When most Americans look at Joe Biden, they see (according to polls) a weak old man who hasn’t gotten much done.
When European heads of state look at Joe Biden, they see an accomplished world-historic leader.
An aging world-historic leader, to be sure. Joke: How old is Joe Biden? He’s so old that when NATO leaders gather at their July summit in Washington, Biden will be the only one born before the organization was founded 75 years ago.
But as Biden’s age has advanced, so too has his clout and respect within the alliance. It was Biden who warned European leaders in early 2022 that Vladimir Putin was going to send his military into Ukraine, a warning many of them initially refused to believe. When the invasion happened as predicted, it was Biden who rallied Western and other allied countries to Ukraine’s defense. It was also Biden who authorized a dramatic increase in U.S. natural gas exports to Europe as Russia cut off supplies. It was Biden who picked up the phone and called the heads of Finland and Sweden with a quiet suggestion that they join NATO. And it was Biden and his team who overcame the resistance of Turkey and Hungary to make NATO expansion a reality, thus turning Putin’s military quagmire into a geo-strategic disaster for Russia.
No president since Ronald Reagan has more successfully wielded influence in the Western alliance. Yet Biden has also overturned one of Reagan’s greatest legacies, Reaganomics, and replaced that free market “neoliberal” ideology with an economic vision of his own, Bidenomics. Instead of cutting safety net programs, Biden vastly expanded them during the pandemic. Instead of encouraging corporate monopolies, his administration is charging them with antitrust violations. Instead of “letting the market decide” all matters of economic development, his government is providing hundreds of billions of dollars to encourage private investment in green energy and microchip manufacturing on American soil.
As a result, instead of declining as an economic power, as most experts 10 years ago predicted would happen, the U.S. over the past four years has zoomed ahead, writes former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark in this issue’s cover story. American voters may not have noticed, but every NATO official visiting Washington understands that on virtually every economic measure—GDP, wages, inflation, job creation, business start-ups—the U.S. is outperforming their countries, and China, too.
They are also aware that military and diplomatic strength depends on economic strength. So, while European leaders might protest some of Biden’s positions, like favorable treatment for American-made EVs, they mostly accommodate themselves to him. For instance, under pressure from Biden, the European Commission has taken a harder line on China’s predatory trade policies despite resistance from Germany and other countries with massive investments in China.
“America’s strong and resilient economy is a godsend at this moment, because we are facing the most dangerous period in our history since at least World War II,” warns Clark. Among other challenges, he notes, “China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are building an alliance of convenience against the United States and our allies” while “our military-industrial base, depleted over the course of recent decades, struggles to field sufficient quantities of even the most basic weaponry, such as artillery shells.”
The latter problem also has its roots, ironically, in Reaganomics. “While the Reagan administration was pouring money into defense, its libertarian zeal proceeded to undermine the industrial base supporting defense,” observes the former Republican congressional defense staffer Mike Lofgren elsewhere in this issue. Reagan cut subsidies for commercial shipping, which the military relies on for logistics, and greenlighted defense industry mergers that led to the mothballing of weapon factories—actions future administrations continued. The Biden administration, Lofgren reports, has taken some modest first steps toward reversing this dire situation.
Biden has started to address other destructive aspects of Reaganomics beyond the military realm. As Tamara Gilkes Borr explains in her review of Washington Monthly contributing editor Anne Kim’s new book, Poverty for Profit, the Gipper began a trend of encouraging corporations to take a lead role in delivering safety net benefits, from health services to housing. Defensible in theory, it has turned out in practice to be a disaster for taxpayers as well as recipients. For instance, low-income working families who want to receive the federal Earned Income Tax Credit often rely on for-profit tax prep companies that can take 20 percent or more of the benefit. This year, the Biden administration unveiled a new government service that allows these families to file directly to the IRS for free.
Of course, millions of Americans whose economic well-being and security have been enhanced by these and other actions have almost no idea that any of it has happened, and even those who are aware seem so far unconvinced that Biden had anything to do with it. That’s why the polls this summer have Biden neck and neck with Donald Trump, a convicted felon who has repeatedly threatened to pull out of NATO.
Trump scares the bejesus out of the alliance leaders gathering in Washington. And they have rising right-wing illiberalism in their own countries. So, they will greet Biden with genuine admiration and wish him well with desperate sincerity. But they will also be having side conversations with emissaries from MAGA world because most of them think Biden is going to lose in November.
And he might. But they should also keep two things in mind. First, the best way to defeat right-wing populism is to deliver economic conditions that benefit average people, and Biden has done that. Second, no American president who has presided over an improving economy has failed to be reelected.
