President-elect Joe Biden announced his national security brain trust Tuesday afternoon, unveiling a team with experience in the ways of Washington that is as impressive as its intellectual heft.
Antony Blinken, the nominee for secretary of state, has been a top foreign policy adviser to Biden since the 1990s and served as deputy national security adviser and deputy secretary of state during the Obama administration. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, tapped to be the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is a three-decade-long foreign service officer with multiple stints around the world. And Jake Sullivan, a Rhodes scholar and former senior Obama administration official, is commonly described as a leading foreign policy force in the Democratic Party.
The foreign policy establishment was absolutely giddy about the cabinet-in-waiting. Thomas Wright of the Brookings Institution called the Blinken-Sullivan duo “a terrific combination and bodes very well for Biden’s foreign policy.” Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations agreed, writing that the team has “lots of experience, camaraderie, & capacity, all of which they will need in large supply given what they will inherit at home & abroad come January 20.” PBS White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor quoted an unnamed Democrat who likened Biden’s advisers to “superheroes” swooping in to rescue the Republic.
But everyone would be wise to take a deep breath, stop the premature adulation, and place both feet on the cold, hard ground of reality because while it’s indisputable that Biden’s national security cabinet is composed of consummate professionals, none of us know what they will be advising Biden when a national security crisis pops on the radar. It would be the height of immaturity to assume simply that the United States is entering a new golden era. All of us will pray and hope that this is the case, and we should all root for the success of the incoming administration. But success will be totally dependent on the foreign policies Biden chooses to execute.
After four years of chaos, the Beltway is understandably exhaling that “competency” will run the machinery of government again. Every person Biden announced Tuesday has already worked in government in some capacity. Needless to say, that the national security bureaucracy will run smoother over the next four years than it did during the Trump era is about as insightful as predicting that more police officers in a certain neighborhood will drive down crime — of course they will.
But again, “competency” is not the guiding post here. The guiding post, rather, is whether the ideas Blinken, Thomas-Greenfield, Sullivan, and the rest of their colleagues offer their boss serve the U.S. national interest and don’t create more problems than they solve. Will these fine men and women counsel Biden into asking the hard questions and going through the first-, second-, and third-order effects before recommending the deployment of the U.S. military? Will they have the right national priorities overall, where certain regions of the world — for example, Asia — are given more resource and attention than others, such as the violent, sclerotic mess of the Middle East?
Further, will these advisers be content with simply telling allies in Europe and Asia that “America is back,” or will they begin the hard, awkward, but necessary work of explaining to some of those allies (particularly in Western Europe) that the U.S. neither has the bandwidth nor the resources to underwrite everybody’s defense? Will the pressure to intervene militarily in the event of an escalating humanitarian emergency be too much for Biden’s team to resist? Or will that team launch a rigorous inter-agency process to weigh the costs and benefits of action before plunging into a time-consuming military intervention with unpredictable consequences?
There are even more questions. Will Russia policy over the next four years be dumbed down to sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and moralizing lectures? Or will some pragmatism and dialogue on common interests be injected into the equation? And how will the new team approach China, the biggest U.S. foreign policy challenge of the next few decades: with a Cold War-like mentality or with a mixture of competition and cooperation?
We don’t know the answers to any of these questions. Until we do, let’s reserve judgment.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
