The good news is that we have a “Biden Doctrine”, says the WashPost’s Fareed Zakaria. The bad news is, it’s a Biden doctrine.
Innocently spelling out the bad news for us is Biden national security dude Jake Sullivan—“fiercely intelligent”, Fareed tells us, fiercely, as though a little afraid that Jake might punch him out at their next meeting if Fareed wasn’t sufficiently obsequious in his adjectives—even though “fiercely intelligent” sounds a bit like Mitt Romney’s “severely conservative”—trying just a bit too hard.
Fareed also tells us that Jake is “brilliant”, though it’s hard to understand how a “brilliant, fiercely intelligent” man gets it all wrong, as Fareed tells us Jake does, picking the Biden doctrine to pieces as he goes, correctly identifying it, though not in so many words, as a paleolib/neocon mélange of blind protectionism and “blame China” posturing, Beltway comfort food guaranteed to keep defense budgets and international tensions soaring for decades to come, if not the U.S. economy. Why bother to think when you can gorge yourself on the intellectual (and financial!) equivalent of a Colonel Sanders Valu-Tub, with a jumbo helping of mac and cheese on the side?
Fareed points out pretty patiently that the Biden administration’s industrial policy won’t work:
Finally, Sullivan insisted that these polices were not designed to be “America First” or “America Alone.” But the facts are clear. Almost every element of Biden’s economic policy has a “Buy America” component to it. Its green subsidies are causing some European companies to build new plants in the United States. This sounds great to Americans but not to Europeans, who must now offer industries their own bribes to invest at home instead. It conjures up an autarchic vision of the world that is quite far removed from reality. (The iPhone, for example, is made with products from dozens of countries across six continents — though the vast majority of the profits accrue in the United States.) And as the United States preaches the need for a rules-based international order, it is worth noting that this new Biden Doctrine is violating the core of that order; every one of these policies is in violation of the letter or spirit of the World Trade Organization and its framework of open trade. This hypocrisy is rarely discussed in the United States but frequently and angrily pointed out abroad.
“It conjures up an autarchic vision of the world that is quite far removed from reality.” It does indeed. The simple fact is, in both foreign and domestic policy, the Biden administration is following the path of least resistance—the path of least resistance and greatest possible stupidity—with “brilliant, fiercely intelligent” folks like Jake Sullivan in charge.
Afterwords
Fareed himself falls victim to a number of clichés—bemoaning, for example, the plight of the middle class, which is not nearly as bad as “everyone” thinks. The median middle-class household income in 2019 was $86, 600, which is not exactly starvation wages. The middle class has been shrinking in size, more because more Americans are getting richer than because more are becoming poorer, though it’s unfortunately true that a lot of them are becoming poorer as well. According to a report from the Pew Institute, linked to a couple of sentences back, the share of the American population that is upper class rose from 14% to 20% from 1971 to 2019, while the share of the lower class rose from 25% to 29%. The middle class was shrinking in size at both ends—not all good news for sure, but there has been substantial income growth for the middle class over time as well: their median household income rose from $58,100 in 1971 to $86,600 in 2019. There was very little income growth during the first 20 years of the 21st century, thanks to a slow recovery from the 2001 recession, not at all helped by the massive tax cuts engineered by the Bush administration—though this did help turn a massive budget surplus into a massive deficit—and a very slow recovery from the “Great Recession”, thanks in significant part to the hysterical resistance of the middle class, both in the U.S. and abroad, to the Keynesian measures needed to boost economic growth, which only became acceptable to the middle class in the U.S. when Donald Trump became president.
It is true that “industrial policy” has been successful in many places and many times. The U.S., for example, in its boom years before World War I, had a high tariff policy—on manufactured goods, rather than agricultural. Even if high tariffs didn’t “help”, they clearly didn’t hurt. But the industrial policy being pushed today by the Biden administration is doubly flawed. It seeks to return to the economic “Eden” of the 1950s and 60s when the U.S. had not real competition. This won’t work, according to me. Furthermore, the Biden administration’s “Buy American” kitsch is so loaded down with “woke” measures intended to ensure “equity” that it’s guaranteed to shoot itself, not only in both feet, but both knees, as Ezra Klein argues in his famous “Everything Bagel” post. Noah Smith thinks Ezra is probably wrong, but I think he’s probably right, because I’ve seen this movie before, when it was called The California Bullet.
