Entanglements

U.S. President Joe Biden spent more than 30 years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee before becoming vice president in 2009. Biden’s supporters cite his foreign-policy experience as one of his main strengths. In September of last year, he said of himself. “When Russia invaded Ukraine, I knew what to do—because I’ve been doing it for a long, long time.” The former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul struck a similar note, praising Biden’s foreign policy experience: “Americans are lucky to have President Biden and his foreign-policy team in charge of national security right now.”

But right now, even President Biden’s closest colleagues concede that he’s not the man he once was. When he left the presidential race this summer, it was largely because he couldn’t convince his fellow Democrats that he was up to it cognitively. But while he’s no longer running for president, he is still the president. Meaning Biden, who failed to reassure his own party that he could run a successful political campaign, is handling America’s engagement in two wars—either of which might escalate suddenly and calamitously.

Biden’s national security team has tried to push back on such concerns. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he believes “the president of the United States is doing a very good job.” And National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said, “I am damn glad we have that guy sitting at the head of the table in the Situation Room.” But Blinken seems the public face of U.S. strategy in the Middle East; and Sullivan appears to be running major aspects of American strategy, more so than many previous National Security Advisors—not least, for America’s Ukraine operations. According to one former U.S. official, Sullivan is “the quartermaster of the war—and everything else.”

So who’s in charge of U.S. foreign policy?

Daniel Bessner is an associate professor of American foreign policy at the University of Washington and the author of Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual. By law, Bessner says, the president has near-total control over U.S. foreign policy’s vision and strategy; but in practice, that vision and strategy is shaped by the institutions charged with carrying it out—and since World War II, those institutions have been set up intentionally to insulate the American government from the American public …

Gustav Jönsson: What would you say we know and don’t know about the extent to which Biden is still running U.S. foreign policy at all?