Each Friday from now until Election Day, I will be looking at what the presidential candidates are saying about foreign policy on the campaign trail. 

Update: Tom Steyer announced on February 29, 2020, that he was ending his campaign. Can lightning strike twice? Tom Steyer hopes that it does. Back in 2016, Donald Trump was a billionaire businessman with no government or military service who won a longshot race for the presidency by arguing that Washington doesn’t serve the people. Steyer, a billionaire businessman with no government or military service, hopes to win the 2020 presidential election by running a longshot campaign that argues that Washington doesn’t serve the people. If Steyer wins, he would be the first president from California since Ronald Reagan. The Basics: Name: Thomas Fahr Steyer Date of Birth: June 27, 1957 Place of Birth: New York City, New York Religion: NA Political Party: Democratic Party Marital Status: Married (Kathryn Taylor) Children: Henry, Tom, Gus, Evi, Sam Alma Mater: Yale University (BA); Stanford University (MBA) Career: Founder of Farallon Capital (hedge fund) and of the nonprofits NextGen America and Need to Impeach Campaign Website: https://www.tomsteyer.com Twitter Handle: @TomSteyer Steyer’s Announcement In January 2019, Steyer told the world that he wouldn’t run for president because he wanted to focus on his “Need to Impeach” initiative, which advocates for impeaching President Trump. Six months later Steyer changed course. He released a video on July 9 that announced he was running to combat corporate greed and climate change. “If you think that there’s something absolutely critical, try as hard as you can and let the chips fall where they may. And that’s exactly what I’m doing.” He did not mention foreign policy in his announcement video. Steyer’s Story Steyer was born and raised in New York City. His father was assistant to the chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials and later became a successful New York lawyer. Steyer’s mother was a teacher and journalist. Steyer attended Philips Exeter Academy, the elite New Hampshire boarding school. He then went to Yale University, where he captained the soccer team. He graduated summa cum laude in 1979. (In case you are wondering, Steyer’s time at Yale overlapped with Amy Klobuchar’s; he was a senior when she was a first-year student.) He earned his MBA from Stanford University in 1983. Steyer started his business career on Wall Street. He worked at Morgan Stanley after graduating from Yale, and then at Goldman Sachs after finishing his Stanford MBA. He left Goldman in 1986 to start his own investment firm, Farallon Capital Management. It was a smart move. Farallon became a top hedge fund and made Steyer a billionaire. Steyer stepped down from Farallon in 2012 to pursue his new passion—environmental activism. In 2013, he founded the environmental advocacy group NextGen Climate and the NextGen Climate Action Committee, a PAC. Among other things, Steyer lobbied President Obama against approving the Keystone XL oil pipeline. Steyer has been willing to use his estimated $1.6 billion net worth to advance his favored causes. Back in 2013 he spent more than $30 million on a clean-energy referendum in California. He has also contributed generously to the Democratic Party, donating more than $100 million to support Democratic candidates in the 2018 midterms. Steyer’s national television campaign to persuade Congress to impeach Trump caught the president’s eye. Last October, Trump tweeted: “Wacky & totally unhinged Tom Steyer, who has been fighting me and my Make America Great Again agenda from beginning, never wins elections!” Steyer’s family responded by giving Steyer a T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase: “Wacky and totally unhinged.” Steyer’s Message Steyer’s platform focuses on combatting climate change and reforming the American political system through changes such as term limits for members of Congress and the repeal of Citizens United. He argues that Americans inherently have “Five Rights”: the right to vote, a clean environment, a full education, a living wage, and solid healthcare. Like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren Steyer argues that corporations wield a disproportionate influence on political decisions. He wants to restore political power to the people. As he put it in remarks to the New Hampshire Democratic Party Convention on September 7: There’s been a hostile corporate takeover of our democracy, and I’m determined to undo it–to restore government of, for, and by the people. Because I know if we break the corporate stranglehold on our democracy, we will get the progressive vision that everyone in this room wants. Sanders and Warren have criticized Steyer for using his wealth to gain the presidency. On the day Steyer announced his campaign, Sanders tweeted: “I am a bit tired of seeing billionaires trying to buy political power.” Warren tweeted much the same thing: “The Democratic primary should not be decided by billionaires.” Steyer calls Warren and Sanders “part of the establishment” and that only an “outsider” like himself can get things done: If we're going to reform this system, if we're going to break this corporate stranglehold, I believe it's going to take an outsider to do it. I believe it's going to take an outsider who's done it, successfully, for ten years, not somebody from inside the Beltway, but someone who's going to bring fresh energy to this problem. Steyer has pledged to spend at least $100 million of his own money on the campaign. To put that number in perspective, that is more than what the top five Democratic candidates combined raised in the second quarter this year. Steyer’s Foreign Policy Steyer hasn’t said much about foreign policy. One reason why is that he didn’t launch his campaign until after the first round of Democratic debates, and he didn’t qualify for either the second or third round of debates. So he didn’t have to answer the (relatively) few foreign policy questions that were asked of the candidates who did make the debate stage. Steyer has, however, qualified for the October 15 (or 16) debate. But Steyer also hasn’t volunteered much about his foreign policy views beyond his intention to make combatting climate change job number one. Nearly three months into his presidential run, his campaign website didn’t have a page devoted to foreign policy. He also hadn’t responded to the Washington Post’s survey on foreign policy or to the New York Times’s survey on presidential power. Steyer has called America First “so stupid that it almost beggars description” and “so darn dumb and so darn self-centered. The result, he argues, is that Trump has “turned allies into enemies” and created “an international leadership vacuum that Russia and China are eager to fill.” Steyer wants to work with “our traditional allies in a multilateral way because that’s the world we’re in.” Climate change is the one foreign policy issue that Steyer has addressed at length. He says that on his first day in office he “will declare the climate crisis a national emergency” and demand that Congress pass a Green New Deal. The plan he is advocating comes with an estimated price tag of $2.3 trillion. It aims to cut “fossil fuel pollution from all sectors in order to achieve a 100% clean energy economy and net-zero global warming pollution by no later than 2045.” The plan also proposes to establish a Civilian Climate Corps to create new jobs. Steyer would also reenter the Paris Agreement to ensure that the United States leads global efforts to combat climate change. He would also redouble the U.S. commitment to a host of other international climate agreements. More on Steyer The Atlantic interviewed Steyer about why he changed his mind about running for president and got this response: “I was watching how this [impeachment] campaign was going, and in my opinion, the overriding issue today is that the politics of our country, the government, has been taken over by corporate dollars. We have a broken government as a result of corruption from corporations. The solution to that, the only solution to that, is retaking the democracy and returning the power to the people.”  Vogue profiled Steyer last year and concluded that “impeachment is to Tom Steyer what ‘build a wall’ is to Donald Trump: an incendiary issue with potential both to stoke the base and to inflame its opposition.” The Los Angeles Times followed Steyer last October as he walked the campus of Cal State Fullerton trying to get students to vote, telling them: “You can change this world, or it can be run by a bunch of arrogant, entitled, rich white old men.” Forbes documented how Steyer accumulated his wealth, calling him “the first billionaire to officially challenge America’s first billionaire commander-in-chief for the presidency.” Vox sought to explain Steyer’s presidential campaign and concluded that “he is a noteworthy figure in the race for one main reason: He’s a billionaire.” The New York Times called Steyer “a virtual one-man ‘super PAC’ [who] is already upending the carefully laid strategies of Democratic rivals who must now grapple with the fact that they are unlikely to have the airwaves to themselves.” Steyer used his time on The View last month to press his argument that "the biggest question in America is the corporate takeover of our government. We have a government that can't get anything done. Because corporations have bought it." Earlier this month, the New Yorker followed Steyer on a campaign trip to Iowa City, where his uncle was a law professor for many years, and noted that unlike Trump, he lacks “an aggrieved constituency whose interests he appears to represent better than the other candidates. Another difference is that Steyer appeals more to optimism than to aggrievement.” When Steyer failed to make the cut to participate in the town hall that CNN held at the start of this month, he held his own “Climate Change Emergency Broadcast,” which lasted more than an hour. Anna Shortridge assisted in the preparation of this post.

Is the third time really the charm? Former Vice President Joe Biden certainly hopes so. He first threw his hat in the ring for the 1988 Democratic nomination but ended up dropping out of the race months before the Iowa caucuses—then, as now, the first official nominating event—because of charges that he had plagiarized from a British politician’s speech and exaggerated his own accomplishments. He tried again two decades later. He stuck around until the Iowa caucuses, but finished fifth and dropped out of the race. If Biden does win next November, he will become only the third vice president in one hundred and eighty years to become president by election rather than by the death or resignation of the sitting president. Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush are the other two. The Basics Name: Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. Date of Birth: November 20, 1942 Place of Birth: Scranton, Pennsylvania Religion: Roman Catholic Political Party: Democratic Party Marital Status: Married (Jill Jacobs); previously married to Neilia Hunter (died in 1972) Children: Joseph "Beau" (died in 2015 at age 46); Robert Hunter (49), Naomi (died in 1972 at age 1); and Ashley (37),   Alma Mater: University of Delaware (BA); Syracuse University (JD) Career: Lawyer; U.S. Senator (1973–2008), U.S. Vice President (2009–2017) Campaign Website: https://joebiden.com/ Twitter Handle: @JoeBiden Biden’s Announcement Biden announced his candidacy on April 25 by releasing a video. Building on an argument he first laid out in an op-ed he wrote after the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville in 2017, he recounted America’s values and argued that President Donald Trump posed a “threat to this nation…unlike any I have ever seen in my lifetime.” Biden went on to say that “everything that has made America America is at stake” in November 2020. Notably missing from the announcement video was any mention of foreign policy. Biden’s Story Biden was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania. When he was ten, his father moved the family to Claymont, Delaware. Biden played football and baseball in high school, and was also a good student. He studied history and political science at the University of Delaware, where he also played football. He then earned a law degree at Syracuse University. Biden says that “during my adolescent and college years, men and women were changing the country—Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy—and I was swept up in their eloquence, their conviction, the sheer size of their improbable dreams.” After getting his law degree, Biden moved to Wilmington, Delaware to practice law. He jumped into politics in 1970 and he won a seat on the Newcastle County Council. Two years later, he became the fifth-youngest person ever elected to the Senate. He was twenty-nine on Election Day; he hit the constitutionally mandated minimum of thirty years of age thirteen days later. Biden liked life in the Senate, and Delaware voters liked having him there. They re-elected him five times. His thirty-six years and thirteen days of service make him the eighteenth longest serving senator in U.S. history. Part of his appeal to his constituents was that he commuted daily between Wilmington and Washington on Amtrak rather than move to the nation’s capital. That trip on the Acela, Amtrak’s fastest train, takes about eighty minutes each way if everything goes according to plan, which as anyone who takes Amtrak knows, often isn’t the case. During his six terms in the Senate, Biden chaired both the Senate Judiciary Committee (1987-95) and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (2001-2003 and 2007-2009). When Barack Obama announced Biden as his running mate in 2008, he said of Biden: "He's an expert on foreign policy whose heart and values are rooted firmly in the middle class. He has stared down dictators and spoken out for America's cops and firefighters. He is uniquely suited to be my partner as we work to put our country back on track." Biden’s professional successes have come against a backdrop of tragic personal losses. Weeks after winning his first Senate election, Biden’s wife, Neilia, and his one-year-old daughter Naomi, were killed in a car accident that also injured his young sons, Beau and Hunter. As an adult, Beau was diagnosed with brain cancer and died in 2015. Biden’s Message Biden’s 2020 campaign slogan is “Our Best Days Still Lie Ahead.” He argues that Election 2020 is a battle for the “soul of America.” He believes that “history will look back on four years of this president, and all he embraces, as aberrant moment in time.” However, if Trump wins reelection, “he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation.” Lest anyone miss the point, Biden has labeled Trump as an "existential threat" to the nation. Biden’s Foreign Policy Views Biden has been involved in national politics and foreign affairs since he took his first oath of office as U.S. senator back in January 1973 as a thirty-year old. A thorough discussion of the foreign policy positions he has taken would fill books. A sense of his worldview can be seen in the votes he cast during his thirty-six years in the Senate: War Powers Resolution (for); Panama Canal treaties (for); funding for the Contras (against); INF Treaty (for): Gulf War (against); NAFTA (for); permanent normal trading relations with China (for); creation of the World Trade Organization (for); Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (for); post-9/11 military authorization (for); and the Iraq War (for). In all, Biden charted a mainstream, liberal internationalist approach to foreign policy. That, of course, is precisely the foreign policy that Trump ran against. As might be expected from someone with traditional foreign policy views, Biden wants to turn the clock back on Trump’s America First. In an address to the Munich Security Conference back in February, the former vice president stressed restoring U.S. foreign policy. He criticized the Trump administration’s approach to transatlantic relations and offered his firm support for NATO and the European Union. Noting the rifts that had developed between the United States and many of its allies, Biden said that “this too shall pass” and that the United States “will be back” to its position of global leadership. The restoration theme ran through the foreign policy speech Biden delivered in July. As part of his “blueprint” for repairing what he called “the damage wrought by” America First, Biden vowed to pursue a “forward-thinking foreign policy.” He would restore U.S. membership in agreements like the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate agreement, as well repair relations with America’s closest friends and allies. Biden also pledged to convene a summit of the world’s democracies during his first year in office “to put strengthening democracy back on the global stage.” A challenge that Biden would face in enacting his foreign policy vision is one that haunts any restoration effort—the damage that has been done may not be reparable. Biden says he would take a tougher line on Russia than the Trump administration has. Writing on the pages of Foreign Affairs last year, he argued that “the Russian government is brazenly assaulting the foundations of Western democracy around the world.” Biden’s proposed solution is U.S. global leadership: “The United States must lead its democratic allies and partners in increasing their resilience, expanding their capabilities to defend against Russian subversion, and rooting out the Kremlin’s networks of malign influence.” That said, Biden thinks that “Washington must keep the channels of communication open with Moscow. At the height of the Cold War, American and Soviet leaders recognized that, whatever their differences, they could not afford a miscalculation that might lead to war. They had to keep talking. The same is true today.” Biden has not taken a similarly tough line on China. He made news back in May when he dismissed claims that China poses a serious economic threat to the United States, saying: “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man…. They’re not competition for us." At a subsequent campaign stop in Iowa, Biden turned to a time-tested congressional maneuver: he revised and extended his remarks. He admitted that "we are in a competition with China. We need to get tough with China. They are a serious challenge to us, and in some areas a real threat." Biden went on to note that Trump’s tariffs were "exacerbating the challenge" facing the United States. He argued that the United States would be better served by focusing its efforts on improving its domestic economy to outcompete China. Although restoration looks to be a guiding theme of Biden’s foreign policy, he is seemingly lukewarm on reviving the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as a way to compete with China. Although he supported TPP while a member of the Obama administration, he now says that he would not rejoin it “as it was initially put forward.” He instead wants to renegotiate it, and “to make sure that there's no one sitting at that table doing the deal unless environmentalists are there and labor is there.” More broadly, Biden has borrowed language from the protectionist playbook as he has tried to rebrand himself as something other than the free-trader he was while in the Senate and the Vice President’s office. Back in May he told reporters: I’m a fair trader. That’s why I’ve been arguing for a long time that we should treat other countries the way in which they treat us, which is, particularly as it relates to China: If they want to trade here, they’re going to be under the same rules. Has Biden truly abandoned the trade views he championed for more than forty years? Or has he merely had a convenient campaign conversion? One piece of evidence for the latter position is that he has repeatedly and correctly pointed out that the United States stands to lose a lot if it walks away from trade agreements: When it comes to trade, either we're going to write the rules of the road for the world or China is–and not in a way that advances our values. That's what happened when we backed out of TPP–we put China in the driver's seat. That's not good for our national security or for our workers. TPP wasn’t perfect but the idea behind it was a good one: to unite countries around high standards for workers, the environment, intellectual property, and transparency, and use our collective weight to curb China’s excesses.  That phrasing suggests that Biden, more so than say, Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, would look for a way to get trade deals done. Of course, striking trade deals and getting others to join a collaborative effort to pressure China would require making concessions as well as demands. Those concessions would likely alienate some voting blocs. In what looks to be a bid to reassure supporters, and one that probably would be a smart thing to do on the merits, Biden says he “would not sign any new trade deal until we have made major investments in our workers and infrastructure.”  Like most of his Democratic rivals, Biden says he “would bring American combat troops in Afghanistan home during my first term.” That doesn’t mean, however, that he has pledged to take all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan. In virtually the same breath as his promise to withdraw troops, Biden admits he may maintain a “residual U.S. military presence in Afghanistan” that would focus “only on counterterrorism operations.” His reason for the caveat is understandable, especially after what he witnessed when the Obama administration withdrew U.S. troops from Iraq: We need to be clear-eyed about our limited enduring security interests in the region: We cannot allow the remnants of Al Qa’ida in Afghanistan and Pakistan to reconstitute, and we must destroy the Islamic State presence in the region. Americans are rightly weary of our longest war; I am, too. But we must end the war responsibly, in a manner that ensures we both guard against threats to our Homeland and never have to go back. The problem, of course, is that counterterrorism operations could end up looking a lot like current U.S. military operations in Afghanistan. Biden has also joined with his fellow Democratic candidates in calling for an end to U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. He also wants to reassess the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia, especially in the aftermath of the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Biden says he would stand up to Saudi Arabia: “I would want to hear how Saudi Arabia intends to change its approach to work with a more responsible U.S. administration.” This approach is consistent with Biden’s broader complaint that Trump has abandoned traditional U.S. support for human rights and instead pursued a “love affair” with dictators: “I just don’t know why this administration seems to feel the need to coddle autocrats and dictators from Putin to Kim Jong Un to Duterte.”  Speaking of dictators, Biden favors taking a harder line against Nicolas Maduro: The violence in Venezuela today against peaceful protesters is criminal. Maduro's regime is responsible for incredible suffering. The U.S. must stand with the National Assembly & Guaidó in their efforts to restore democracy through legitimate, internationally monitored elections. Biden wants the United States to enforce “stronger multilateral sanctions” against Maduro’s supporters of the regime. He has also called for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Venezuelans currently in the United States and for more support to countries caring for Venezuelans who have fled abroad. Biden has joined with other Democrats in calling for major steps to combat climate change. Besides rejoining the Paris Climate Accord, he proposes to lead “a diplomatic initiative to get every nation to go beyond their initial commitment.” His $1.7 trillion climate change plan would, among other things, prohibit the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), the Export-Import Bank, and the International Development Finance Corporation from financing coal-fired power plants in developing countries. Biden says his goal is to get the United States to net-zero emissions by 2050. More on Biden Biden wrote Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose in 2017. It reflects on the year that he spent carrying out his vice presidential duties while dealing with his son Beau’s losing struggle with brain cancer. Biden’s other book, Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics, which he wrote before running for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, is a traditional political memoir. In January, POLITICO Magazine detailed the personal tragedies that Biden has endured with the death of his wife and infant daughter in a 1972 car accident and the 2015 death of his son Beau from a rare form of brain cancer. The New Yorker argued in April that Biden “is going all in on the old conventional wisdom, which is that Presidential elections four years into a Presidency are almost always referendums on the incumbent, and this incumbent presents a very large target.” POLITICO Magazine wrote back in June about what it called the “Two-Biden Problem,” saying that “during his long career, he [Biden] has frequently engaged with controversial issues—from busing to judges to abortion to crime. In doing so, he’s tried to push for the most liberal position that could still appeal to a majority of voters. The danger for Biden is that this story leaves him open to the charge that he was never all that liberal in the first place.” Back in June the New York Times examined Biden’s first presidential campaign in the 1980s, calling it a “calamity.” The New York Times Magazine profiled Biden in July and asked whether Democrats would embrace Biden’s effort “to take America back to a time before Trump.” Biden answered eleven questions from the New York Times on executive power. In response to a question about the limits of any presidential war power, he answered, “As is well established and as the Department of Justice has articulated across several administrations, the Constitution vests the President, as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive, with the power to direct limited U.S. military operations abroad without prior Congressional approval when those operations serve important U.S. interests and are of a limited nature, scope, and duration. CFR asked Biden twelve foreign policy questions. When asked to name America’s greatest foreign policy accomplishment since World War II, he said it “was the work of the United States and our western allies to rebuild after a devastating global conflict.” He said that biggest mistake the United States has made since World War II “was President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord. Climate change is an existential threat. If we don’t get this right, nothing else matters.” Corey Cooper, Brenden Ebertz, Elizabeth Lordi, and Anna Shortridge assisted in the preparation of this post.  

Last week’s third round of Democratic presidential debates gave foreign policy some attention. The candidates spent a shade under forty minutes discussing events beyond America’s borders. That is more time than the first two rounds of debate did combined. Even so, the candidates discussed just four topics: trade, Afghanistan, Latin America, and climate change. None of this is surprising. Foreign policy usually gets short shrift in presidential debates even though it often dominates what a president does once in office. To help provide a fuller picture of what the presidential challengers think about the threats and opportunities the United States faces overseas, the Council on Foreign Relations invited all them—Republicans as well as Democrats—to answer twelve questions on foreign policy. (President Donald Trump did not receive the survey because the questions ask what candidates would do if they become president. Trump is the incumbent, so we know what his foreign policies are.) By last week, fourteen candidates had submitted their answers. CFR has posted these responses on its website, CFR.org, just as they were written. Today, the answers that Elizabeth Warren supplied became the fifteenth entry. I won’t attempt to recap all of the senator’s answers. They are worth reading in full, especially because she got just a shade more than four minutes of airtime during the foreign policy portion of last Thursday’s debate. I don’t know anyone who can explain the world in five minutes or less. I do want to flag two of Warren’s answers because they raise additional questions worth considering. The first was whether she would pledge to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by the end of her first term. She said she would “do so immediately” because “it’s long past time to bring our troops home.” She added that: ending U.S. military operations doesn’t mean we are abandoning Afghanistan. Redirecting just a small fraction of what we currently spend on military operations toward economic development, education, and infrastructure projects would be a better, more sustainable investment in Afghanistan’s future than our current state of endless war. We should enlist our international partners to encourage a political settlement between the Afghan government and the Taliban that is sustainable and that protects U.S. interests. What if such a deal isn’t achievable? As military officers like to say, the enemy also gets a vote in how wars end. If a U.S. troop withdrawal makes a Taliban victory in Afghanistan inevitable, is it still the right policy? The second answer was what Warren considered the greatest U.S. foreign policy accomplishment since the end of World War II. She answered, the fact that “no nuclear weapon has been used in battle since World War II.” That wasn’t an accident. Instead, as Warren rightly notes, that achievement rested on: creative, visionary, pragmatic diplomacy, on facts and expertise in arms control and non-proliferation, and on the alliances and structure of collective security developed after the war and refreshed after the Cold War. In a world where nuclear proliferation remains a serious threat, we must redouble our efforts in this area to ensure that the world remains safe from nuclear conflict. However, as former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and former Senator Sam Nunn point out in an article in the current edition of Foreign Affairs titled “The Return of Doomsday,” that achievement is unravelling. For a variety of reasons, much of the arms control architecture constructed in the 1970s and 1980s has come undone, and the result has undermined strategic stability. How to reverse that erosion is a big question that deserves serious discussion. Perhaps at the next Democratic presidential debate, one of the moderators might ask Warren and her fellow challengers what they propose to do to make sure that nuclear weapons continue to go unused. Margaret Gach assisted in the preparation of this post.