Biden's Foreign Policy Legacy

Eric and Eliot welcome friend of the show Kori Schake back to Shield of the Republic. Kori is Senior Fellow and Director of Foreign Policy and Defense Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Safe Passage: The Transition from British to American Hegemony (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2017). They discuss her recent retrospective article in Foreign Policy on the BIden administration's foreign policy. She critiques the Biden team's failures on the withdrawal from Afghanistan, trade policy and the broader decline of America's margin of deterrence and in particular the failure to keep military spending at an appropriate level given inflation. She also credits the Biden Administration with using the intelligence community's insights into Russia's plans for invading Ukraine appropriately to undo some of the damage done by the Iraq war and its alliance management after the Russian invasion in 2022. She discusses how much of the failure can be laid at Biden's feet personally and how much lies with his national security team. Finally, Eric and Eliot discuss the prospects for the new Trump team that appears to be brimming with self-confidence. They dissect the prospects for Pete Hegseth's confirmation hearing as well as Trump's fixation on Greenland and whether his enthusiasm is getting in the way of actual strategic accomplishments given the increasing strategic importance of the Arctic.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/01/07/biden-foreign-policy-record-failure-success-national-security/

https://www.amazon.com/Safe-Passage-Transition-American-Hegemony/dp/0674975073

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/01/trump-bluster-foreign-policy-greenland-canada/681268/

Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.