Biden Must Craft a Foreign Policy for a World the U.S. Doesn't Rule - POLITICO

America is back.”

And Joe Biden means it, tethered as he is to a romanticized view of America as the world’s greatest power destined to lead and to do good. The new president will have much going for him. He’s the anti-Trump. And after four years of norm-busting disruption, expectations for Biden are so low that Europeans might be inclined to give him a Nobel Peace Prize for just showing up.

But the world Biden will inherit is a far cry from the one he occupied when he was the vice-president and during the 1990s when he chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. America’s unipolar moment has long been relegated to the dustbin of history. China, in the Pentagon’s parlance, is a peer competitor. Other powers, both large and small, including Russia, Iran and North Korea, can easily frustrate U.S. ambitions. Rarely has the environment for international cooperation seemed more challenging.

The president-elect has said repeatedly that his primary goal abroad is to put American back at “the head of the table” because “the world won’t organize itself.” But the shape of that table has changed profoundly. A global pandemic has laid bare the limits of globalization and multilateral diplomacy and accelerated the demise of the liberal international order that America created and that sustained its primacy; it has also exacerbated preexisting trends toward renewed geopolitical competition and heightened sensitivities about national sovereignty on issues from border security to the economy and health care. A powerful China and a declining yet still determined Russia have conspired successfully to oppose Pax Americana.

So how can Biden create a foreign policy that is both effective and designed to meet the new world realities he’ll confront? The new administration should focus on three objectives.

First, President Biden will preside over an America that is physically sicker, economically weaker and more politically and culturally polarized than at any time in the past half century. If he’s to succeed abroad he’ll need to persuade a deeply skeptical world wondering about America’s stability, political coherence and capacity to lead. That means the new president’s first job will be to repair the wreckage at home. He will confront four inextricably linked crises: a raging pandemic that is far from running its course; a still-cratered economy that has revealed deep social and economic inequities; toxic political polarization that, as George Packer noted in The Atlantic, has shown that America has become two countries; and a deeply divided and dysfunctional government. None of these challenges can be resolved easily or quickly. Biden has the tools to be an effective healer-in-chief, but each of these Herculean tasks will test him like no president since FDR.

Second, as he tries to repair America’s broken house—a new stimulus package and a comprehensive Covid campaign would go a long way in this regard—Biden can also turn to a quick harvest of low-hanging diplomatic fruit.

America under Trump pursued a wholesale withdrawal from almost every organization and multilateral agreement—the Paris Climate Accord, the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, the nuclear agreement with Iran, the World Health Organization, three major arms control agreements, and specialized agencies of the United Nations. He has undermined democratic allies, sucked up to dictators and emboldened adversaries. His fecklessness, recklessness, inconsistency and incompetence (especially on the pandemic) and his assault on democracy, dividing America, have left the country in a deep hole and with a badly tarnished international image.

Biden will be eager to repair America’s battered image abroad and much of this work can be done with the stroke of a pen.

He will get a lot of diplomatic mileage because he’s not Donald Trump and will look and sound like a commander-in-chief by caring about America’s alliances, standing up to its adversaries and projecting an image of leadership. Through executive orders and actions, the United States can rejoin the Paris Climate Accord and the World Health Organization and the White House can retract Trump’s Muslim travel ban, end extreme immigration restrictions, and extend protections for Dreamers.

Biden has also pledged to host a global summit of democracies that would reinject American values back into U.S. foreign policy and galvanize closer cooperation among these countries. He has also said he would use the bully pulpit to call out authoritarian leaders like Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman and Russian President Vladimir Putin to whom Trump had kowtowed. Reengaging positively with America’s traditional allies in Europe and the Asia-Pacific won’t be hard. To paraphrase Woody Allen, 80 percent of successful alliance management in the post-Trump era will be just showing up at high level meetings (even if only virtually), without a wrecking ball in one hand and an extended middle finger in the other.

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But the hardest—and most important—nuts to crack will be Biden’s third objective—dealing with China and Iran.

The Trump administration has failed to realize any of its objectives with China and has driven the bilateral relationship into a ditch by demonizing China and blaming Beijing for Trump’s own failure in responding to the pandemic; hyperventilating about the Chinese threat; hinting at a goal of toppling the regime and recognizing Taiwan as an independent country; and embracing reckless trade and technology policies that hurt the U.S. more than China and threaten to “de-couple the world’s two largest economies. Not surprisingly, Trump imagines that the U.S. and China are locked into a zero-sum game and that U.S. cooperation on issues of mutual concern is for suckers and losers.

Some of China’s behavior—its predatory trade and technology policies and repression at home, are two examples—warrants a more muscular American response. And Trump deserves credit for raising political consciousness of these obnoxious Chinese practices. But the Biden administration, notwithstanding its hardline rhetoric during the campaign, will need to hit the reset button with Beijing. There are several steps the new administration can take to halt the downward spiral in the U.S.-China relationship.

First, as one prominent Chinese scholar has advocated, Biden should put an end to portraying China as an ideological threat to the American way of life and an existential threat to what is left of the tattered U.S.-led liberal international order. President Xi may be a bloody-minded techno-nationalist, but China has neither the intention nor the capabilities to upend and assume leadership of this order and it is ludicrous to believe that its authoritarian model of governance threatens American democracy.

Second, organizing a multilateral coalition of like-minded states to oppose China’s neo-mercantilist trade practices makes sense. But the Biden administration should use the World Trade Organization’s trade dispute mechanisms to redress its grievances whenever possible, as experience has shown that U.S. businesses and consumers have benefitted from WTO mediation and the U.S. achieves more favorable results by using this system instead of negotiating with countries directly. More importantly, it should end the feckless and counterproductive tariff war with China, which according to several studies cost U.S. businesses $46 billion and the US economy 300,000 jobs and roughly 0.5 % in GDP growth.

Third, the new administration should publicly call out Beijing for its egregious human rights abuses—specifically the incarceration and persecution of Muslim Uighurs—while avoiding actions the Chinese leadership would perceive as aimed at regime change, such as providing assistance to Chinese civil society groups.

Fourth, while the new administration should help its allies with diplomatic support to resist Chinese bullying, its public messaging on China should de-emphasize containment and “great power competition” and instead stress the need for revitalized US-Chinese cooperation in tackling global challenges such as pandemics and climate change.

Lastly, a Biden administration should stop obsessing over what the Chinese are doing to fortify their military positions in the South China Sea as long as China does not interfere with freedom of navigation; nor does it need to constantly puff up its chest about preserving American military dominance in the Asia Pacific. The Chinese are gaining an advantage on the U.S. in this region not because of China’s military prowess, but because the U.S. is being outmaneuvered by Beijing diplomatically and economically.

The Trump administration’s policy of applying “maximum pressure” on Iran has also been a complete bust. Iran has not agreed to renegotiate an agreement with more stringent restrictions on its nuclear program, and it now possesses 12 times the amount of weapons grade material it had when the nuclear deal with Iran was signed in 2015. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard has not reduced its “malign” activities in the region nor curtailed its ballistic missile programs; sanctions have not hastened the collapse of the regime; the U.S. is more isolated diplomatically than ever from its allies; Iran has been able to increase oil revenues by evading sanctions; and the administration’s unsuccessful efforts to isolate Iran have handed both China and Russia a golden opportunity to forge closer relations with Tehran.

The Trump administration has dug a deep hole for the Biden administration to climb out of and has vowed to keep shoveling by threatening to ratchet up sanctions every week until January 20. Indeed, the president-elect’s promise to re-enter the nuclear agreement will face stiff headwinds. Biden has said he wants to renegotiate the terms of the nuclear agreement; Iran’s Foreign Minister has poured cold water on this idea. Biden would like to focus on Iran’s regional activities and missile program, but there is slim chance the Iranian government will agree to put these issues on the table. The politics on the nuclear issue are vexing: Iran will have little room to maneuver before its presidential election next June and the U.S. Congress is piling sanctions on Iran’s non-nuclear activities which will be harder to remove.

Given these challenges, if Biden is serious about wanting to de-escalate the risks of a conflict with Iran, he will have to compromise; the most realistic outcome his administration can expect is an interim “freeze for freeze” agreement in the first half of next year, followed sometime later by negotiations on a more comprehensive agreement. Achieving even this more modest goal will be politically difficult, because it could require the administration to offer partial sanctions relief while permitting Iran to conduct some activities that were banned under the 2015 nuclear agreement. Moreover, it is by no means clear that Iran is interested in a temporary freeze, that it will halt uranium enrichment or reduce its stockpile of this material.

The odds of success are stacked against success at putting the nuclear Humpty Dumpty back together again. To hedge its bets, the new administration might want to explore other ways to de-escalate tensions with Tehran, such as providing humanitarian assistance or establishing a back channel to discuss possible confidence-building and conflict prevention measures. It remains to be seen whether the Iranian regime, which needs an American enemy to maintain its legitimacy and identity, will be receptive to this kind of dialogue.

Establishing guardrails for the U.S. relationships with China and Iran will require reinvigorating American diplomacy and ending Washington’s preternatural habit of trying to browbeat and bludgeon countries into submission with military force, economic sanctions and threats. This attitude adjustment will not come easily to foreign policy mandarins in the Biden administration, many of whom cling stubbornly to American exceptionalism and primacy. But it is necessary if the U.S. hopes to avoid a dangerous confrontation with both countries that would seriously harm the security and prosperity of America and its allies, partners and friends.

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Biden Must Craft a Foreign Policy for a World the U.S. Doesn't Rule - POLITICO
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