Will Biden Be FDR, or Jimmy Carter?
Does his desire to transform the country outweigh his fear of losing reelection?
So it’s come to this. A year and a half into his term, President Biden - who asserted during his campaign, “Getting to a 100% clean energy economy is not only an obligation, it’s an opportunity” - travels to Saudi Arabia, and begs its crown prince to export more oil. Mohammed bin Salman, ruler of a kingdom Biden promised to make a pariah, gets a fist bump from the leader of the free world. If anything shows the folly of making grand promises on the campaign trail, this is it.
Yes, Vladimir Putin’s thuggish invasion of Ukraine has led global oil prices to spike, causing American drivers pain at the pump. That’s not the only price surge Putin’s war has created - the world may be on the edge of a severe food shortage thanks to him - but it’s one Americans feel especially acutely. More of us are going back to the office, and we want to travel again, so when the cost of driving goes up, we notice right away. And Biden, who first came to the U.S. Senate in 1973, remembers all too well the turmoil that came when the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, and then the 1979 Iranian Revolution, led to similar gas price increases. It’s understandable that he would want to avoid a return to those days.
But does Biden truly believe it’s in America’s best interest, either morally or strategically, to remain closely linked to Saudi Arabia? Even if MBS had not ordered the murder of journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi - a resident of the United States - his regime would still be atrocious. Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen has resulted in one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world today. The kingdom has supported the warlord Khalifa Hifter in his attempt to overthrow Libya’s internationally recognized government. And that’s before getting into his domestic authoritarianism.
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It’s possible to see MBS as a progressive figure. Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, argued two weeks before Biden’s trip that the president’s visit could reinforce the crown prince’s efforts to get Saudi Arabia, “to end its support and funding of Islamist radicalism, to stop its decades-long export of extremist ideology, and to focus instead on a positive agenda of human development at home.” Pointing to MBS’ attempts to reduce his country’s dependence on oil exports, and move away from its past support of extreme interpretations of Islam, Satloff argued that these, more than a desire to send more oil into the world, should motivate the U.S. to embrace him. They are initiatives worth supporting, in his assessment, even though they are “top-down initiatives, pursued by a leader who is both visionary and mercurial.”
But Saudi Arabia has a very long way to go before it becomes any sort of politically admirable country. Between its leader’s brutal authoritarianism, and his belligerent foreign policy, it could very easily become the Middle East’s China: technologically and economically developed, but utterly intolerant of domestic dissent, not hesitating to murder journalists or torture human rights defenders, as well as militarily aggressive abroad. Earlier this year, in its annual Freedom in the World report, Freedom House ranked Saudi Arabia as one of the nine Worst of the Worst countries for political rights and civil liberties - worse even than Iran.
As for the U.S. leading regional efforts to confront Iran in its ambition to acquire nuclear weapons, this is a worthwhile goal. The Islamic Republic is a destabilizing force in the Middle East, and its neighbors have reason to worry it would be even more hawkish with a nuke in its arsenal. But that would be a reason to sell Saudi Arabia defensive weapons - not the offensive weapons the U.S. is contemplating selling them again, sales Biden curtailed due to MBS’ brutality in Yemen. So much for “putting human rights at the center of U.S. foreign policy.”
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Having begun in his political career in the 1970s, Biden is probably worried about ending up like Jimmy Carter. And there are parallels already: both were narrowly elected in the aftermath of a corrupt and power-mad administration, and both presented themselves as returning basic decency and some kind of normality to the White House. But Carter was undone by high oil prices, inflation more generally, and a perception that he was weak on foreign policy, as seen in the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Biden has reason to be nervous about suffering the same fate as Carter: losing reelection.
That’s a sharp contrast to the vision many Democrats had of Biden when his term began. They thought of him as the next Franklin D. Roosevelt, a figure who would lead sweeping changes to America’s economy and society through activist government. But while he’s signed legislation stimulating an economy battered by COVID, and investing in infrastructure repairs, his Build Back Better social agenda has been stymied, in no small part by its extremely high price tag at the outset. What’s more, Biden’s promise not to raise taxes on Americans earning less than $400,000 has surely created quite a lot of cognitive dissonance. If he really were serious about enacting such expensive change, a reasonable person would think, he’d have asked for more sacrifice from more people.
There are signs, however, that Biden is capable of being bold like FDR, of trying to prepare Americans for a difficult struggle rather than pandering to them. While last year’s U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was carried out poorly, and led to a drop in Biden’s popularity, he defended the decision as in America’s best security interest. And rightly so - with China and Russia to worry about, the U.S. could not afford to be distracted by an unwinnable war in central Asia anymore. Similarly, just a few weeks ago he told Americans they would have to endure higher gasoline prices, “As long as it takes, so Russia cannot, in fact, defeat Ukraine and move beyond Ukraine.” While not on the scale of sacrifice the federal government insisted on from citizens during World War II - carpooling to save fuel and rubber, having their income taxes go up - it is in the same spirit, a spirit today’s president could appeal to more often.
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With Republicans expected to make large gains in this year’s midterm elections, Biden has strong incentives to play it safe, including by keeping gas prices as low as he can. But if the cost of doing so is being friendly to one of the most oppressive regimes on the planet, and undermining his highly admirable goal of reducing American fossil fuel use, it may not be a cost worth paying. Biden may not transform the country like FDR, but he can show some of the great man’s strength by being clear (and clearheaded) about just what it will take to achieve goals like victory abroad and big change at home. And if he wants to avoid Carter’s embarrassing defeat, maybe he should accept being a one-term president - by not running again.