Biden's contain-China strategy
Addressing the UN General Assembly last month, President Joe Biden promised a new era of "relentless diplomacy" and renewed US commitment to multilateralism that his predecessor so disdainfully rejected.
In his first foreign policy speech since the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, Biden declared that US military power would now be an option of last and not first resort. He called for international cooperation to meet common challenges and pledged to work with allies. He also said the US was "not seeking a new Cold War or a world divided into rigid blocs."
Welcome assertions that contrasted sharply with the blustering rhetoric of President Donald Trump. But the Biden administration's actions have been at odds with many of these words. Both policy towards China and Washington's treatment of allies have not been consistent with these pronouncements.
Consider what happened on the heels of the US departure from Afghanistan. As if to swiftly make good on the promise to pivot to bigger challenges - ie China - Washington forged a new trilateral security pact with the UK and Australia named AUKUS. The coalition's aim is to counter Chinese power in the Asia Pacific region by assisting Australia to build eight nuclearpowered submarines equipped with Tomahawk missiles.
This effort at enhancing Australia's naval power to challenge China's military ascendancy in the western Pacific met a sharp response from Beijing. Accusing AUKUS nations of an "outdated zero-sum Cold War mentality", Beijing denounced the move as "irresponsible" and said it would "undermine regional peace and security and intensify the arms race". To be sure this deal is consequential for the international non-proliferation regime. As former IAEA official Tariq Rauf recently wrote, "it could well open up a Pandora's box of proliferation with nonnuclear-weapon states also going in for nuclear-powered submarines and keeping nuclear fuel outside the scope of IAEA safeguards".
The world's most consequential relationship is drifting into uncharted waters in a fraught environment.
The immediate diplomatic fallout from the deal was a rift among America's allies. Paris, which was not kept in the loop and saw Australia abandon its plan to acquire diesel-electric French submarines, reacted furiously. France's foreign minister described it as a "stab in the back". While Washington sought to calm French anger in a phone call from Biden to President Emmanuel Macron, the damage to relations was already done.
The signal sent to Europe was that the US could act as it wished without taking allies on board. It laid bare the gap between Biden's pledge to consult partners and his policy steps.
Building a coalition against China by AUKUS opened up cracks in the transatlantic alliance which Biden had earlier sought to shore up for his anti-Beijing diplomatic strategy. The security pact also made many Asean countries nervous - their economies being closely integrated with China's global supply chain.
In the week following the AUKUS announcement Biden hosted a summit of Quad leaders - US, Australia, Japan and India in another effort to fortify an antiChina front among regional states. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue was resuscitated by the Trump administration in 2017 with the aim of countering China. But, as many Western analysts pointed out, Quad has now been undercut by AUKUS. US officials described it as non-military and "informal".
The haste with which Washington acted after its Afghan withdrawal - perhaps to shift attention away from that debacle - involved moves that appeared so haphazard as to leave many allies disconcerted.
For example, a former Indian foreign secretary Nirupuma Rao said there was "a strategic ambush of Quad by AUKUS" and questioned its rationale when Quad already existed.
The statement issued after the Quad summit committed member countries to a "free and open Indo-Pacific". While it never mentioned China, the meeting and indeed Quad itself - is focused principally on offsetting China's rising power. The Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman responded to the Quad summit by cautioning the US not to engage in "closed and exclusive small circles" while Global Times - which reflects Beijing's views - depicted it as an attempt to "incite disputes and confrontation in the western Pacific".
What both the AUKUS and Quad moves have done is to intensify US-China tensions and confirmed to Beijing that a USled contain-China strategy continues to unfold.