What awaits the world with Biden in the White House? We analyze some of their proposals
Those who have known President-elect Joe Biden for decades say they expect him to move carefully, projecting safety with some far-reaching symbolic actions.
WASHINGTON - President-elect Joe Biden has made no secret of how quickly he plans to bury the motto "America first" as a guiding principle of the country's foreign policy.
He has said that he will rejoin the nuclear deal with Iran, if that nation is willing to back down and respect its limits.
He intends to extend for another five years the only nuclear weapons treaty that still exists with Russia and to redouble efforts on the United States' commitments to NATO after four years of threats from President Donald Trump to withdraw from the alliance that set the course. of the West during the Cold War.
Similarly, Biden promised that he will make Russia "pay the price" for its intrusions and actions with the purpose of influencing the US elections, including his own.
Above all, Biden emphasized in a statement sent to The New York Times that he wishes to put an end to the slogan that came to define the United States as a nation determined to erect walls and convinced that it could do without collaborating with its allies. From Biden's perspective, that slogan undermined the chances of forging a common international approach to fighting a pandemic that has claimed more than 1.2 million lives.
"Unfortunately, the area in which Donald Trump has served the sentence 'America first' is in his failed response to the coronavirus because, although we constitute 4 percent of the world's population, our country records 20 percent of deaths" Biden noted a few days before the election. "Besides the fact that Trump accepts the autocrats of the world and provokes our democratic allies, that is another reason why respect for the American leadership has plummeted."
Of course, it is much easier to promise to return to the predominantly internationalist approach of the post-World War II era than to realize that change after four years of actions to withdraw from the global sphere and, last but not least, during a pandemic that has reinforced the nationalistic instincts. The world doesn't look remotely like when Biden was last in contact with him from the White House four years ago. Power gaps have been created and often filled by China. Some democracies have regressed. The race for a vaccine has created new rivalries.
So while foreign allies may find Biden reassuring - and they smiled when they heard him say at an assembly-style meeting that "'America first' has made America lonely" - they also admit that they may never fully trust him. the country will not build walls again.
In interviews in recent weeks, Biden's top aides began outlining a restoration that could be called the Great Amendment, an effort to reverse the course of Donald Trump's aggressive methods of retreating within American borders.
"Like it or not, the world just doesn't organize itself," said Antony J. Blinken, Biden's longtime national security adviser. “Until Trump came to power, regardless of whether the government was a Democrat or a Republican, the United States was largely in charge of that organization; of course we made mistakes along the way, no one denies it ”. However, now the United States has discovered what happens "when another country tries to assume our role or, worse still, nobody tries, and then we end up with a void that is filled with negative events."
Blinken acknowledged that for those allies - or opponents of Trump - who seek to reset the clock at noon on January 20, 2017, "that is not going to happen."
Those who have known Biden for decades expect him to exercise caution and begin by building trust with some far-reaching symbolic actions, the first of which was reincorporating the Paris accord on climate change in the early days of his administration. However, the actual rebuilding of US power will occur at a much slower pace.
"He will inherit a situation that gives him enormous latitude and, strangely, limits him," said Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a longtime friend of Biden's. "Clearly, what Trump did by executive order can be undone by executive order."
But "any act that requires the approach of the Senate or any new use of force, in the absence of a clear provocation, will be practically off the table," he added.
At 77, Biden has his own vision of how to achieve the goal of "America First." "It is time to harness the strength and audacity that led us to victory in two world wars and to bring down the Iron Curtain," she wrote in Foreign Affairs in March.
Yet in a campaign in which foreign policy was rarely mentioned, no one asked Biden to fully explain how the current iteration of competition between the superpowers differs from the memories she has of the beginning of her political career.
She never made clear what kind of "price" she had in mind for Russian President Vladimir Putin to pay, although one of her longtime foreign policy advisers, Jake Sullivan, did give some details. Just before Election Day, he noted that Biden wanted to impose "substantial and enduring costs on those responsible for Russian interference," which could include financial penalties, asset freezes, responses to cyberattacks, and, "perhaps, exposure of practices corrupt leaders of other countries ”.
That would mean a tightening in US policy. But it would also involve measures that the Barack Obama administration considered taking in its last six months, when Biden was vice president, and were never carried out.
The drastic shift from Russia is just a sample of the detailed plans Biden's transition team is working on to reverse Trump's approach. He has built a foreign policy team of formal and informal advisers, largely drawn from mid-level and senior Obama administration officials who are ready to return. There are deadlines for the opening of the negotiations, the re-entry into the treaties and the first summits.
Those plans show notable deviations from the Obama administration's strategy. Biden is rethinking the positions he took in the Senate and the White House.
According to some officials, the clearest example will be seen in the changes in the strategy for relations with China. His own advisers agree that during the Obama era, Biden and his national security team underestimated how quickly Chinese President Xi Jinping would crack down on dissidents within the country and combine his 5G networks and the Belt and Road Initiative. the Silk Road to threaten American influence.
"Neither the bounties nor the sticks have served to persuade China as expected," wrote Kurt Campbell, a former assistant secretary of state for Asia, and Ely Ratner, one of Biden's deputy national security advisers, in an article for Foreign. Affairs in 2018 that reflected this change. “Diplomatic and commercial relations have not favored political or economic openness. Neither the military power of the United States nor the regional balance has prevented Beijing from seeking to displace core components of the US-led system.
China is just one arena - though probably the most important one - where Biden's views will come into contact with new realities.
Afghanistan and the use of American force
Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense who served Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, described Biden as "impossible not to like him" because he was "funny, vulgar, and humorously aware of being a loudmouth." But Gates also declared that Biden "has been wrong on almost every major foreign policy and national security issue in the last four decades."
That assessment also referred to Biden's stance on Afghanistan. In the first phase of the Obama administration in 2009, it supported the maintenance of a minimum force focused on a mission to combat terrorism. Gates later recalled that Biden was convinced that the Army was trying to pressure the president to send more soldiers to a war that the vice president deemed politically unsustainable.
Biden was overruled by Obama, who nearly doubled the size of the force in Afghanistan in 2009 before moving to downsizing.
Yet what was once a setback for Biden has now become something of a political asset: Trump's effort to portray him as an advocate for "endless wars" failed. Biden, according to Sullivan, "wants to turn our presence into counter-terrorism activities" to protect the United States by preventing al Qaeda or Islamic State forces from establishing a base in Afghanistan.
"It would be limited and targeted," Sullivan said. "That's where it was in 2009, and that's where it is today."
Confront Russia
In the Cold War, the Democrats were often portrayed as Moscow's pacification party. Biden is the first Democrat to turn things around: he doesn't despise the Russian threat like Obama did when he debated Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee in 2012, nor is he eager to wear a big red "reset" button to Moscow, as he did. Hillary Clinton in her early days as Secretary of State.
In the campaign, Biden took advantage of the US intelligence assessment that Russia preferred Trump, telling reporters in Nevada that "Putin knows me, and I know him, and he doesn't want me to be president." He's probably right: After the details of the extent of Russian interference in 2016 became clear, followed by Trump's unwillingness to confront Putin, the Democrats have become the party of political hawks regarding Russia.
For most of the campaign, Biden attacked Trump for "pandering to dictators" and describing how, if elected, he was willing to punish Russia. In his capacity as president, Biden will have to deal with the current situation in Russia, whose arsenal includes 1,550 positioned nuclear weapons and several tactical nuclear weapons that he has freely placed, even before Trump decided to abandon the Nuclear Forces Treaty. Intermediate.
What would Biden do to end this downward spiral? For starters, negotiate a five-year extension for the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), Blinken explained, because that treaty expires 16 days after taking office. Later, he will try to expand the treaty. Furthermore, his plan is to take advantage of Putin's growing economic fragility.
"We will impose costs and apply other mechanisms to discourage President Putin's meddling and aggression," Blinken said. "Of course there is the other side of the coin" in relations with Moscow, he added. Putin "is exploring options to reduce Russia's growing dependence on China," Blinken continued, so "he is not in a very comfortable position."
That suggests that the Biden government could use Moscow and Beijing's suspicions of each other to divide the two superpowers, just as President Richard Nixon used it, in reverse, to win his openness with China nearly 50 years ago. .
As for Iran, the resurgence of a crisis
"Oh damn," Biden exclaimed angrily in the emergency room in the summer of 2010, according to some people who participated in the meeting, when news began to arrive that a secret plan designed by the United States and Israel to destroy the Iran's nuclear program with a cyber weapon was about to come to light. “It has to be the Israelis. They exceeded ”.
A decade later, that plan to undermine Iran's nuclear strategy appears to have ushered in a new era of conflict, in which Biden was a key player. Biden backed the covert actions because he was interested in finding a way to delay Iran's advances without risking provoking a war in the Middle East. He later commented to some colleagues that he believed the secret program had helped convince the country's authorities to negotiate, which resulted in the Iran nuclear deal.
Now, Biden says the first step with Iran is to restore the status quo, and that means re-signing the agreement if Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is willing to adjust again to the production limits announced in 2015. Unfortunately, the Iranians have hinted that the price to pay for Trump's default will be higher. Furthermore, some of the key restrictions on Iran will begin to be lifted soon. The first phase of an arms embargo expired in October, clearing the way for the Russians and Chinese to begin resuming sales. And soon there will be a new Iranian president, with unknown effects on possible negotiations.
Biden's advisers say that retaking the deal that Trump abandoned "returns the burden of responsibility" to Tehran.
"If Iran decides that it is not going to comply again," Blinken said, "we are in a much stronger position to gain support from allies and partners" who now blame Trump for starting the crisis by rejecting a deal that the United States had already done.
China's challenge
In 2012, Biden was the host when Xi went to Washington. The vice president praised the Beijing guest as a rising reformist who was "prepared to show another side of Chinese leadership." Biden was among those who celebrated the inevitable but "peaceful rise" of China, followed by the assurance that trying to contain its power was foolish.
By this year, he had changed his point of view. "This is a guy who's a bully," Biden said.
So during the campaign he attacked Trump for "false harshness" and argued that he "lost a trade war that he himself started." What he meant is that Trump-era tariffs on Chinese goods were ultimately underwritten by American taxpayers in the form of government subsidies to compensate farmers and others who lost sales.
Biden has said little about how that situation would change. And even if it solves the protracted discussions about agricultural products and the theft of intellectual property by Beijing, Biden will face challenges never discussed when Xi was visiting eight years ago: managing the technology forays of companies like Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant, and TikTok, the app that has taken over the imagination and phones of 100 million Americans.
Biden has suggested that Trump's crackdown may continue, albeit surrounded by more skillful diplomacy to attract European allies and others.
"God only knows what they are doing with the information they are collecting from here," he said of the Chinese. “So as president, I'm going to go into that very deeply. I will bring cyber experts in order to give me the best solution to deal with that. "
Complicating matters is Biden's insistence that, unlike Trump, he will put values back at the center of foreign policy, including how to approach America's relationship with China, a softer echo of the promise of Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential race to face "the butchers of Beijing."
Presumably that means making China pay a price for Xi's controls on dissent, including the national security laws that led to the detention camps in Xinjiang, the arrests of dissidents in Hong Kong, and the expulsion of foreign journalists who were the last bastion of independent information in China.
