Biden and “the Rooseveltian Tradition”

Two prominent American scholars of international relations, Daniel Deudney (Johns Hopkins) and G. John Ikenberry (Princeton), have published an article called “The Intellectual Foundations of the Biden Revolution.”  They argue that Biden’s policies reflect and extend a form of liberal internationalism that should be called Rooseveltian.  This outlook favors institutionalized multilateral cooperation and U.S. leadership, which Deudney and Ikenberry see as basically benign and also crucial to the prospects of liberal democracy in its competition with illiberal regimes of one sort or another.  The piece has some merit as an effort to provide an historical and theoretical grounding for Biden’s approach, but one’s appraisal of it will turn partly on whether one shares the authors’ view that U.S. power is, on balance, a force for good in the world rather than the opposite.

The Biden administration “has staked out a bold program to extend and refurbish the liberal state and reestablish global internationalist leadership in problem-solving,” Deudney and Ikenberry (D & I) write.  This program “aims to reverse a rising, global illiberal and autocratic tide by deepening and modernizing liberal democracy.”  It “should be seen as the next step in the evolution of what has arguably been the United States’ most influential and successful 20th-century tradition — one that should appropriately be labeled the Rooseveltian tradition.”

According to D & I, the Rooseveltian tradition rests on a recognition that the “world, both domestically and internationally, is marked by much higher levels of interdependence in more areas than existed in previous eras.”  Industrial and technological innovations have produced

“large and growing spillovers, externalities, and unintended consequences” and “intense interdependencies in violence, economics, and ecology.”  Comparably intense efforts at multilateral cooperation are required to deal with these problems.

Did FDR himself think in these terms?  He didn’t use most of these particular words – the word “interdependence” in this context did not come into wide use, I believe, until the 1960s and ‘70s — but did he grasp these ideas?  I’m not an expert on FDR, so it would be foolish of me to offer a firm view on this.  Perhaps he did, especially in terms of domestic policy.  Particularly in foreign affairs, however, Roosevelt was something of an improviser – a juggler, as Warren Kimball has called him – rather than a deep thinker.  He had some guiding ideas but was not too constrained by them at the level of strategy (though, as Kimball maintains, his basic assumptions remained consistent).[1]

More to the point, the problems FDR faced, at least in the international realm, were different than those facing Biden in some significant respects.  The U.S. and its allies in that earlier era were confronted by fascist dictatorships that sought territorial expansion and conquest.  By contrast, the countries seen as the U.S.’s main adversaries today, China and Russia, are much less likely to launch a world war of conquest than were the Axis powers.  There are several reasons for this, including the restraining effects of nuclear weapons and the declining benefits, both perceived and actual, of territorial conquest.  Russia and China will take advantage of opportunities to expand or solidify their spheres of influence – see, for instance, Putin’s annexation of Crimea, or Xi Jinping’s repression of democracy and dissent in Hong Kong – but a World War III is not one of the things that should be at the top of Biden’s worry list.  That said, nothing in this realm is impossible, and one should always be concerned about the condition of relations between great-power competitors and the possibility of a small conflict that proceeds to escalate.  The rise of China requires not only a “full-spectrum response” (D & I’s phrase) but a nuanced and discriminating one.  Biden’s approach is to mix strong criticism of Russia and China with cooperation in those areas (e.g., climate change, arms control, pandemics) where it is essential.  As Deudney and Ikenberry recognize, the trick is to compete in some realms while cooperating in others, though they may underestimate the difficulties of doing so successfully.

The case for a progressive Rooseveltian tradition has to confront a couple of wrinkles, which D & I prefer not to dwell too much on.  They argue that anti-imperialism is one key component of Rooseveltian internationalism, further asserting that “[i]deological anti-imperialism pervaded the United States’ founding” (in fact, it did not: the Founders were opposed to British rule but not, on the whole, opposed to the idea of empire, or an “empire of liberty” in Jefferson’s phrase, when it came to the new nation’s own aspirations).[2]  Despite the high-sounding phrases of the Atlantic Charter, Roosevelt, understandably enough, prioritized winning the war against the Axis over pressuring Churchill to begin unwinding the British Empire, which Churchill, a dyed-in-the-wool imperialist, had no intention of doing.  Prosecuting the war was more important to FDR than supporting the movement for Indian independence, which thus took a back seat.[3]  At home, the question of race also took a back seat, as FDR relied on the votes of Southern segregationist Democrats to pass New Deal legislation.  And as is well known, the U.S. military remained segregated throughout World War II.

D & I write that “[d]uring the 20th century, the United States played pivotal roles in thwarting and subverting empires, including the global empire-building of Germany, Japan, Italy, and the Soviet Union.”  But, as D & I acknowledge only in passing, after World War II the anti-empire stance was often trumped by anti-Communism, as when the U.S. supported France in its effort to keep control of Indochina and, when the French were defeated, stepped in to replace them, in effect.  According to D & I, “[l]eft-leaning critics who characterize the U.S. system as yet another empire fail to recognize that it is one ‘by invitation’ and that the number of independent countries in the world rose explosively during the period of greatest U.S. influence.”  But that’s because the U.S., if it has an empire, has a mostly (though not completely) informal one that today involves somewhat more subtle means of projecting power and influence than conquest and colonization.  This kind of informal empire is entirely compatible with a world of roughly two hundred legally sovereign, independent countries.

To be sure, it’s important to recognize that decolonization transformed the international system, changing “a Eurocentric international society” into one where an institutionalized form of “racial hierarchy was abolished….”[4]  However, other hierarchies remain.  For example, we still refer to some countries as “great powers,” and there are still only five permanent members of the UN Security Council.  There’s the G-20, but then there’s the more exclusive club of the G-8.

Biden’s rhetorical emphasis on the contest between autocracies and democracies is Rooseveltian, but it’s also characteristic of other presidents.  Wilson wanted to make the world safe for democracy, Clinton wanted to “enlarge” the community of democracies, and George W. Bush wanted to democratize the Middle East at the point of a gun.  All are variations on a similar theme, one might argue, while acknowledging that both the rhetoric and the actions also differed in each case (especially Bush’s).

Biden has framed the autocracy-versus-democracy issue as one of problem-solving.  D & I write that “U.S. success in the 20th century…came from the superior capacity of modern liberal democracies to solve the problems of global interdependence and modernity itself.”  Biden has to simultaneously demonstrate the renewed “superior capacity” of liberal democracy to solve problems while at the same time enlisting the cooperation of illiberal governments in dealing with problems, such as climate change, that require every country’s doing its part.  Yet if climate change is eventually “solved,” or at least mitigated – an outcome that’s far from assured — the world probably will be too preoccupied with breathing a sigh of relief to bother with determining exactly how much each country contributed to its solution.  In that sense, the goal of demonstrating liberal democracy’s problem-solving superiority over rival ideologies and forms of government may be in some tension with the goal of actually solving global problems, a tension that Deudney and Ikenberry’s article does not really address.

As I remarked on this blog some years ago in a roundtable piece on Perry Anderson’s essays “Imperium” and “Consilium,” U.S. foreign policy is not static, and it’s possible to exaggerate the degree of continuity from one administration to the next.  By the same token, however, it’s possible to exaggerate the discontinuities.  For sure, Biden represents a definite change from Trump’s erratic and xenophobic unilateralism, but whether this heralds a Rooseveltian-inspired “revolution” or a return to, and extension of, some of the familiar themes of U.S. foreign policy (or, as D & I suggest, both), is in the eye of the beholder.

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[1] See Warren F. Kimball, The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman (Princeton Univ. Press, 1991).

[2] See, e.g., Steven Hahn, A Nation Without Borders (Penguin pb., 2017), pp. 22-26.

[3] See, e.g., M.S. Venkataramani and B.K. Shrivastava, Quit India: The American Response to the 1942 Struggle (New Delhi: Vikas, 1979).

[4] Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire (Princeton Univ. Press, 2019), p. 99.