'To destroy what it cannot save'
'To destroy what it cannot save'
The common theme of the Trump-Biden-Harris era is a scorched-earth approach to diplomacy and economic power.
Last week, Vice President Kamala Harris attacked former president Donald Trump for holding the exact same position as her administration. Trump, speaking to the New York Economic Club, said that economic sanctions were a powerful weapon but warned that overusing them could undermine the dollar-based global financial system. It was the same conclusion that the Biden administration itself had come to over the past few years.
Harris’ spokespeople, however, claimed that Trump’s turn against sanctions was a sign that he wanted to appease Russia and Iran. As I wrote for Reason, this rhetoric is another example of how the U.S. foreign policy debate is closing back up. Instead of pushing back against the consequences of the “forever wars,” both parties are now engaged in a competition to out-hawk each other.
In practice, neither faction in American politics has the world-shaping ambitions of the old Cold War liberals or neoconservatives. Instead, “great power competition” is a race to the bottom. The United States can’t really build up its sphere of influence in a positive way. It can, however, destroy the alternatives. Through sanctions and proxy warfare, Washington has gotten quite adept at frustrating and undermining its rivals, preventing them from building anything positive, either.
Ironically, the best articulation of this policy came from Harris’ own national security adviser, Phil Gordon, slamming the Trump administration. In August 2020, he coauthored an article for Foreign Policy titled “Trump and the Rise of Sadistic Diplomacy.” The article laid out all of the instances in which Trump tore up old agreements without achieving anything new:
Despite these failures, Trump has modified neither his negotiating tactics nor his objectives. Instead, the administration has simply resorted to a scorched-earth policy apparently designed to destroy what it cannot save. Punishment of adversaries—and sometimes even allies—is no longer part of a diplomatic strategy to achieve specific policy goals; it has become the objective itself. In many cases, the administration appears to be no longer even trying to produce new deals but simply declaring the pain inflicted the measure of success. The means to an end—economic damage and instability in a target country to build diplomatic leverage for a deal—has apparently become the end itself.
For all the rhetoric about “alliances,” the Biden administration did not really break from this “sadistic” pattern. Biden has continued the campaigns of attrition that he inherited, and started new ones. The next administration is likely to be locked in. Whatever openings there were for diplomacy in 2021 and 2022, the Biden administration blew past them, and the conflicts with a whole host of U.S. adversaries look even more intractable than before. And Washington seems happy with the situation, as long as its enemies keep bleeding.
A decade ago, the Obama administration had prided itself on its ability to begin opening up Cuba and Iran, two longtime U.S. enemies that had been isolated from the post Cold War order. The Trump administration reversed this opening, and imposed harsher economic and political pressure on those countries than Washington had in decades.
Although these campaigns are often described as “regime change,” the goal was not necessarily to install a new, stable regime, as the Trump administration showed in response to success revolutions. While the Trump administration militarily supported a Kurdish-led rebellion in North and East Syria, it kept the region under the constant threat of a Turkish invasion, while attempting to spin off new militias. Washington also imposed sanctions, ostensibly aimed at the Syrian dictatorship, that were designed to prevent postwar reconstruction.
In 2019, a revolution swept through Sudan, putting in place a fragile coalition of old military elements and new civilian leaders. The Trump administration took the opportunity to shake down the country, offering to lift counterterrorism sanctions only if Sudan paid a $335 million penalty and adopted a domestically unpopular stance on Israel. Sudan has since fallen back into military dictatorship and civil war.
If there was a positive Trump administration vision for the frontiers of U.S. empire, it was the Abraham Accords: a few islands of high-tech police state utopia surrounded by a sea of refugee camps, war zones, bunker states, and aid-dependent, stagnant societies. If regime collapse were to succeed in Cuba and Iran, it is unlikely that Washington would help or even allow those societies to enter the “high-tech utopia” club.
Biden had the option to reverse course and return to good faith diplomacy; Gordon himself was a particularly harsh critic of “maximum pressure” on Iran. But the Biden administration decided to keep up the pressure on Cuba and Iran, due to a combination of domestic politics and strategic calculations.
At the time, friendly press blamed then-Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Menendez, who had a lot of…shall we say, personal motivations, to push for a hawkish line on the Middle East and Latin America. Yet it was also clear that the Biden team believed that a little more attrition couldn’t hurt. In September 2020, two think tankers close to the Biden team argued in Foreign Policy that Iran would be desperate for a deal, so the United States should not rush or worry too much about losing its window of opportunity.
The window of opportunity did fly by in the end, in part because pressure worked too well. Civil unrest roiled Cuba in July 2021 and Iran in late 2022. Washington smelled blood in the water. It would have been politically impossible to “throw a lifeline” to states that were repressing ongoing protests. Besides, Biden was probably not too dissatisfied watching two U.S. rivals suffer social collapse, and perhaps rethinking whether he was wrong to doubt maximum pressure after all.
When the U.S.-backed republic in Afghanistan fell, Biden showed his full capacity for vindictiveness. After failing to prepare to evacuate the U.S. military’s Afghan partners, he publicly blamed the Afghans for failing to resist the Taliban. Then he moved to ensure that the new Taliban-led government would preside over a starving country, by freezing Afghanistan’s bank reserves and collapsing its economy. If America can’t have a stable Afghanistan, then no one can.
The same instincts were on display with Biden’s approach to Russia and Ukraine. When Russia demanded that Ukraine be excluded from the Western military bloc, the Biden administration refused to entertain that demand, even though it did not expect Ukraine to be able to resist Russia militarily. The working assumption was that Ukraine would fall to a Russian invasion quickly, and the United States would then adopt a sore loser strategy to deny Russia the fruits of victory.
One plan was to prop up a government-in-exile that would support an endless insurgency. Another was to impose a de facto partition of the country by preserving a rump state inside a no-fly zone. However miserable living in a Russian puppet state would be for Ukrainians, having their nation-state replaced with a stateless Unlimited Violence Zone would be far worse.
Ukraine ruined everyone’s plans by continuing to exist. The Ukrainian resistance succeeded not only at stopping Russian military advances, but also at keeping civil infrastructure running and preventing the political leadership from defecting to Russia or fleeing. Real U.S. and European support for Ukrainian sovereignty followed suit.
Still, Ukrainians are quite far from the liberal Western European path of prosperity they had been hoping to follow. Although the war has damaged Russian prestige and killed lots of Russians — something American politicians, including Biden himself, are quite giddy about — Ukraine has also suffered irreversible damage: hundreds of thousands dead or suffering from wounds for their rest of their lives, millions displaced, infrastructure and livelihoods set back by $1 trillion.
Of course, the invasion is also an example of Russian sadistic diplomacy. Russia can no longer offer its neighbors a positive model to keep them within its sphere of influence. So the Russian strategy has been to make a vicious example out of any neighbor considering breaking away: first Georgia, then Ukraine.
The peak of U.S. vindictiveness has been enabling the Israeli destruction of Gaza. Apart from genuine revulsion at the attacks of October 7, the Biden administration was left with the feeling that Palestinian ingrates had ruined their beautiful plans for the new Middle East.
The Biden administration has massively concentrated American force in the region, and patted itself on the back for neutering or deterring Iran’s attempts to intervene. But to what end? The United States is not keeping Iran out so that the Israeli-Palestinian peace process can resume, or even so that Israel can impose a stable new regime on Palestinians. U.S. forces are in the region to ensure that Israel can kill, impoverish, and scatter as much of Palestinian society as it wants.
Pestilence, war, famine, death. Past generations of Americans could pride themselves on inventing a vaccine for polio, raising up great cities, and providing its people with abundance never seen before. Now the American state is working assiduously to invent new forms of remote-control starvation, raze cities to dust, and bring back polio.
Many policies that were thought to be Trump’s personal impulses turned out to be reflections of broader trends in U.S. politics. The United States has forgotten how to do diplomacy with enemies, and does not have a tradition of cutting losses or graciously bowing out of fights. “Sadistic diplomacy” is not a reflection of one leader’s personal cruelty; it is what happens when a country has no other cards to play.