All eyes are turning to Donald Trump as a diminished Joe Biden quietly prepares to leave the White House on Jan. 20. But Biden’s reluctant withdrawal from the race and his Vice President’s decisive defeat in November should not blind us to the important legacy he built in Asia or the unfinished work that the Trump administration faces.
The most important thing the Biden administration got right was understanding the larger strategic picture in the region and Beijing’s intent to displace the United States as the most influential power in the Indo-Pacific region. This conceptual clarity eluded all the previous post-Cold War American administrations. We entered the first Bush administration with clarity that our allies came first in Asia and that China should be managed with candor and clarity, but by the end of the administration, the challenges of Iraq and the pursuit of diplomacy with North Korea confounded what had been a clear strategic line on Asia.
The most important thing the Biden administration got right was understanding the larger strategic picture in the region and Beijing’s intent to displace the United States as the most influential power in the Indo-Pacific region.
The Obama administration was then divided over Chinese President Xi Jinping’s proposal of a U.S.-China condominium in Asia that he called the “New Model of Great Power Relations” that would have relegated allies to second-tier importance in deciding events in the region. By the end of the Obama administration, the consensus grew that this was a false trap. Trump then came in with a team of national security hawks who declared in the 2017 White House National Security Strategy that the future would be defined by “strategic competition” with China — an important precedent — but friction with allies and distractions over United States Forces Korea and other Trump pet projects undermined implementation.
The Biden team learned from most of these mistakes. Across the administration there was agreement that strategic competition with China was the defining challenge of the era and that strong alliances and partnerships were a key part of the answer. With the exception of perpetual idealist John Kerry, there was little dissent from a focus on strengthening what Biden National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan famously called the “latticework” of alliances and partnerships in the region.
And it was an impressive list of accomplishments, including the Aukus agreement on submarine and technology cooperation, the U.S.-Japan-India-Australia “Quad,” the U.S.-Korea-Japan Camp David agreements and several others.
Trump’s team would be well advised to build on these so-called minilaterals and my guess is that Secretary of State Marco Rubio will do just that, but Trump will probably confuse the attempt to some extent with his freewheeling threats of tariffs and other measures to force concessions from friends and foes alike. Trump’s proxies say that this approach will push allies to make greater efforts toward deterrence, which would be a good thing, but if it undermines trust in the United States at a time when allies need to “go together” in contingencies, it would be a mistake.
Biden’s weakest tool was economic statecraft. The Australian Lowy Asia Power Index rated Biden lower than Trump on economic influence in the region, reflecting the fact that Biden kept all of Trump’s tariffs on but then did not negotiate any new agreements as Trump did with Canada and Mexico under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement or Japan in a bilateral deal. Arguably, it would have been smarter to stay in the Trans-Pacific Partnership and not threaten to retreat from the North American Free Trade Agreement, but the fact is that Trump negotiated trade agreements and Biden did not. What Biden did put on offer — the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) — was better than nothing but was hobbled by antitrade ideologues who sabotaged it from with the office of the United States Trade Representative. In the end, the U.S. economy performed so well that the negative effects were limited, as investment from major Asian economies into the United States surged. However, that did little to bind the smaller and less developed economies to the United States, and China took full advantage with its own economic statecraft, backed by Belt and Road. This gap in U.S. strategy is important, and it is not clear that the Trump administration has any idea what it will do in that space.
Many critics will say that Biden’s embrace of democracy in foreign policy strategy was also a failure, but that would not be entirely fair. Biden was right that geopolitics were being shaped by a battle of ideas between democracies and autocracies, but his Summit on Democracy started with too strict a definition of which countries counted as democracies, and that undercut the impact of his insight.
North Korea policy was a success in that there were no nuclear tests on Biden’s watch, but there were significant advances in Pyongyang’s delivery systems, including the most recent intercontinental ballistic missile test. The fracturing of great power relations meant that Biden had few cards to play, since Russia and China have provided North Korean leader Kim Jong-un with diplomatic protection, and, in Russia’s case, technological assistance. Still, the Biden administration preferred to sweep North Korea problems under the rug (perhaps concluding that no publicity would be good publicity) and opportunities may have been lost to impose greater costs on Pyongyang, and on Moscow and Beijing, for backing the North Koreans. That said, Trump has very little chance of fundamentally changing the dynamics on the Korean Peninsula, even if he does return to his romancing of Kim.
Biden can claim that he successfully deterred aggression in Asia on his watch, but that does not mean that deterrence is necessarily stronger than it was when he came to office.
Biden can claim that he successfully deterred aggression in Asia on his watch, but that does not mean that deterrence is necessarily stronger than it was when he came to office. The alignment of major democracies has definitely complicated Beijing’s and Moscow’s ambitions, particularly as Korea, Japan, Australia and other allies rallied in support of Ukraine to demonstrate that aggression against any democracy affects them all. Credit in large part goes to the Biden team for that demonstration of solidarity. Yet in other respects, Beijing and Pyongyang continue to “own” the initiative strategically. The Biden administration’s response to escalations in the South China Sea or Taiwan Strait or on the Korean Peninsula has been firm but predictable. America’s adversaries still control the pace of tensions because they demonstrate a greater tolerance for risk. Authoritarians have that advantage because their citizens do not get to vote while the democracies’ citizens believe they have more to lose. Nevertheless, the Biden administration never fully figured out how to seize back the initiative in the confrontations with Beijing and Moscow. Trump’s team will make a lot of noise about doing that, but much will depend on how well they can coordinate with allies — because seizing the initiative only helps the other side if it alienates your own.
In the coming years, historians may not be kind to Joe Biden due to the way his presidency ended. But historians of Asia will see that important foundations were built for competition without catastrophe. And perhaps the strongest testament to Biden’s Asia strategy will come as a Republican-led Congress disciplines the Trump administration to keep much of that strategy in place.