Steady hand can restore America’s place on global stage

Fresh tone will be biggest change as president-elect’s foreign policy aims to lead by the ‘power of example’

Joe Biden has a motto for describing how America will see its place on the world stage under his presidency. In a victory speech in Delaware on Saturday, he declared: “We lead not by the example of our power, but by the power of our example.”

The new American leader does not have copyright on that pithy catchphrase: it was used by Bill Clinton in support of Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008. That, though, perhaps underlines how Mr Biden plans to return the world to “normal” after the Trump years, re-establishing US international leadership, and hoping others show faith in it.

Mr Biden is an experienced foreign policy hand. Not only is he a former chair of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he served as Mr Obama’s global fixer during his two terms as vice-president, tasked with the knottier, more thankless portfolios such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine after Russia’s 2014 invasion.

Anyone unnerved by the chaos of the Trump years, when foreign policy often seemed to be conducted on a whim via Twitter, will be relieved to see Mr Biden doing exactly the opposite. His informal foreign policy and national security advisers are to number nearly 2,000 people and 20 different working groups. Yet while a Biden “doctrine” will result in America reaffirming its commitment to the global order – he has said, for example, that he will rejoin the 2015 Paris Climate Change Agreement and the World Health Organisation, both of which the US exited under Mr Trump – in many areas it is the tone that will change rather than the substance.

CHINA

Mr Biden will end the confrontational rhetoric of the Trump years, during which the president not only launched a trade war but accused Beijing of spreading a “plague” with coronavirus. But relations will still remain cool. Mr Biden believes the US “does need to get tough with China”, and has accused Beijing of stealing US firms’ intellectual property and giving unfair subsidies to state-owned exporters. He will also take a firm line on human rights violations, be it in Hong Kong or over the mass detentions of Uighur Muslims. In piling pressure on China, however, he will try to get other Western democracies onside, abandoning Mr Trump’s unilateral approach. A diplomatic bloc that includes Europe, he points out, is twice as economically powerful as America alone, and harder for Beijing to ignore.

IRAN

Mr Biden will seek to re-enter Mr Obama’s landmark nuclear control deal, which Mr Trump withdrew from in 2018. Mr Biden claims Mr Trump’s “maximum pressure” policy has backfired dangerously, giving Tehran an excuse to resume its suspected atomic weapons programme. But whether Tehran will now respect the terms of any resumed deal is unclear. And even if it does, Mr Biden will still face the problem of Iranian military meddling in the wider Middle East, where Mr Trump’s tough-guy approach did occasionally yield results. For example, the US killing in January of the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, for example – deplored by Mr Biden at the time – is credited by some with undermining the power of Iran’s proxies in Iraq and Syria.

YEMEN

Mr Biden will face a similar dilemma in Yemen, where he has said he will end US support for the Saudi-led war against the Iranian-backed Houthis.

While that has won him plaudits from his own Democratic Left, it does not solve the question of Tehran’s growing Yemen foothold.

THE ‘FOREVER WARS’

On the question of US military interventions, Mr Biden, who backed the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003, accepts America’s role as a world policeman. The Trump years, he believes, prove that if Washington doesn’t do the job, then hostile strongmen such as Vladimir Putin fill the void. He plans, therefore, to maintain a strong military, despite his wish to end “forever wars” in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia. He will, he says, bring the “vast majority” of troops home, leaving small units to help local armies fight al-qaeda and Islamic State. “Those smaller-scale missions are sustainable militarily, economically, and politically, and they advance the national interest,” he says.

RUSSIA

If there is a distinctive strand to a Biden foreign policy, it is to worry less about terrorists, who he says are “not an existential threat”, and more about hostile nuclear-armed states. A Biden presidency will pursue a new era of nuclear arms control arrangements with Russia – although unlike Mr Trump, there will be no cosying up to Mr Putin, the president. Mr Biden is expected to ramp up criticism of Russia’s human rights record, and do more to expose corruption among the Kremlin elite.

ISRAEL

In many other fields, though, there is little immediate prospect of change. Mr Biden has no plans to undo the achievements of Mr Trump’s Middle East peace plan, which has seen Israel restore diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan. While he wants more safeguarding of Palestinian interests, he will also maintain an “ironclad commitment” to Israeli security. Likewise, he has no plans to reverse Mr Trump’s controversial decision to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

ROGUE STATES

Nor is there likely to be much real change in attitude towards states such as North Korea and Venezuela. While Mr Biden may be more diplomatic than Mr Trump – who nicknamed Kim Jong-un a short, fat “Rocket Man” – his tone will still be harsh because of their poor human rights records. He describes Venezuela’s leader Nicolás Maduro as a “dictator, pure and simple”. In both cases, he may be able to exercise leverage by presenting himself as a more predictable player than his predecessor. Indeed, when it comes to the wider world, playing the “Trump card” may be his most useful asset of all.