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The Biden Doctrine

Consider the sequence of dramatic posturing after the Iranian attack:

  1. Iran threatens that if Israel responds to its attack, Iran will hit Israel back massively — wildly disproportionately.
  2. Biden’s response: to threaten Israel that it must not retaliate to Iran’s attack an inch more than “proportionately”.

Why this strange-sounding sequence? We have actually seen it many times before. Yet it is more striking this time, when it has again happened, this time more brazenly than ever.

We need to articulate to ourselves the meaning of it. We need to ignore the easy temptation to dismiss it as mere idiocy. For in it lays the logic of the doctrine that Biden fairly consistently applies on wars. It gives us, in short, the Biden Doctrine.

 

Teasing out the Doctrine from the policy

The immediate meaning of the sequence is this:

  1. Iran can escalate at every stage. It can attack disproportionately whenever it wants to.
  2. Israel must never escalate. Its response must never be more than Iran’s attack. It must never be disproportionate.
  3. Israel and the U.S. must never exercise their objective escalation dominance – for objectively, their militaries have an enormous escalation dominance over Iran’s. But they must concede the escalation dominance to Iran anyway.
  4. Iran’s escalation dominance consists of the will to hit its enemies. Biden’s escalation subordination consists of the will not to hit America’s enemies.

 

But what is the underlying thought in this? The Doctrine?

 

Equity and Affirmative Action as Foreign Policy Doctrine?

At first sight, it’s as if Biden were saying to Israel: ‘Stop, you’re at risk of winning’. At second sight, as if he felt he was striking a blow for ‘equity’ with this policy.

This policy does, to be sure, make up for the inequity of Iran’s military inferiority. It acts as a grand affirmative action program for America’s enemies.

But what is its doctrinal significance? Is affirmative action what is running consciously in Biden’s mind when he does this?

That seems not likely.

Yet remedial equity may indeed be running in the back of his mind, as a program that is playing a role in pre-programming his specific arguments and policies. Indeed, it would be hard for it not to be playing such a role. Biden declared from the start that ‘equity’, meaning remedial affirmative action-type equity, would be the core of his every policy.

His policies on wars have in fact been the equivalent of an affirmative action program in foreign enemies. He has applied it to one after another of America’s enemies. He has applied to protect the Houthis and let them feel safe to strike as aggressors against America and against global shipping. He has a applied it also to Iran, protecting it against both ourselves and Israel whenever conflict arises. And to Russia, letting it feel safe first to invade Ukraine, then bomb all of Ukraine’s territory with impunity, while Ukraine is not allowed to hit back except at limited localized aggression platforms.

He has never applied it to our allies, by contrast: not to Israel, not to Ukraine. They are, after all, on our side, the side of the privileged, the side that has to be equalized against.

The evidence thus accumulates for Equity as his military doctrine.  Consider:

Is there any enemy at war that he has not applied it to?

No.

Is there any enemy that has not felt emboldened by this to proceed with its aggressive attacks on our allies? It there any enemy that has not felt empowered by this to escalate at their own discretion?

No.

The consistency makes it more than just a policy for a particular instance. It makes it a part of the overall war doctrine of the Administration.

The Biden Doctrine: a first draft of it

This gives us some of the content of the Biden Doctrine: remedial equity on behalf of our enemies.

But this is so absurd that we must think of it as just a surface content. We will have to look at its precursor, the Obama Doctrine, to find out its deeper, inner content.

There we will find a serious ideological commitment, one that is not simply against the West winning in war, but that is deeply ambivalent about the power of the West in the world. We will find that its roots lie in a more radical milieu prevalent in college formative years, where the regnant social rallying code was opposition to that power, and came replete with an ideology that justified this opposition.

About the Author
Chair, Center for War/Peace Studies; Senior Adviser, Atlantic Council of the U.S.; formerly a Fulbright professor of international relations; studied at Princeton, UVA, Oxford. Institutions named above for identification purposes only; views expressed herein are solely the responsibility of the author.
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