Blinken’s Blinkers—Four Years of Biden Foreign Policy Failure

In around three months’ time, the Biden administration will be out of office. Exits typically prompt reflection. For an outgoing administration, the chief task is to shape the narrative. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent legacy-molding foray grounds the Biden administration’s legacy in the “fierce competition” with the “revisionist powers”—Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China—who want to bring down America and dominate the international order at the US government’s expense. On Blinken’s telling, the Biden administration’s strategy of domestic industrial spending and improved international partnerships were the one-two punch that “has put the United States in a much stronger geopolitical position today than it was four years ago.” Unfortunately for Blinken, nothing can sugarcoat the bitter pill of four years of Biden administration failures.

Start with the Biden administration’s “historic investments in competitiveness at home.” Blinken touts the Inflation Reduction Act, which has been appropriately mocked and pilloried. A colossal spending bill purporting to reduce inflation? Really? Are we to be spared nothing? Most charitably understood, the Inflation Reduction Act is, among other things, supposed to incentivize domestic manufacturing of things like electric vehicle batteries, components, and minerals through features like tariffs and tax credits. For EV batteries and minerals, we overwhelmingly depend on China, despite China being foreign policy hawks’ chief rival. This was awkward indeed.

But this “problem” is the Biden and Obama administrations’ own creation. Under their dictates, the EPA and other federal agencies have relentlessly forced a transition to electric vehicles. They accomplished this through EPA’s approval of California’s “Advanced Clean Cars” programs—a unique federal program under which California alone, with EPA’s approval, can set vehicle emission standards—and setting stringent light-, medium-, and heavy-duty vehicle emissions standards that only “zero emission” EVs can meet.

It is the ultimate Washington con game: obscure that the government caused the problem, while taking credit for the “solution.” The Biden administration claims to be acting from concern about dependence on China and offshoring domestic manufacturing, while at one and the same time continuing to ratchet up EV mandates to alarming levels. All the while, presidential candidate Kamala Harris claims, “I will never tell you what kind of car you have to drive.” Sure, the Biden-Harris EPA may not tell you, “Thou shalt drive an electric vehicle,” but rest assured these regulations will price most Americans out of gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles, while EVs are artificially underpriced due to government fiat.

If the Biden administration’s domestic industrial policy is seriously flawed, the foreign policy picture is in shambles. Secretary Blinken touts the Biden administration’s “intensive diplomatic campaign to revitalize partnerships abroad.” The problem is US leaders conceive of international relations as parenting, with the US as the perpetual parent of its “partner” nation-state children. And the Biden administration acts as a parent of the worst sort. They spoil nations around the globe with foreign aid like it is a trust fund, while refusing to impose conditions so other nations will like them. The result, unsurprisingly, is that those nations act like entitled brats, never satisfied with what they have. Worse still, because “Power tends to corrupt,” our foreign aid recipients are far worse than mere children. The US government’s model is more akin to giving your heroin-addicted son an irrevocable, unconditional trust fund, while imploring them not to spend it on drugs. What did they expect would happen? […]

— Read More: mises.org