Biden delivered a strategy-free State of the Union
The loudest line of Tuesday’s State of the Union was ad-libbed. “Name me a world leader who’s change places with Xi Jinping,” he shouted in a departure from his prepared text. “Name me one, name me one.”
There may not have been a Chinese spy balloon drifting above the United States as Biden was speaking, but foreign policy hung awkwardly over the president’s address. In the wake of a major spat with America’s most powerful adversary and in the longest speech of his presidency, Biden spent about as much time talking about hotel resort fees as he did discussing the US’s relationship with China.
Noting the brevity of Biden’s comments on China, my colleague Ben Domenech speculates that the administration steered clear because they “seem out of step with the bipartisan consensus on China.” Perhaps, but Biden has, in many ways, doubled down on the previous administration’s hawkishness. And the foreign policy brevity was not limited to US-China relations. On Ukraine, Biden delivered a short paean to the Ukrainian people but not much else.
Why this foreign-policy dodge? Part of the explanation lies in the fact that the president’s immediate priorities are elsewhere: the White House is gearing up for a debt-ceiling fight. Biden was clearly eager to use his primetime address to frame that showdown in a way that flatters himself and his party (something I think his boisterous back and forth with Republican lawmakers managed to do). He was also keen to demonstrate his ongoing utility to his party, elements of which remain unsold on his suitability for another presidential run. That means talking about pay rises for teaches and subsidized childcare, not grand strategy.
But other priorities cannot fully account for the extraordinarily brief treatment of world affairs at a time of such instability. The second, more unsettling, explanation is that, when it comes to the fraught foreign policy in-tray, the Biden administration isn’t sure what to say right now.
What Biden did say was notably backwards-looking and triumphalist. What was missing was any hint of a forward-looking strategy. And that may be because the White House is in the middle of recalibrating its foreign policy. The State of the Union came at a very awkward time for Biden, just days after the balloon bust-up scuppered the administration’s push for a thawing of US-China relations. And so the best he could manage in his speech was a promise that America seeks “competition, not conflict” with China.
Looking in from the outside, the Biden administration appears to be at a moment when it is realizing its geopolitical ends and means do not match. Ever since the start of the war in Ukraine, Biden and many others in Washington, have been reluctant to acknowledge any costs to the commitment to support Ukraine. They have maintained that they can walk and chew gum at the same time, upping the ante over Taiwan, say, even as they ship Javelin missiles to Kyiv. The mistake was not that support — but that it did not come with a broader acknowledgment of the far more dangerous world we now live, and a major recalibration to meet that challenge.
With the China spy balloon stand-off all but confirming we are in a new cold war, with no end to the war in Ukraine, and with the stand off over Iran’s nuclear program getting more tense by the day, Americans need their president to lay out the dangers we face and explain a strategy in response. The State of the Union was a missed opportunity for Biden to do just that.
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Shouting from the cheap seats
If the 2023 State of the Union will be remembered for anything at all, it will be for the exchanges between the president and rowdy Republicans in the audience over government spending and the debt ceiling. Matt Purple sticks up for the hecklers: “If the president is allowed to be political, shouldn’t his opponents? This is all the more important if the president is lying, which Biden was. ‘Some Republicans’ do not want ‘Medicare and Social Security to sunset every five years’; one Republican, Senator Rick Scott of Florida, has endorsed that, and his proposal was dead on arrival in Congress.”
I don’t mind the rough and tumble, but these back and forths always seem to play into the president’s hands. The commander in chief is mic’d up and looking about as presidential as it is possible to look. You’re shouting from the cheap seats. Who is likely to come out on top?
Ron Klain has left the building
Biden officially has a new chief of staff. On Wednesday Jeff Zients took over from Ron Klain, who was clapped out of the West Wing by a crowd of staffers. Such was his power in the administration that the outgoing chief of staff was known as Prime Minister Klain. And the handover had all the efficiency of a British transition of power — the only thing that was missing was an audience with the King.
Trump goes low
Trump escalated his attack on Republican presidential rival Ron DeSantis on Tuesday. In a post on Truth Social, the former president accused DeSantis of “grooming” and shared a picture that appeared to show a picture of a twenty-year-old DeSantis, then a teacher, holding a beer and posing with high school graduates. “That’s not Ron, is it? He would never do such a thing!” wrote Trump.
“I spend my time delivering results for the people of Florida and fighting against Joe Biden,” DeSantis said in response. “I don’t spend my time trying to smear other Republicans.”
What you should be reading today
John Pietro: A closer look at Biden’s State of the Union proposals
Matt Purple: The State of the Union: raucous as it should be
Amber Athey: GOP congressman scoffs at complaints about ‘lack of decorum’
Ryan Tracy and Georgia Wells, Wall Street Journal: TikTok’s secret sauce poses challenge for US oversight, researchers say
Martin Gurri, City Journal: In search of a right populist agenda
Jonah Goldberg, the Dispatch: Is Ron DeSantis just Scott Walker 2.0?
Poll watch
President Biden job approval
Approve: 44.3 percent
Disapprove: 51.4 percent
Net approval: -7.1 (RCP average)
Republican presidential nomination
Donald Trump: 42 percent
Ron DeSantis: 32 percent
Mike Pence: 8 percent
Nikki Haley: 5 percent(Economist/YouGov)
