Shortly after President-elect
Joe Biden clinched his party's nomination in May, a group of 50 progressive organizations sent his campaign a letter urging him to
commit to a broad agenda of foreign policy reform. They wanted him to agree to such policies as reentering the
Iran nuclear deal and cutting at least $200 billion from the Pentagon budget.
Six months later, Biden has given his answer: With his choice of
Antony Blinken for secretary of state and
Jake Sullivan as national security adviser, as well as his expected nomination of
Michele Flournoy for secretary of defense, Biden has signaled that his national security
Cabinet will be more centrist than the left flank of his party would like.
To be sure, Blinken, Sullivan and Flournoy will not give
Saudi Arabia the greenlight it has come to expect from the Trump administration. Biden's appointment of
John Kerry to be his climate czar shows that an issue the
Trump White House did not care about will be a priority for Biden. And Biden has committed to trying to rejoin the 2015 Iran nuclear deal if
Iran comes back into compliance with it.
At the same time, all three choices come out of the moderate wing of the Democratic Party. Blinken is a longtime aide to Biden
going back to his tenure as chairman of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He has emphasized in the last year how a Biden administration would focus on rebuilding relationships with allies that Trump
has disrupted.
He has also signaled that he is more clear-eyed on
Middle East policy than his party's progressive activists. Last month, for example, Blinken told the Jewish Insider that even if the
Biden administration suspends nuclear-related sanctions on
Iran, "we will continue nonnuclear sanctions as a strong hedge against Iranian misbehavior in other areas." If Biden keeps that
promise, then
Iran would still be under considerable financial pressure because the Trump administration has ramped up sanctions on
Iran for its support of terrorism.
In other areas of the world, Biden is not quite reading from the progressive playbook. That May letter to Biden urged him
to reject efforts to work to unseat the regimes of adversaries and oppose the "broad based" sanctions on
Iran and
Venezuela. But in a talk last year at the
Hudson Institute, Sullivan wasn't in complete agreement. When asked about Trump's
Venezuela policy, he said a military intervention was too risky, and that it was wiser to focus on nonmilitary policy. "That means
doubling down on the sanctions pieces and continuing to build the international coalition around this and particularly focus
on breaking off
China,
Cuba and
Russia from
Venezuela," Sullivan said.
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Flournoy, too, is a centrist on defense policy. She has publicly opposed significant defense cuts and advocated for rebuilding
the military to meet new challenges from
China and
Russia. This was a key point of her testimony before the
House Armed Services Committee last year, when she said her primary concern was that a miscalculation by
Russia or
China could lead to a major confrontation with the
U.S. She advocated that the
U.S. "procure and deploy all of the systems necessary" to deter both countries from any misbehavior.
Compare that to the
May 11 letter from progressives, which called for greater diplomatic engagement with
Russia and
China. "Overhyping the threat these countries pose to
the United States intensifies fear, racism, and hate domestically," it said.
It's still very early days to assess what a Biden foreign policy will look like. When
Barack Obama became president, no one was predicting the Arab Spring and its tragic aftermath in the war in
Syria. Presidents often learn what their foreign policy is by reacting to events in the world.
Nonetheless, Biden's early signals show that, for now at least, he is charting a centrist course. And if his choices for national
security positions are disappointing to his party's progressives, they are sure to be reassuring to his country's allies.
(COMMENT, BELOW)
Eli Lake is a Bloomberg View columnist who writes about politics and foreign affairs. He was previously the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast. Lake also covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI, and was a contributing editor at the New Republic.