The emergent Biden Doctrine

President Joe Biden’s resolute move, 9 September 2021, to substantially increase the number of vaccinated people and block the dissemination of the Delta variant of the Covid-19 virus is - as New York Times' Jim Tankersley makes out - not merely an endeavour to stop the continuing and evolving threat that the dread virus poses, per se, but also that to the national economy. Delta’s spike has been fueled in part by the “inability of Mr Biden and his administration to persuade millions of vaccination-refusing Americans to inoculate themselves against the virus,” he informs. According to reliable reports, roughly 80 million Americans who are eligible have not gotten vaccinated. That has created another serious problem for Biden: a drag on economic recovery. EMERGENT BIDEN DOCTRINE

While it remains to be seen how far, and how quickly, Biden succeeds in his new vaccination and economic recovery campaign, what has grabbed my attention at this time is what foreign policy wonks here discern as an emergent Biden Doctrine.

Indeed, given its global ramifications, including for our own neck of the international woods, it will be entirely germane to pivot to that theme.

First off, note that with the recent, messy conclusion of America’s ‘forever war’ in Afghanistan – and the discomfort that Biden feels with prolonged military engagements - perceptive analysts have identified the main strands of a Biden Doctrine having a direct bearing on America’s foreign and security policy, going forward. Indeed, an interesting exposition has been presented, 5 September, in the New York Times (NYT) by a four-member reporter-cum-analyst team: Helene Cooper, Lara Jakes, Michael D. Shear and Michael Crowley. Among the main elements of the so-called doctrine that they have identified are enumerated and elaborated below.

They begin by quoting Michele A. Flournoy, a former undersecretary of defense during the Obama administration, explaining: “It’s important to draw a distinction between his (Biden’s) appetite for nationbuilding, which is essentially nil, versus his appetite for using force if it’s necessary to defend U.S. national security, which I believe remains quite strong.”

The NYT team continues, thus: “The Biden Doctrine sees China as America’s existential competitor, Russia as a disrupter, Iran and North Korea as nuclear proliferators, cyber threats as everevolving and terrorism spreading far beyond Afghanistan.”

They note that recently the White House has indicated that Biden is comfortable with the idea of backing American diplomacy with a muscular military posture but stress the obvious point that such threats would work only if adversaries believe he will follow through.

They also recall that Biden ordered military strikes in Syria against Iranianbacked Shiite militias that rocketed U.S. troops in Iraq and, more recently in Afghanistan against the Islamic State after the group took responsibility for a suicide bombing attack at the Kabul airport. They add this caveat, however: “But those attacks were retaliation against non-state actors and not intended to be followed by American troops on the ground.”

The reporter/analyst team explains, too, that the Biden Doctrine is being formed by a “group of like-minded officials, most of them largely on the same page as their boss. That unity means it is more difficult for allies and adversaries to exploit differences in the administration. But it also means the president may not be stress-testing his doctrine during internal meetings at the White House.”

“Nowhere will a stress test be more necessary than on China, which presents a military, economic and technological challenge. The administration is seeking to counter the narrative of a surging power and a declining America by showcasing an American economic recovery. For that to work, Mr Biden must rein in the coronavirus pandemic, but without the authoritarian tools that are available to Beijing.”

On Taiwan, concerned officials one is informed “are trying to figure out if the longtime American policy of ‘strategic ambiguity’ – providing political and military support to Taiwan, while explicitly promising to defend it from a Chinese attack – has run its course. Pentagon officials say the matter could come to a head within six years.” The NYT team believes that “on Russia, Biden will take a tougher line than his predecessor, President Donald J. Trump, who acceded to President Vladimir V. Putin” wishes on many levels. To highlight some other dimensions of the putative

Biden Doctrine, the NYT squad quotes Lisa Curtis, who oversaw policy for Afghanistan and elsewhere in Central and South Asia on the National Security Council during the Trump administration, thus: “Whether it is a Republican or Democratic president, as we saw with Trump, there is this exhaustion with major missions that put large numbers of troops on the ground and have ambitions to remake the governments in countries.”

Despite the raucous current criticism of Biden on Afghanistan by a segment of the population, Curtis declared Biden was “well in step with the American public.”

The NYT quad argues that the Biden Doctrine calls for conducting operations against groups from afar, or ‘over the horizon’. That means fewer American service members were killed in the process, the Pentagon hopes. “But that means fewer Americans on the ground to gather intelligence and call in such strikes.”

Another foreign policy pundit that has been quoted in explaining the contours of an emergent

Biden Doctrine is Vali R. Nasr, a senior State Department policy adviser during the Obama administration, who has declared that there was no reason to believe the president would resist sending American troops into conflict when warranted.

In his words, “I don’t read this as Biden saying that we will never go to war at all.” Still, “I think for him, the idea of a forever war, of these Middle East years were we basically go down a rabbit hole after the largest target without actually achieving much, is going to lock us in and take away from us the ability to address other sets of issues.”

Yet, as Curtis

has predicted, the first test for the Biden Doctrine may yet be Afghanistan, as terrorists from around the world are likely to feel safe relocating to a country “where their brothers-inarms” are in charge. She recalled pointedly, that Biden was “very clear that he did not believe that we needed boots on the ground to protect U.S. counterterrorism interests”, adding that “the war against terrorism has not ended.”

WAR ON CHINA NEXT? Thomas L. Friedman, NYT’s noted columnist and author, has provided heaps of food for thought on the theme of what comes after the war on terrorism. In an eminently readable and comprehensive column the other day, he was sternly critical of China’s general assertiveness under President Xi Jinping but was even more concerned about the possibility and adverse consequences of war between the United States and China, not least because the Biden administration has more or less signaled that ‘War on China’ could come after the ‘War on Terror’ après Afghanistan.

To cut a long story short,

Friedman concludes with these observations: “It might light a fire under Americans to get serious about national renewal. But it might also light a fire to the whole U.S.China relationship, affecting everything from supply chains, to student exchanges, to Chinese purchases of U.S. government bonds.

“In any event, this would be my starter checklist before we pivot from war on terror to war on China. Let’s really think this through. Our grandchildren will thank us in 2041.”

In a parallel thought process, celebrated economist and NYT columnist, Paul Krugman in a recent piece entitled ‘Foreign Terrorists Have Never Been Our Biggest Threat’ concludes on this sage note: “America was viciously attacked 20 years ago. But, even then, the call that mattered was coming from inside the house. The real threat to all this nation stands for is coming not from foreign suicide bombers but from our right wing.”

Another viewpoint equally deserving of our notice on the subject under review here is that offered by Touqir Hussain, a former Pakistan ambassador and adjunct professor at Georgetown University, in Dawn, 10 September.

In a thoughtful piece entitled, ‘Who lost America?’, he proffers many ideas including his belief that the principal ‘loss’ in America is, at heart, “the loss of democracy at home and hegemony abroad” even as he maintains that “policy in America is now all about politics which is all about power.”

His concluding thought is well worth mulling over: “Washington is obsessed, however valid its concerns may be, with competition with China. The China fever, that obscures focus on other global crises and plays into regional disputes, has sabotaged good policy. The Afghanistan fiasco is a glaring example, the result of what Tony Blair called, ‘imbecilic politics’.”

Nowhere perhaps have the echoes of America’s haphazard military withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the reestablishment of Taliban rule in Afghanistan, reverberated more than it has on the India-Pakistan theatre to which we now briefly turn.

INDIA AND PAKISTAN The international community has been flummoxed and disappointed that the interim government that was announced in Kabul the other day was anything but ‘inclusive’ - despite repeated assurances that it would be.

It now remains to be seen how the new government in Kabul deals with such a fraught situation, especially as the issue of international recognition and urgently needed assistance are inextricably tied up with it.

While I have not seen any official reaction from Kathmandu on this topical subject, media reaction is pretty reflective of the dismay, anxiety, even anger blowing in the wind in India. C.Raja Mohan in the Indian Expresses, for one, flies off at a tangent charging that Pakistan had a hand in shaping the new government, offering as evidence a visit to Kabul of ISI chief Lt. Gen. Faiz Hameed!

Naturally, no mention was made of the fact that CIA Director William J. Burns, who had come a-calling in New Delhi, had also visited Kabul quite recently, in fact even before Gen. Hameed had done so.

Neither does the fact that, unlike India, Pakistan shares a 2,000 plus-km land border with Afghanistan figure in Indian media commentary. Obviously, Pakistan has very clear and urgent security concerns, including those relating to the AfghanPakistan land border. Equally telling were alarmist Indian media reports about the alleged downing of a PAF jet in Panjshir – dismissed by Pakistan’s National Security Adviser Dr Mooed Yusuf in a CNN interview with Becky Anderson. The photograph purporting to be that of a PAF aircraft turned out to be that of an American jet taken in the United States. Fortunately, some Indian commentators, such as former Indian diplomat M.K. Bhadrakumar, have plausibly and soberly argued, (Indian Express 10 September), that India’s interest won’t be served by demonizing the Taliban. That, in fact, New Delhi must carry forward the nascent conversation it had struck in Doha with the new government in Kabul.

Clearly, the situation in Afghanistan is still extremely fluid and things on the ground may get a good deal worse before they stabilize. In other words, the last word on the subject has yet to be written.

Subsequent developments in Afghanistan have obviously to be closely monitored and their possible implications for the national interest carefully analyzed. COMRADE GUZMAN From BBC, one learns that Abimael Guzman, the founder of Peru’s Shining Path rebel group, died in prison on Saturday, 11 September, and that Peruvian officials are expected to decide soon on what to do with his body. While one is reminded that almost 70,000 people died or disappeared in the conflict between the Maoist group and the Peruvian state, it seems that there are fears that if it were buried his gravesite could be a rallying point for extremists.

Though this observer sheds no tears over the passing of the leader of a violent movement that claimed so many innocent lives in Peru, he cannot but wonder how our own Maoists, who drew inspiration if not more from Guzman and company, choose to mark Guzman’s demise. It would be a learning experience, in any case, I believe!