Biden and the Gulf: The Future of American Security Leadership
By Charlie McKell
“Trump put to an end Obama-Biden ‘leading from behind foreign policy’,” U.S. National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien told Fox News last month. O’Brien was praising the Trump administration’s posture toward China, while recalling viewers to Barack Obama’s characterization of U.S. participation in the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya. Republican hawks balked at what the phrase “leading from behind” then seemed to suggest. And yet, Donald Trump has overseen the abdication of longstanding leadership roles in international security. Some speak of “neo-isolationism” when contextualizing this Trump-driven withdrawal from the world, while his supporters insist on “America First.” All the while, geopolitical shifts are opening opportunities for security leadership that appear to escape O’Brien’s notice.
Power soon will transfer to Joe Biden, whose expertise in international affairs is well-known and who, as Vice President, opposed American involvement in the Libya intervention. With ongoing public health and economic crises at home, a Biden administration’s priorities abroad are subject to reasonable speculation. Expectations tend to be unspecific: Biden will revitalize partnerships and reassure allies with whom he has personal relationships. But in the Arabian Gulf, for example, heads of state are making decisions under a different set of incentives than during Biden’s time as Vice President. American policy-makers must reassess what forces are at work on the other side of these vital relationships.
Washington has long been the security guarantor of the Gulf, where the U.S. Navy patrols one of the world’s most important energy supply chains. But Gulf Arab countries now have more economic ties to Asia, and the U.S. is no longer dependent on Middle Eastern oil. Moreover, oil prices are expected to remain low next year while crucial industries in the region continue to recover; and the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council have together issued a record quantity of debt this year. These conditions, among others, alter strategic priorities just as they drive internal and regional dynamics. Shifting incentives could induce Arab Gulf leaders to pivot from a security arrangement that is led exclusively by the U.S. to a collective security architecture that incorporates other partners.
Dr. Narayanappa Janardhan, a political analyst based in the UAE, finds increasing evidence that Arab Gulf countries are open to that scenario: Present and growing ties between the Gulf and Asia could allow for a shift toward an alternative security arrangement that would see the American military reduce its role, leaving room for Asian leadership. Of course, this new arrangement could not come about simply with the election of a new American president. But Dr. Janardhan notes that Asian countries, including India and China, could increase their security responsibilities over the medium to long term, just as Arab Gulf countries have themselves resorted to direct military engagement in recent years.
Writing last year, Dr. Janardhan further observed that an Asian-led collective security architecture in the Gulf would allow the U.S. a dignified exit under Trump’s “America First” slogan, explaining that it “ensures Washington’s continued and cost-effective relevance in the region, without being the only one responsible for the security of the Gulf.” Biden will seek to reverse some of Trump’s withdrawal, but where he reasserts leadership will depend on where resources are best deployed. If we can reliably predict that Biden will direct efforts to reinforcing partnerships and alliances, we cannot reasonably expect him to issue injunctive mandates against alternative arrangements if other countries have decided they better meet their interests.
Whatever slogan supporters attach to Biden’s foreign policy, the clearest break from the current administration will be how Washington seeks to project power and what criteria its policy-makers apply to measure American triumph. The U.S. military’s dominance remains unquestioned, and Arab Gulf partners do not wish to see its forces depart.
Still, many citizens of the Middle East favored Trump because they viewed his tenure as a reprieve from his predecessors’ military interventionism in the region. Given the immediacy of Washington’s need to restore credibility, the incoming administration’s designs to restructure or extend existing terms of agreement will be bounded by an understanding of partners’ other options.
Past & Present
Zalmay Khalizad, writing for RAND Corporation in 1995, famously outlined three possibilities for the U.S. role in the post-Cold War world. Deeming too precarious the pre-WWII balancing of multi-powers and rejecting isolationism outright, Khalizad furnished an important intellectual grounding for neoconservatism by stressing a necessity for U.S. global hegemony. A quarter of a century on, his thesis serves a useful heuristic purpose for evaluating America’s approach to the Middle East—particularly against the current internal trends. “Neoliberal,” describing the domestic package of what international relations scholars call the Washington Consensus, is now a stock term of derision in popular discourse; Trump’s record of transactional foreign policy cannot count any major win; and the global acknowledgement of modern multipolarity—even bipolarity—simply doesn’t register with the American public.
Trump rose to power on a message that the American middle class has gained nothing from American adventurism in the Middle East and, as far as they see it, next to nothing from globalization. These were not the necessary, nor exhaustive, premises of Trump’s “populism.” But as the descriptive conditions that underlay it, they deserve the continued consideration of an incoming administration that seeks to build a robust foreign policy grounded in popular legitimacy.
Biden acknowledges this head-on. Presenting his vision in Foreign Affairs, the president-elect dubs a “foreign policy for the middle class” that appoints alliances as its primary tool. In the Gulf, the U.S. might witness Asian countries gradually take on more responsibility for security under the scheme of a collective architecture. This it could do without diminishing its essential relationship with Gulf Arab countries, or even its preeminent status among them. A new administration must determine where its comparative advantages lie, positioning itself to remain the partner-of-choice in the long-term. “Leading from behind” did not anticipate “America First,” but a more dynamic sequel, after surveying the options left to it, might adopt a cost-effective presence in the Gulf while scaling up investments in infrastructure and innovation at home—investments that might actually prevent the U.S. from finding itself “behind” in its sustained strategic competition with China.
On Capitol Hill, though, politicians lie in wait. Waggish online commentators often suggest that Republican legislators, when once again under a Democrat in the White House, will all of the sudden remember just how concerned they are about the national debt. Similarly, they will deploy messaging on the military to declaim that Democrats have rendered the U.S. weak on the global stage. These are repeated if reliable predictions. And Joe Biden, who has built a career on bipartisan relationships and deal-making, knows that affirming commitment to national security is an inviolable rule of electoral politics. Championing a “foreign policy for the middle class” can appeal to a broader base and bring about a modernized strategy, so long as its ostensible aim is not further reduction of security leadership. It probably needs a better name.
Common to many Western governments over past decades was the failure to effectively communicate the real gains of globalization to workers. Amid urgent and devastating domestic crises, a self-evident starting point for a new administration would be to figure out how to effectively communicate to the American public exactly how it is that the U.S. wields power in today’s world.