. And we're going back to the old ways.” And that will be the extent of a Joe strategy for the first year, maybe two, because he's got such a domestic focus up front. And on top of that, if you learn anything from the election, it's that there is a pretty big contingent of folks that voted either for him or for Trump who are attracted to a “rebuild America at home” kind of message. And so, while Biden is a guy who cares about foreign policy and certainly wants to have a big hand in it, he's not going to be able to at the start. If you're doing a restoration project in the back seat, it's going to be hard to have an expansive foreign policy, almost by definition. It's going to be—you can call it restraint by default—I feel, a quite limited strategy at the beginning.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: I want to ask you—why do you think they're announcing for the cabinet positions around foreign policy first? You said Biden is not going to be able to focus as much on foreign policy in his first two years because of the domestic challenges. And, of course, he named the coronavirus task force right out of the gate. But this is the first cabinet pick, to my knowledge, the campaign has announced. And obviously, State Department is a focus on foreign policy. So it seems like it might loom large when Biden does take his oath, right?

WARD: Sure. But I also think foreign policy is less rancorous when it comes to the domestic political scene. Few Americans are going to tune into the Secretary of State hearings. They might for the Pentagon, but few are going to care about what Tony Blinken thinks about transforming the diplomatic corps and what advances could be made and couldn't be made and how to reverse the past four years of budget decline. None of that really fires up a Republican base. And so I think this is also just a way to get something out there and get the ball rolling without much controversy. It also shows Blinken being seen as a return of competence, getting him back there as someone Biden knows, and then it might have just been the logistics. The worst kept secret in Washington was Blinken got to choose what he wanted to do. He got to choose Secretary of State or National Security Advisor. He may have just made the decision before Thanksgiving, and then here it goes.

HANNAH: If he does get nominated, if he does get confirmed, if he is installed as our next Secretary of State, how do you think he'll do?

WARD: He has a pretty big mind meld with Biden. I mean, they are about as simpatico as they come on foreign policy. They believe in alliances. They believe in multilateralism. They believe in America as the force for good, and “not the example of our power but the power of our example”—that maxim Biden likes to say. What I would note and I find interesting is while they mind-meld on 99.8 percent on issues, that 0.2 percent is quite interesting and important because Blinken is a bit more willing to consider humanitarian intervention options than Biden seems to be. While they agree on grand strategy on the role of America, there are certain instances. Some people are already expecting that maybe in the Security Council, in the Situation Room, as they're discussing a certain crisis that will come up over the next four years, Biden might lean more and say, “Hey, we should consider some military options here,” or some intervention options where Biden might be more resistant to them. I think you'd be wrong again on the sort of bigger stage job of being the mouthpiece for the president to the world. There's literally no one who can do that better. He knows Biden's mind. He's been with them for so long. The world knows if Tony Blinken speaks, it's on behalf of the president. So there's that.

When it comes to the building. I think he'll be fine. He was the Deputy Secretary of State, which is a more internally focused job, the person who runs the mechanics of the building. So, he knows that well. And he's been working on this area for a really long time. None of this will be new to him. What I'm most interested in with Blinken will be: does he try to bring in some of those ideas that have come in from the progressive wing about how to rebuild the State Department? How close at all would he adhere to, let's say, a Chris Murphy proposal of doubling the State Department budget? How much would he lean in on increasing the amount of full time employees at the State Department? How much would he try to change the way people are brought into the civil service or the diplomatic corps? And how long does he focus on that? And the other thing I'll focus on is, again, the advice to the president. Biden, based on this seeming pick and others that might be coming down the line, is putting people around him who are more into intervention than he is, who are less restrained, let's say, than he is. And that's interesting. If we consider Blinken, we consider perhaps Michele Flournoy as Secretary of Defense and Jake Sullivan as National Security Advisor. Those are all folks who believe in using American force a little bit more than Biden does. Not that Biden is against it, but he's a little more resistant to doing so. And it seems as if the only check on American interventionism or humanitarian interventionism will be the president himself, which, of course, is a pretty big check.

HANNAH: We're hearing these names—Tony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Linda Thomas Greenfield. As a group, what do you think this trio represents?

WARD: It's a great question. I would say it is a couple of things. It is a restoration of competence. These are people who just know how to be in government. That's important, especially after four years of incompetence. It is a restoration of an older style of thinking. These people aren’t bringing anything new to the table. I mean, maybe they have learned new stuff over the last four years and will bring some newer ideas. But they've been in this game for a long time, and they have some ideologies already and some notions that are really hard to get out of their head at this point in their careers. And it will pose a challenge to Joe Biden, I think. Again, these are people he knows and trusts. He's a very loyal guy. He's going to want to listen to them and take their advice. But if there is, let's say, a team of folks who say, “Mr. President, we understand you don't want to take this action, but we all think this is the right thing to do,” it's going to take a lot on Biden to go not only against his advisers but also against his friends and longtime confidants on certain action. I'm not saying this means intervention. I’m not saying anything like that, but it does raise that question a lot, that now Biden has surrounded himself with people who are a little more adventurous than he is.

HANNAH: OK, let's do a little uplift here. We're going to go into our lightning round. It's time for a round of extraneous and miscellaneous questions for which we expect spontaneous answers.

WARD: Alright.

HANNAH: One book you would like the incoming president to have read—required reading for the administration and Joe Biden?

WARD: The Moralist by Patricia O'Toole, a biography of Woodrow Wilson. Very good book.

HANNAH: The worst American foreign policy decision of the past one hundred years?

WARD: The Iraq War.

HANNAH: One piece of professional advice you wish you'd received as a kid.

WARD: Don't try too hard.

HANNAH: Oh, wow. Is that because you're a millennial?

WARD: No. Trying too hard—it's not like you shouldn't work. There's a difference between not working and trying too hard. Trying too hard—by that I'm trying to say, pithily, is you could want it too much. You could overexert yourself. You could come off wrong. And also going too fast and too hard could lead to mistakes. So, I guess let's do it in a very crude and weird way—be like a predator on the hunt. They don't just run out the thing. Right? They stalk it a little bit and wait for the right moment and then you strike. So do that.

HANNAH: Nice. Nice. A role model for the work you do?

WARD: Peter Baker

HANNAH: A publication you read every day?

WARD: New York Times and Fox.com.

HANNAH: There you go. Now you're earning your paycheck.

You mentioned in a recent article that Joe Biden's two main priorities within the first one hundred days would be combating the coronavirus and addressing global warming. Why do you think he'll be so focused on global warming in the first one hundred days?

WARD: He said as much multiple times. Day one, he'll rejoin the Paris Climate Accords. That's going to be a very big thing for him. It is both symbolic and also a decent policy play to limit America's carbon emissions and to pledge to do so and to lead the world in a way, saying if we can do it, everyone else should, too.

Interlude featuring archival audio

WARD: As Biden's maxim tends to go, “It's not using the example of our power, but the power of our example.” The Paris Climate Court almost precisely fits in that vein. He also sees it as the biggest foreign policy challenge of short and long term. It’s hard to argue based on the data and the storms we've been having this year and in recent years. So, I feel it's something he can do without Congress. Rejoining the Paris climate accords, taking other executive actions on emissions and certain regulations that Trump took away that he can re-impose if he wanted to—a lot of that is at the presidential level. So, for the first one hundred days it's not hard for him to take action on something he feels is a truly genuine threat.

HANNAH: It would be interesting to have a Secretary of State who wanted to reinvigorate diplomacy, do diplomacy first, and in your scenario, butting heads with somebody who is more hawkish as Defense Secretary, having those debates air out a little bit.

One debate that we are going to have is between the administration, it looks like, and Congress, specifically the Senate, because depending on what happens here and in the days and weeks ahead, we are likely to have a divided government. And one wonders whether this will make foreign policy and national security more important or less important. On some level, domestic policy other than some emergency priorities like COVID relief are going to be hobbled by potential obstinacy of the Republican-led Senate. Does that free up Biden to do a lot more in the realm of global affairs, of international relations? Or do you think this is not necessarily going to be where he runs to?

WARD: I think, the history of how this works is, when you have a president from one party and a Senate, especially, from another, the president obviously has a lot of space to do foreign policy. It's pretty much his domain, but the Senate can constrain the limits of what is possible. An example would be the Iran deal. Let's say Biden wants an Iran deal 2.0. Well, he might try to get it, but he might run into the same problem Obama did, which is a Republican Senate will not sign one unless Iran capitulates completely, which it's unlikely to do. And so if you're Biden, your aspirations are already curtailed. So it will bind him at his upper and lower limits as to what the realm of the possible is and what he'd like to do.

Interlude featuring archival audio

WARD: I would imagine—and I'm also interested in whether a Congress, especially a Senate, continues in the direction of wanting a greater voice in foreign policy. That could be yet another way to hobble a Biden presidency if you're the Republicans.

HANNAH: He's come out in support of Bernie Sanders, a war power act. And so I think as a longtime, long serving senator, he respects the Senate's role in conducting foreign policy and declaring war. It'll be interesting to see how he as president wants to work with or not work with the Senate. And of course, we remember Obama's final year in office. We remember the way in which he was kind of prodded and chided by a Republican Senate into taking certain foreign policy actions he might have been ambivalent about. Syria comes to mind. Libya comes to mind. Right. He was sort of publicly criticized for not being tough enough on Libya, and then he goes in and does the intervention and gets criticism—sort of a “damned if you do, damned if you don't.”

What do you see as the role of the of the Senate, whether it's Republican-led or split down the middle? What do you see as the working relationship between Biden and the Senate? I think I counted fifteen Republican senators who were there and who served when Biden was a senator twelve years ago. Do you think he'll have a Lyndon Johnson-esque relationship, or are we living in such polarized times where that kind of arm twisting and across-the-aisle cooperation is irretrievable?

WARD: No, I don't expect an LBJ-type moment. I think we are too polarized. I do believe in a world where Donald Trump could be president in 2024. Republicans are probably going to try to do anything they can to obstruct him. We're already seeing them buy into this lack of concession from Trump. If they're willing to go there already, why would they wheel and deal with him on foreign policy or anything else? I just don't buy it. I'm sure Biden believes in the entire appeal of his candidacy, or rather his theory of the case was a vote for Biden is a vote for the restoration not just of the world, but the way American politics works. There will be a comedy again. We'll always have our disagreements, but we will have a sense of unity and backslapping and all that. Sure, he's friends with McConnell. Great. He friends with Graslie. Cool. But their loyalty is to their voters. It's not to friendship with Joe Biden. I feel Biden has an incredibly optimistic view and one that's unlikely to hold in both the domestic and foreign policy fronts. So, this result in the Senate is an absolute disaster for any real Biden agenda.

HANNAH: OK, Alex, I want to end here with some questions we got from Eurasia Group Foundation’s followers on Twitter. We let them know you were coming on, and they've got some questions.

Harlan R. Kutchal on Twitter has asked, “What steps beyond rejoining the Paris climate accords will the Biden administration take to strengthen international cooperation on climate change?”

WARD: I think it's actually going to be a domestic focus. So, putting some regulations on, making sure cars, for example, are more gas-friendly or whatever the term is, and basically saying, “Look, if America is doing this, other countries should do it, too.” And I think when Biden is trying to say that we're a better climate alternative than China, he'll say, “Look at what we're doing. China is not doing that. Follow our example.” And then it will also give the U.S. legitimacy to make even more environmental pacts if it wants to.

HANNAH: We've got a question from John Grover: “How will the Biden Administration address the problem of how to approach North Korea?”

WARD: In the old style. Oh, boy. No more summits with Kim Jong-un. Unless Kim Jong-un somehow agrees to dismantle its entire nuclear arsenal and missile arsenal. He won't. So, we're going to go back to working-level meetings. Biden could perhaps do it in a more ally-friendly way, working with other countries and sitting down with the North Koreans and finding some sort of agreed framework, as we've had in the past. But I don't think you'll see the drama in terms of the diplomacy with North Korea. But I do believe it will be one of his biggest challenges, because if North Korea does anything at the start of any new administration, it's usually testing a missile. And they've got some pretty badass ones now.

HANNAH: John also wants to know how Biden can repair the relationship with South Korea.

WARD: Don't make them pay too much for our troops. Make sure you say it's still an ally. Stay in touch with the administration. Coordinate better. It will be harder, though, because I feel like Moon Jae-in, the president of South Korea, wants to go further with North Korea than Biden is going to want to. The world kind of missed a weird opportunity, a weird triangulation of a Kim-Moon-Trump leadership. Now, Biden is one of the more skeptical ones for improving ties. So, it's going to be not as bumpy as a fire and fury, let's say, but in terms of actual diplomacy-making, it's going to be a longer slog.

HANNAH: Alex Ward from Vox, thanks so much for joining us.

WARD: Thanks for having me.

HANNAH: And Alex is here to remind you: don't try too hard.

I’m Mark Hannah, and this has been another episode of None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. Special thanks go out to our None of the Above team who make this all possible: our producer Caroline Gray, editor Luke Taylor, sound engineer Zubin Hensler, as well as EGF’s graduate research assistant Adam Pontius.

If you enjoyed what you heard, subscribe to us on Google Play, iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get podcasts. Rate and review us, and if there is a topic you want us to cover, send us an email info@egfound.org. We really read them and appreciate them. Thanks for joining us today. Stay safe out there. Catch you next time.

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