Biden's National Security Strategy: The Key to Safeguarding America is a Strong Democracy
Containing China & Russia is paramount. Beyond that, to be strong abroad we must be strong at home. Biden has it right. But after him, what?
The Biden administration has finally released its long-awaited National Security Strategy paper (NSS), a legislatively mandated outline of a president’s national security goals. Biden’s reflects an ambitious vision that calls for reinforcing the nexus between domestic and foreign policy as a means to meet the challenges of great power competition and containment. This includes a healthy and vibrant democracy as well as a revitalized economy. It is incumbent upon all democracy-defending Americans to support these goals. The alternative is an America in decline, at the mercy of its adversaries.
Declaring “the post-Cold War era is definitively over,” the NSS describes Washington’s highest priority in the coming years as “outcompeting China and restraining Russia,” while repairing democracy at home. “The United States is strong abroad because we are strong at home,” it continues, making the case that overdue investments in U.S. infrastructure, education, industry, and technology are required if the U.S. is to continue to lead in the 21st century.
The NSS authors have dusted off and revised the Cold War-era Containment Doctrine, a direction I have advocated since Joe Biden won the election. The strategy characterizes Russia as “an immediate and persistent threat to international peace and stability,” while identifying Beijing as “America’s most consequential geopolitical challenge.” In contrast with the old Soviet Union, Moscow today “lacks the across the spectrum capabilities of the PRC.” While the United States aims to compete with China, it will “constrain” and manage the “acute threat posed by Russia.” In short, Russia is viewed as a regional troublemaker with limited non-nuclear capabilities, while China, with its growing economy, strategic reach and fast-developing military establishment, poses a long-term challenge across the board. President Xi Jinping has made explicitly clear that it is China’s goal to surpass the United States both economically and militarily, goals to which Putin can aspire only in his dreams.
In fact, the NSS lays the groundwork for the Pentagon’s own upcoming National Defense Strategy paper and the Nuclear Posture Review, which will address the administration’s nuclear doctrine. China is expected to occupy center place in U.S. military planning for many years to come.
Apart from great power rivalry and containment, the NSS also lists a number of transnational issues as occupying prominence in national security policy, including climate change, food security, pandemic response, countering disinformation, anti-corruption efforts and strengthening American democracy.
The latter deserves special attention by all Americans not in the MAGA grip given the threats to democracy posed by the far-right. Without a healthy democracy, we risk going the way of Putin’s Russia: a palooka on the world stage, a has-been great power, no longer the proverbial “shining city on a hill” — global defender of freedom, democracy and human rights. The NSS euphemistically refers to our domestic political dysfunction as “passionate political intensities and ferment” and warns that we not use it “as an excuse to retreat from the wider world.”
This stress on healing our democracy is foundational to all else. If we are to remain strong abroad, we indeed must be strong at home. And if the nation succumbs to anti-democratic forces, all bets are off.
I’ve contributed to NSS’s of presidents past while working at the State Department. The National Security Council tasks the national security agencies with providing raw input. The NSC staff then laboriously crafts draft after draft of the NSS. Sometimes, international crises cause delays in completion and release, which was the case with Biden’s NSS after Russia invaded Ukraine. Some NSS’s have that everything-but-the-kitchen-sink product-by-committee cast. This one is not that. It is clear that National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and his staff, under the president’s guidance, aimed for something original, concise and rooted in American values. Their calling attention to America’s domestic weaknesses was also courageous and smart.
This NSS contrasts profoundly with that of Trump’s 2018 piece of work. As I analyzed then, “the 55-page NSS document is a painstaking effort by foreign policy experts on the National Security Council to marry up Trump’s rambling Nietzschean sloganeering on the state of the world with cogent establishmentarian thinking that transcends multiple presidential administrations. The result is a hodgepodge of incongruities and contradictions.”
But it didn’t matter because Trump and his penultimate National Security Advisor, John Bolton, ignored it in favor of improv policy schticking based on whatever whims flew into Trump’s cheeseburger-addled brain on any given day. Kim Jung Il is our friend. Putin will call the shots. The U.S. quits NATO. Climate change is a hoax, etc., etc. A return to this kind of slap-stick policy-making will spell chaos and make America more vulnerable to its enemies.
Here’s the bottom line: should a MAGA-captive GOP headed by a wannabe-Duce president (Trump, DeSantis, Hawley — name your autocrat) regain control of the White House and Congress, rest assured Pax Americana will be over and Mandarin lessons will be in high demand.
The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.