The Failure of Biden's summit meetings actually exposes the emerging shape of our new world
“Lofty words cannot construct an alliance or maintain it; only concrete deeds can do that.”
--John F. Kennedy
The good news is that, unlike many of his presidential predecessors, Joe Biden has a definite theory of the case as to how the world works. The bad news is that it has been proven entirely wrong.
The real-world summits of the past days (G7, NATO, and with Russia) have made this painfully clear. In practical terms, Biden wanted to woo the Europeans as committed American allies in our new era (at the G7), refocus the West’s collective strategic gaze on the dangerous rise of China (at the NATO summit), and park Russia as an issue that needs dealing with (at the Geneva meeting with Vladimir Putin). On all counts, the Wilsonian Biden failed for ideational reasons; our new world simply does not work as he thinks it does.
But that is not to say the meetings were not important. In the American president’s failure lies the clues as to the genuine, emerging contours of our new era. For an underlying alliance system for blocking the rise of an expansionistic China is forming, just not with the membership Biden had been counting on.
At last week’s G7 meeting in Cornwall, Biden’s theory of the world was found wanting; proving to be an oversimplification of a very complicated place. Faced with a new era with two discernible superpowers (the US and China), the new president is rightly aware that they key to ultimate success in this bipolar competition is which superpower crafts genuine alliances with the great powers just below it in order of importance (India, Japan, the Anglosphere countries, the EU and Russia).
Biden, correctly condemning the outgoing Trump administration for not doing enough to curry favor with these great powers—which, unlike during the US-Soviet Cold War, now have a great deal of latitude in setting the trajectories of their respective foreign policies—sees a geostrategic opening here based on ideology. He correctly points out that the great democratic powers are all more pro-American than they are pro-Chinese, while Russia is closer to China. This, Biden is certain, is the basic new strategic division in the world.
It is here that Biden’s worldview slips from simple to simplistic. Of course, Biden hopes that this democracy versus autocracy theme has intellectual legs (fawning US commentators have even labelled the new idea ‘The Biden Doctrine’), as it suits America’s geostrategic dreams. With the Anglosphere, India, Japan and the EU all firmly on the US’ side (with only economically sclerotic Russia supporting China), America would be highly likely to retain its pre-eminent global role well into the new era.
The G7 meeting served as perfect experimental template for Biden’s thesis, as its membership comprises many of the other great powers in question: the EU (Germany, France, and Italy), Japan, and the Anglosphere countries (UK, Canada). Surely, all these democratic allies would easily coalesce around a common position balancing China?
Of course, they did not. Beyond the abundant flummery of the G7 meeting, almost nothing of substance was agreed about how to commonly deal with China, by far the single most important foreign policy challenge faced by the democratic grouping. The G7 countries did agree to yet another World Health Organization (WHO) investigation into the origins of the pandemic. However, given the WHO’s appalling recent track record over this issue, I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Further, neutralist EU leaders Angela Merkel of Germany and Mario Draghi of Italy (plus EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and EU Council President Charles Michel)--seeing China as much as a market opportunity as an existential geopolitical threat--blocked the US, the Anglosphere countries (UK, Canada) and France from their efforts to name and shame Beijing’s horrendous forced labor practices against the Uighurs in western Xinjiang province.
Pathetically, an earlier specific reference to these human rights violations was omitted in the final draft, with only a pallid, generic reference to the global evils of forced labor included, signifying precisely nothing. Tellingly, such was the state of G7 disunity over Beijing that China itself was not mentioned in the summary of the group’s final communique, despite it having emerged as the dominant topic of the leaders’ discussions, according to Draghi. This basic political and strategic division over China--between the US, Japan, and the Anglosphere on the one hand, versus an appeasement-minded EU on the other--is the real analytical takeaway of the G7 meeting.
The real-world G7 diplomatic failure stands as an intellectual rebuke to Biden’s putative doctrine. This is because, in his over-simplification of the world, the Wilsonian President has assumed that, just because the democratic states have similar values, they are bound to magically have identical interests. Of course, this does not follow at all in the real world.
At present, Japan, India, and the Anglosphere countries are lining up firmly in the American camp on the need to balance against China. However, both Russia (though certainly tilting towards Beijing) and the EU (tilting towards Washington) are instead struggling to maintain more of a neutralist stance independent of either superpower.
The Kremlin, fearful of its subordinate position in any Sino-Russian alliance, with a regime founded and sustained by the principle of Great Russian nationalism, is wary of being swallowed whole by the Chinese whale. The EU, chafing for decades under US domination and beguiled by the perceived riches of the Chinese market, is tempted to not fully commit to the American camp, now that it has more room for maneuver. Leaving out the complexity that the great powers today can pursue on independent neutralism as well align with either superpower led Biden to naively believe all the democratic great powers would be with him; the G7 decisively proved otherwise.
Nor did the NATO summit serve Biden’s basic goal of reprioritizing the alliance into an anti-Chinese nexus. While Beijing was mentioned in the final communique (for the first time) ten-plus times, China was not specifically labelled an adversary of the western alliance. Continuing in the same vein from the G7 meeting, French President Emmanuel Macron directly affirmed the EU’s neutralist line: “NATO is a North Atlantic Organization, and China has nothing to do with the North Atlantic. We shouldn’t bias our relationship with China—it is much larger than just the military.”
Biden’s losing ways continued with the Geneva meeting with Putin. While the two presidents (in the past Biden has labelled the Russian president ‘a killer’) managed not to throw chairs at one another, again almost nothing of significance occurred. Surely there wasn’t the necessary US-Russian diplomatic thaw allowing Russia to be parked as an issue for the whole of Biden’s presidency. Moscow will continue to be a wrecking power, reminding the west of its existence and great power significance.
So, what to make of all this alliance failure? Rather a lot. First, clearly, the world simply does not work as Joe Biden would like it to. The Biden Doctrine of Democracies versus Autocracies stumbled at this first real-world hurdle, both because in our new era the great powers have much more room to set their own strategic course than was the case in the Soviet-American Cold War, and because basic political affinities (being a democracy or a dictatorship) do not magically do away with the specific national interests of a country, however much American Wilsonians may try to wish reality away.
But, on the other hand, the world’s emerging power structure was made clear, and it is heartening to those of us who are well-wishers of individual liberty. More and more, through nascent strategic organizations such as the Quad (with great powers the US, India, and Japan as members alongside Anglosphere Australia) and geo-economic groupings such as the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), committed allies in the Indo-Pacific are practically balancing against an expansionistic China. In the US, India, Japan, and the Anglosphere countries a genuine alliance is forming over time, one with the strategic heft to both balance China and over the long term to prevail in a strategic contest with it.
John F. Kennedy put it so well; lofty words cannot create or maintain an alliance, only practical deeds can do this. This past week saw a lot of lofty words in Europe but precious few practical deeds. That is because the EU is increasingly neutralist in its dealings with both the US and China. If this is the bad news, the good news is that the opposite is occurring in the Indo-Pacific, the most important region in the new era—with most of the world’s political risk and most of the world’s economic reward—where new deeds and new organizations are practically creating and sustaining the most important emerging alliance of the Twenty-First Century.