Perhaps most disappointingly, the Biden administration has still not published a revised conventional arms transfer (CAT) policy, an essential executive branch directive that guides the government-wide approach to the conventional arms trade. Under President Trump, the U.S. CAT policy was rewritten to elevate perceived economic benefits of arms sales at the expense of foreign policy, national security, and human rights concerns, helping justify a number of sales that defied public and congressional opposition. After promising a new CAT policy, and more than a year of delays, it is far past time for the Administration to issue a new policy that explicitly prioritizes human rights, civilian protection, transparency, and oversight. Unfortunately, the lack of a CAT policy has created confusion around Biden administration’s security cooperation strategy. In cases as disparate as Saudi Arabia and Ukraine, the absence of an overarching policy gives the sense of an untethered approach and leaves lingering questions about inconsistencies in the administration’s commitment to transparency, human rights, and oversight.
The administration has also used the lack of a CAT policy to remain deafeningly silent on the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), the first legally binding, global agreement to regulate international arms transfers. Despite the absence of any legal or procedural barrier preventing the President from rescinding the letter from his predecessor claiming to “unsign” the ATT, the administration has delayed any new policy change – an executive prerogative – saying any action must await the long-delayed CAT policy. The position is unfortunate and betrays the Administration’s supposed commitment to multilateralism and international cooperation on global security matters. The Administration should both reaffirm America’s signature of the treaty and begin socializing the agreement’s benefits with key domestic stakeholders with an eye towards eventual ratification.
Although the Biden Administration announced a much-welcomed new anti-personnel landmines (APL) policy on June 21, 2022which basically reverses the Trump administration’s January 2020 APL policy and reverts back to that of the Obama administration, the Biden administration hasn’t gone far enough with landmine policy reform. While the use of landmines in the Korean demilitarized zone remains the largest obstacle, for which the United States claims it needs an exception, in reality those mines are now under the responsibility of South Korean forces and thus do not prevent the United States from joining the Mine Ban Treaty. The Biden administration could be more aligned with partners and allies on the landmine issue by announcing a timeline for the destruction of the remaining 3 million APL in the U.S. stockpile and a timetable and concrete actions the administration will take in order to join the Mine Ban Treaty.
On cluster munitions, the Biden administration has been frustratingly silent. The United States last used cluster munitions in a single attack in Yemen in 2009, has not exported cluster munitions since 2015, and no U.S. companies produce the weapon, yet the United States has not joined the Convention on Cluster Munitions. The Biden administration should announce a timetable and path towards joining the convention and review the Department of Defense’s (DoD) 2017 Policy on Cluster Munitions with the aim of halting their use, production, export, and stockpiling. Moreover, the Biden administration should expedite the destruction of stockpiled cluster munitions, fulfilling a policy goal that dates back to the George W. Bush administration.
Arms transfers have increased under the Biden administration. In 2022, congressional notifications for proposed arms sales reached $81 billion, more than twice the $36 billion in arms offers made in 2021. While growing political insecurity has contributed to an increased focus on arms transfer as a tool of foreign policy and national security, the administration should not lose sight of the commitments it made to develop greater safeguards against irresponsible arms transfers.
Hits & Strikes From Biden’s First Two Years
By Kelly A. Grieco • Christopher Preble • Emma Ashford • Andrew Hyde • Rachel Stohl • Elias Yousif • Andrea Viski • Christina McAllister • Sneha Nair • Elizabeth Threlkeld • Frank O’Donnell • Akriti (Vasudeva) Kalyankar • Jaiya Lalla • Betzalel Newman • Uzair Sattar • Dante Schulz • Jenny Town
In Grand Strategy
On the two-year anniversary of President Joe Biden’s inauguration, Stimson Center specialists review his administration’s policies across a range of issue areas and look ahead to the challenges and opportunities of the second half of his presidential term.
A mixed assessment emerges of Biden’s policy effectiveness and success:
Among the key challenges to tackle and opportunities to seize they found:
America Needs to Ask More of Its Allies
President Joe Biden has rightly made revitalizing U.S. alliances and security relationships a cornerstone of his foreign policy, but his administration’s “back to the future” approach is out of step with 21st-century geopolitics. The United States needs to reform and rebalance its entire alliance network to reflect today’s emerging multipolar world rather than reinforce the highly asymmetrical security dependencies of the Cold War era.
Biden has sought to win back America’s “old friends,” having vowed to stand “shoulder to shoulder” with them. And he has turned those words into action. Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the White House has sent an additional 20,000 U.S. forces to the continent, bringing the total to more than 100,000 US military personnel in Europe. Washington has also deepened security ties with Indo-Pacific allies and partners, signing new security partnerships and scaling up military exercises.
The Biden administration’s shift in tone was a welcome correction. A foundation of trust and mutual respect, not gratuitous taunts and insults, should be the basis of US security relationships. But in trying so hard to prove itself a reliable ally, the Biden administration has inverted the Trump-era pathologies — the problem is no longer that US allies may have reason to doubt credibility of U.S. security commitments, but that they believe Washington’s promises too much.
Allies are so confident of America’s security guarantees that they continue to free ride. Tokyo recently unveiled a record defense budget, but Japan will still only spend about two percent of its gross domestic product on defense, and it will take five years to get there. Many European allies have announced spending increases since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but they continue to lag behind the United States in providing financial and military support to Ukraine.
It’s not clear the White House sees free riding as a problem. Its own National Security Strategy, for example, never addressed equitable burden sharing. The Biden administration seems to want to keep to the old formula — American dominance, and allied dependence. And U.S. allies are still happy to oblige — all that money they might otherwise have spent on “guns” can be put towards “butter.”
But this arrangement is no longer sustainable. China is now the “pacing threat,” one that requires more American resources and attention, while Russia remains a weak but dangerous adversary. The administration insists that the United States is still powerful enough to “walk and chew gum at the same time.” But it is bluster. The United States is dangerously overstretched, and the Biden administration has done little to address the problem.
The obvious solution is to insist that America’s allies and partners step up their defense efforts, starting with larger and more sustained defense spending. To make that happen, the White House needs to have frank discussions with America’s allies and partners about the limits of U.S. support. If these security relationships withstood the Trump years, they can surely survive some tough but necessary talk about burden sharing.
An Instinct to Do More
President Biden has navigated the most challenging foreign policy crisis of his presidency: Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. He wisely concluded that a direct confrontation between the United States and NATO versus Russia would be disastrous, and deflected proposals — like a no-fly zone — that would have led in that direction. The risk of a catastrophic escalation is ever-present, however, and thus all focus should be on ending the war.
President Biden also deserves credit for extricating the United States from the 20-years-long war in Afghanistan. That conflict was not advancing U.S. vital interests and it diverted attention and resources away from more urgent priorities. Joe Biden made the necessary but courageous decision to turn the page, something that his predecessors failed to do.
Alas, these moments of relative restraint have not translated into a foreign policy that aligns objectives with available resources. Biden’s instincts mostly seem to be pushing him to do more — and spend more. The Pentagon’s budget continues to break records, and U.S. foreign policy remains overmilitarized.
The Biden team has dropped the ball on some easy diplomatic wins. They failed to bring the United States back into the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — aka the Iran nuclear deal — despite candidate Biden’s promise to do so. Trump’s maximum pressure campaign was a total failure. The path to getting US-Iran policy back on track was clear, but Biden refused to take it. With Iranian hard-liners now engaged in brutal crackdown on peaceful protesters, there may be no going back.
Biden has drawn the United States even closer to Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, even though the U.S. intelligence community concluded MBS was responsible for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. And Biden limited, but did not terminate, U.S. military assistance to Saudi Arabia as it was waging war in Yemen. The warm embrace of the Saudis is doubly puzzling given the president’s stated commitment to advancing democracy.
The most consequential decisions over the long term, however, pertain to U.S. policy toward China. The president has sent mixed signals on the U.S. stance vis-à-vis Taiwan, and has generally pushed a confrontational approach toward Beijing, even while claiming to want to avoid a new Cold War. The decision to limit Chinese access to certain technology has prompted concern that the United States is engaged in a thinly veiled form of protectionism in the name of national security. Subsidies and “Buy American” provisions within the Inflation Reduction Act for funding the green energy transition have similarly elicited consternation. We should expect more such blowback in the future. The country that claims to be a champion of the rules-based order, and assumes allies and partners will follow its lead, can’t expect to defy the rules governing global trade without others noticing.
Biden and the UN – Important Progress But Unfulfilled Potential
On the global stage the first two years of the Biden administration have seen a concerted and measurable effort to reassert U.S. leadership at the United Nations (UN) and in other multilateral forums. However, it has still fallen short of expressing a compelling and concerted goal for that leadership — an affirmative U.S vision for global advancement. Admittedly, other nations’ distrust of U.S. intentions and commitments that had grown significantly under the Trump administration had to be overcome by tangible actions from Washington. In addition, the rest of the world showed it would not stand still while Washington sorts out its priorities and how to achieve them. Results alone — untethered from an animating vision — will always fall short.
Biden’s team has executed a distinct change in tone. After pledging “relentless diplomacy” to the UN General Assembly in 2021, the President in his remarks to the global gathering on September 21, 2022, pledged to other countries that, “if you’re still committed to a strong foundation for the good of every nation around the world, then the United States wants to work with you.” He and his UN Permanent Representative Ambassador Linda Thomas Greenfield have racked up a series of initiatives and achievements in areas as diverse as Ukraine, food security, humanitarian assistance, human rights, and the Digital Future, along with pledges for UN institutional modernization and specific signals of an abiding U.S. commitment to the institution and its future health.
The vitality and relevance of the world’s multilateral architecture has rarely ever been more important. Russia’s war on Ukraine, while undermining the credibility of many international conventions in areas such as the use of force, human rights and international humanitarian law and economic relations, has also demonstrated the role and utility of international forums to focus and amplify a mostly global consensus opposed to Russia’s actions along with developing and modifying tools to help mitigate its negative impacts. But, beyond showing Moscow’s relative isolation and generating a relatively unified and significant international response, other nations are still looking to Washington for more.
A number of commentators foresee that a White House now confronted with a divided Congress might increasingly pursue foreign policy achievements. A key element of that will be to demonstrate how U.S. global leadership advances U.S. interests and relates to the concerns of everyday Americans. International trust in Washington’s leadership is probably higher now that it has been at any point in the last twenty-five years. Several ongoing and upcoming UN processes and events — such as the Secretary-General’s Our Common Agenda, looking ahead for a vision on the future of global cooperation in the next 25 years, and 2024’s UN Summit of the Future, which seeks to forge a new global consensus on the future — are “turnkey” opportunities to set out U.S. thinking.
The U.S. has made sure that all the ingredients of the “vision thing,” as President George Bush once put it, are on the table; what is now needed is a clear articulation of the kinds of international institutions and their most effective roles and capabilities over the next several decades that this administration believes will help shape the international system.
Over Promising and Under Delivering on Arms Transfer Policies
When the Biden administration came to office, it did so with a number of promising commitments to reform America’s security cooperation, arms transfer, and military assistance enterprise that would elevate human rights, accountability, and transparency imperatives. While many notable and welcome improvements have been made, the administration’s record in its first two years falls far short of expectations. From the notable absence of a long-awaited conventional arms transfer policy to its silence on cluster munitions, the Biden team marks the midway point of its first term with mixed results for its effort to reform the management and undertaking of the U.S. arms trade.
Perhaps most disappointingly, the Biden administration has still not published a revised conventional arms transfer (CAT) policy, an essential executive branch directive that guides the government-wide approach to the conventional arms trade. Under President Trump, the U.S. CAT policy was rewritten to elevate perceived economic benefits of arms sales at the expense of foreign policy, national security, and human rights concerns, helping justify a number of sales that defied public and congressional opposition. After promising a new CAT policy, and more than a year of delays, it is far past time for the Administration to issue a new policy that explicitly prioritizes human rights, civilian protection, transparency, and oversight. Unfortunately, the lack of a CAT policy has created confusion around Biden administration’s security cooperation strategy. In cases as disparate as Saudi Arabia and Ukraine, the absence of an overarching policy gives the sense of an untethered approach and leaves lingering questions about inconsistencies in the administration’s commitment to transparency, human rights, and oversight.
The administration has also used the lack of a CAT policy to remain deafeningly silent on the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), the first legally binding, global agreement to regulate international arms transfers. Despite the absence of any legal or procedural barrier preventing the President from rescinding the letter from his predecessor claiming to “unsign” the ATT, the administration has delayed any new policy change – an executive prerogative – saying any action must await the long-delayed CAT policy. The position is unfortunate and betrays the Administration’s supposed commitment to multilateralism and international cooperation on global security matters. The Administration should both reaffirm America’s signature of the treaty and begin socializing the agreement’s benefits with key domestic stakeholders with an eye towards eventual ratification.
Although the Biden Administration announced a much-welcomed new anti-personnel landmines (APL) policy on June 21, 2022which basically reverses the Trump administration’s January 2020 APL policy and reverts back to that of the Obama administration, the Biden administration hasn’t gone far enough with landmine policy reform. While the use of landmines in the Korean demilitarized zone remains the largest obstacle, for which the United States claims it needs an exception, in reality those mines are now under the responsibility of South Korean forces and thus do not prevent the United States from joining the Mine Ban Treaty. The Biden administration could be more aligned with partners and allies on the landmine issue by announcing a timeline for the destruction of the remaining 3 million APL in the U.S. stockpile and a timetable and concrete actions the administration will take in order to join the Mine Ban Treaty.
On cluster munitions, the Biden administration has been frustratingly silent. The United States last used cluster munitions in a single attack in Yemen in 2009, has not exported cluster munitions since 2015, and no U.S. companies produce the weapon, yet the United States has not joined the Convention on Cluster Munitions. The Biden administration should announce a timetable and path towards joining the convention and review the Department of Defense’s (DoD) 2017 Policy on Cluster Munitions with the aim of halting their use, production, export, and stockpiling. Moreover, the Biden administration should expedite the destruction of stockpiled cluster munitions, fulfilling a policy goal that dates back to the George W. Bush administration.
Arms transfers have increased under the Biden administration. In 2022, congressional notifications for proposed arms sales reached $81 billion, more than twice the $36 billion in arms offers made in 2021. While growing political insecurity has contributed to an increased focus on arms transfer as a tool of foreign policy and national security, the administration should not lose sight of the commitments it made to develop greater safeguards against irresponsible arms transfers.
Crisis Management is Not a Strategy
At the halfway point of his first term in office — and given his age, potentially his only term in office — Joe Biden’s foreign policy is a mixed bag. His administration has been highly competent in day-to-day diplomacy and in weathering crises like the war in Ukraine. But they’ve not been particularly bold; instead of seeking to turn the major crises besieging them into pportunities for new thinking about global affairs, they’ve largely stuck with the foreign policy status quo.
This holds true even for arguably the administration’s biggest foreign policy achievement: the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Biden deserves a lot of credit for choosing to let the withdrawal proceed, but one wonders whether he would have initiated it if not for the prior administration. Likewise, the administration’s response to the war in Ukraine has been admirably competent, walking a tightrope between hands-off support for Ukraine and dangerous escalation. But it has not apparently prompted any new thinking on European security. If anything, the administration’s response to the war has reinforced the existing pathologies in the US-European defense partnership, with a surge in American troops to the continent discouraging European states from developing the necessary capabilities and defense industrial base to step up in security affairs.
This is part of a broader pattern: Biden’s tenure exhibits remarkably little genuine change in security policy. The National Security Strategy — finally released in October 2022 — is wildly ambitious. “The need for American leadership is as great as it has ever been,” Biden declares in his letter introducing the strategy, “There is nothing beyond our capacity.” The document explicitly commits America to “support every country, regardless of size or strength, in exercising the freedom to make choices that serve their interests.” This rhetoric is more consistent with the ambitious strategies of Biden’s predecessors than with any new thinking.
The lack of innovative thinking in the administration is highly problematic given the ongoing flux in the international system, and the significant geopolitical changes that are occurring in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. Indeed, the most obvious changes in Biden’s foreign policy have been more tactical than strategic, and more concentrated on the economic than the security side of the ledger. The administration’s use of economic statecraft has been extensive, and it has emphasized the growing salience of economic issues, from supply chain resilience to the energy transition and U.S. sanctions and export controls as a tool of foreign policy. As Andrea Viski points out below, the U.S. has begun to apply traditional nonproliferation tools like export controls to the area of strategic competition, trying to restrain China’s technological rise by restricting so-called “choke-point” technologies. These export controls, as well as the use of sanctions to constrain Russia’s wartime economy, are among the most assertive and widespread uses of economic tools we’ve seen since the interwar period.
In a nutshell: this administration is using powerful, innovative new tools of economic statecraft in pursuit of a national security agenda aimed at preserving the foreign policy status quo. It’s a risky approach. Biden’s use of economic statecraft in the first two years will have far reaching implications; it will not, however, move us any closer to resolving the big security questions that the United States faces in the 21st century.
Strategic Trade and Biden’s New Multilateralism
The Biden administration’s first two years have been characterized by strong reliance on trade controls in tandem with multilateral coordination to try to achieve U.S. technological, economic, and security objectives. The U.S. has taken on strategic competition with China through targeted use of export controls and, importantly, extraterritorial jurisdiction of those controls through the Foreign Direct Product Rule (FDPR) and use of the Entity List, on what it views as “choke point” technologies.
The 2022 restrictions on American chip technology to China foreshadow that the administration seeks to continue using trade and investment controls in its strategic competition, with an Executive Order forthcoming to control U.S. investments in China in key technology areas. Instead of jumping to conclusions on whether this approach to China will succeed or backfire, I believe its outcome depends on two factors. The first is the administration’s ability to work with like-minded partners to coordinate and effectively enforce new controls as it has been energetically trying to do, and second, to consistently calibrate controls based on the state of technology, competition, and real security risk.
The challenges of decision-making, transparency, and action within multilateral regimes and their ability to adapt to new challenges and enact effective policies represents a fundamental shift towards a new era in the U.S.’ role in the trade and security space. Whether in terms of the United Nations, the export control regimes, or any number of other multilateral instruments stalled in fundamental ways in their ability to respond to new security threats, the Biden administration has signaled a willingness to act with like-minded allies and partners within or outside of these structures to implement its policy priorities. Examples of this include U.S. efforts to coordinate policy via the European Union–U.S. Trade and Technology Council as well as the Indo-Pacific Framework for Prosperity, and in the context of the semiconductor supply network, the Chips4 Alliance.
The new controls vis-à-vis China have in some respects overshadowed other significant developments in the Biden administration’s response to major global challenges through trade tools. in responding to the Russian aggression in Ukraine, the administration has taken an assertive stance on the use of trade controls to punish the Putin regime, weaken the Russian economy, as well as to thwart Russian acquisition of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and conventional weapons capability. The administration’s leadership in the international community in implementing, coordinating, and enforcing far-reaching sanctions against Russia, in partnership with U.S. allies, has been a marked success, especially in light of the inability of the United Nations (UN) to impose multilateral sanctions due to the composition of the Security Council.
A notable achievement, and no small feat, of the administration has been the hard work and diplomacy contributing to the passage of UN Resolution 2663 (2022), which ensures the implementation of Resolution 1540 (2004) by renewing the mandate of the 1540 Committee and its Group of Experts. With UNSCR 1540 being one of the most important global WMD nonproliferation instruments in international law and the only global mandate obligating all UN member states to implement WMD-related trade controls, securing and strengthening its future is a key piece of the United States’ commitment to fight WMD.
The Biden administration has relied heavily on the use of trade controls to pursue diverse policy objectives from technological dominance to nonproliferation. The very features that underpin trade control effectiveness — multilateral implementation, enforcement, and compliance — will have to feature front and center as goals to ensure policy success through the rest of Biden’s term.
Mixed Record on Non-Proliferation Issues
As Andrea Viski notes above, Biden’s team deserves recognition for its contributions to the extension of the 1540 Committee’s mandate for another decade, and should seek to build on that momentum to ensure continuity of international efforts to prevent proliferation of WMD.
The Biden administration also deserves kudos for a more proactive response than previous administrations to Russian disinformation, including false claims about the nature of U.S. assistance to Ukrainian biological laboratories and about alleged Ukrainian plans to sabotage chemical plants, obtain nuclear weapons, or detonate a dirty bomb. This response must become even more vigorous, and creative, in the time left to the administration, both to protect fragile yet critical assistance partnerships to build WMD proliferation prevention capacity around the globe and to deny Russia cover for possible false flag attacks of its own. The United States should also follow up concretely on indications at the Ninth Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) Review Conference in December that it is open – after 20 years – to taking a fresh look at potential verification measures for the treaty, a key weakness in the regime and a festering sore point with other states parties.
Importantly, the United States also supported the 2021 France-led censure of Syria within the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). Given the OPCW’s findings that Syria has repeatedly used chemical weapons, suspending Syria’s rights and privileges under the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) strengthened the global norm against the proliferation of chemical weapons. The Fifth CWC Review Conference, scheduled for this May, offers Biden and his team a near term chance to work with partners to demonstrate commitment to and strengthen one of the key pillars of the international nonproliferation regime.
The Biden administration has a more mixed record on nuclear proliferation prevention, having fumbled on a promise to return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on Iran’s nuclear program. On North Korea, as our colleague Jenny Town notes, the administration’s “new” official policy offered no fresh strategies to accomplish the stated goal of denuclearization. And the September, 2021, announcement of a deal to provide Australia with nuclear-powered submarines as part of an “AUKUS” trilateral security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States has also raised nonproliferation concerns. The deal seems at odds with US-led efforts to reduce quantities of highly enriched uranium (HEU) around the globe and has been interpreted by some as undermining safeguards – and by extension broader global non-proliferation norms. Meanwhile, the 2022 Nuclear Posture Review’s relatively weak language on nuclear security commitments, with no reference to international cooperative efforts to combat nuclear terrorism, was also disappointing, despite the document’s emphasis on nuclear arms control, nuclear nonproliferation, and risk reduction. Those elements of the document were further undermined by Biden’s departure from campaign promises on reducing the role of U.S. nuclear weapons use, with the NPR explicitly rejecting policies of no first use and sole-use. The administration must make clear pledges going forward to strengthen the security of nuclear weapons, materials, and facilities. The United States must also continue unabashedly supporting proposals at the IAEA General Assembly and Board of Governors meetings to keep nuclear power plants safe and create mechanisms for accountability by preventing Russia’s occupation of Zaporizhzhia from setting a precedent, especially in light of divisions over the issue at the August, 2022, Tenth Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Biden Administration South Asia Policy: Two Years On
In its first two years in office, the Biden administration has prioritized regional competition with China in its South Asia policy, at times struggling to balance global goals with regional realities. The centerpiece of this strategy has been India, routinely described by U.S. officials as a country “vital to addressing virtually every global challenge,” especially upholding a free and open Indo-Pacific. High-level U.S. and Indian officials now meet regularly in bilateral and Quad engagements, focusing on cooperation across a wide array of issues, from defense, to supply chains, to critical technology, to maritime security.
Competition with China has also shaped Washington’s relations with smaller South Asian states. Beijing’s increasing naval, economic, and infrastructure footprint in the region has led Washington to step up its engagement with these states through high-level visits and grants.
Complicating this focus, however, have been legacy issues linked to previous U.S. policies and regional dynamics. Topping the list is Afghanistan, where Biden inherited a stalled peace process and oversaw a poorly managed and politically costly withdrawal followed by the Taliban takeover. The President’s decision to draw down forces — driven by a recognition that further extending the U.S. presence in Afghanistan would not turn the tide of the war — evinced a desire to prioritize great power competition. Washington demonstrated an effective over-the-horizon counter-terrorism capability in its strike on al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, but it has failed to moderate the Taliban’s increasingly draconian policies and hold the group to its CT commitments under the Doha agreement. Meanwhile, the devastating floods Pakistan suffered in September 2022 brought climate change to the top of the bilateral agenda, joining a new focus on issues including education, health, and agriculture as a corrective to what had previously been a security-centric relationship dominated by Afghanistan.
Looking ahead, the challenge the Biden administration faces is in maintaining its focus on competition with China while managing the realities of regional dynamics in South Asia. Three friction points are worth watching where the two objectives could come in conflict:
By recognizing, seeking to mitigate, and preparing to manage these dynamics, President Biden’s team can best navigate the range of challenges they could face in South Asia through 2024 and beyond.
Rising Insecurity on the Korean Peninsula
After a months-long policy review process at the outset of Biden’s term, the administration rolled out its strategy for North Korea, describing it as a “calibrated, practical approach” that is “open to diplomacy.” While it tried to distance the “new” approach from the extreme perceptions of past policies, there was little that was actually new. The policy still is focused on achieving North Korean denuclearization as its primary goal but with little evidence of a diplomatic strategy to compel Pyongyang back to talks. Notes have been sent and open-ended messages have invited the North Koreans to meet for talks “anytime, anywhere,” but about what? To what end? What would be different this time around? That formula wasn’t effective in the past and it hasn’t been effective so far under Biden either.
Getting North Korea back to the negotiating table is not going to be easy, especially without a full-time diplomat working on creating new diplomatic openings. After raising domestic expectations in 2018-2019 that the summits were going to bring about political and economic breakthroughs, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is unlikely to see value in trying again without high confidence that tangible outcomes are possible. Since the failure to get an agreement at the Hanoi Summit in 2019, North Korean rhetoric about its nuclear program has shifted—no longer is it posed as contingent on U.S. hostile policy but is now characterized as a vital part of the country’s defenses. More importantly, Pyongyang has moved away from its historical non-alignment and firmly situated itself among the autocratic states, pledging a new level of political support and tactical cooperation with China and Russia. Convincing Pyongyang now that there are greater benefits to choosing the path of nuclear disarmament will be a hard sell, especially in the shadow of Russia’s invasion of a denuclearized Ukraine and amid an accelerating arms race in Northeast Asia, a growing emphasis on a values-based world order, the resumption of large-scale, live-fire US-ROK joint military exercises, the continued imposition of at least unilateral economic sanctions on Pyongyang, and more muscular responses coming out of South Korea and the US-ROK alliance to North Korea’s actions.
In the meantime, the real U.S. strategy seems to be focused on improving alliance relations with South Korea and Japan and shoring up unified rhetoric and reactions to North Korean moves, while keeping an eye focused on China. While the Yoon administration in South Korea has been on board so far, the end of 2022 was fraught with an escalating spiral of military drills on both sides of the DMZ and 2023 is already off to rocky start with rising tensions over North Korean drones infiltrating South Korean territory. Despite US efforts to expand US-ROK consultations on extended deterrence, South Korean anxieties remain high, and frustration with the current situation is manifesting in dangerous ways. Just last week, Yoon became the first sitting South Korean president to voice the idea of Seoul potentially pursuing its own nuclear weapons program if the “situation gets worse.”
What the administration will have to grapple with in its remaining time is that strengthening alliance relations and cooperation, while important to our allies and our common defense, is still reactive in nature. Without greater efforts to create diplomatic opportunities to reengage North Korea itself, Pyongyang is likely to continue testing South Korean and U.S. resolve, challenging peace and security on the Peninsula and in the region.
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