AT U.N., PRESIDENT CALLS FOR UNITY IN ADDRESSING PANDEMIC, CLIMATE CHANGE
Biden briefly mentions Afghanistan withdrawal, sub deal with Australia
President Joe Biden, fighting mounting doubts among America’s allies about his commitment to working with them, used his debut address to the United Nations on Tuesday to call for “relentless diplomacy” on climate change, the pandemic and efforts to blunt the expanding influence of autocratic nations like China and Russia.
In a 30-minute address in the hall of the General Assembly, Biden called for a new era of global action, making the case that a summer of wildfires, excessive heat and the resurgence of the coronavirus required a new era of unity.
“Our security, our prosperity and our very freedoms are interconnected, in my view as never before,” Biden said, insisting that the United States and its Western allies would remain vital partners.
But he made only scant mention of the global discord his own actions have stirred, including the U.S. retreat from Afghanistan as the Taliban retook control 20 years after they were routed. And he made no mention of his administration’s blowup with one of America’s closest allies, France, which was cast aside in a secret submarine deal with Australia to confront China’s influence in the Pacific.
Those two foreign policy crises have led some U.S. partners to question Biden’s commitment to empowering traditional alliances, with some publicly accusing him of perpetuating elements of former President Donald Trump’s “America First” approach in more inclusive language.
Throughout his speech, Biden never uttered the word “China,” although his efforts to redirect U.S. competitiveness and na
tional security policy have been built around countering Beijing’s growing influence. But he laced his discussion with a series of choices that essentially boiled down to backing democracy over autocracy, a scarcely veiled critique of both Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“We’re not seeking — say it again, we are not seeking — a new Cold War or a world divided into rigid blocs,” he said. Yet in describing what he called an “inflection point in history,” he talked about the need to choose whether new technologies would be used as “a force to empower people or deepen repression.” At one point he explicitly referred to the targeting of Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region of western China.
A few hours after Biden left the podium, Xi also addressed the General Assembly, in a prerecorded video, rejecting U.S. portrayals of his government as repressive and expansionist, asserting that he supports peaceful development for all people.
Xi’s language was restrained, and like Biden he did not name his country’s chief rival, but he made a clear allusion to China’s anger over the Australian submarine pact. The world must “reject the practice of forming small circles or zerosum games,” he said, adding that international disputes “need to be handled through dialogue and cooperation on the basis of quality and mutual respect.”
He also announced that his country would stop building “new coal-fired power projects abroad,’’ ending one of the dirtiest fossil-fuel programs. China is by far the largest financier of coal-fired power plants.
Biden’s debut at the annual opening of the U.N. General Assembly in New York was muted by the pandemic. Many national leaders did not attend, and there were few of the big receptions and relentless traffic gridlock that have traditionally marked the September ritual.
He stayed only a few hours and met only one ally there: Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Later in the day, back in Washington, Biden, met British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the other partner in the submarine deal.
Last week, the three countries revealed the nuclear submarine agreement they had negotiated in secret. Australia said it was abandoning a previous deal to have France build conventionally powered submarines, enraging French leaders who felt betrayed by their allies. The surprise announcements tied Australian defense more closely to the United States — a huge shift for a country that, just a few years ago, aimed to avoid taking sides in the U.S.-Chinese rivalry.
Until Tuesday, the last time Biden had seen Johnson and Morrison was at a summit of leading industrial nations in June, when they were deep in negotiations that were hidden from French President Emmanuel Macron, who was at the same event.
On Tuesday there was no conversation between Biden and Macron, who was so infuriated over the submarine deals, and the silence of his closest partners, that he recalled the French ambassador from Washington, a move with no precedent in more than 240 years of relations, as well as the envoy to Australia. It was unclear if there were simply scheduling difficulties preventing the two men from speaking on the phone, or if Macron was being deliberately hard to reach.
Biden has bristled, aides say, when the French have compared him to his predecessor, as French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian did Tuesday, telling reporters that the “spirit” of Trump’s approach to dealing with allies “is still the same” under Biden.
Biden tried Tuesday to turn to the larger picture — “We’ve ended 20 years of conflict in Afghanistan,” he said — making the case that the United States was now freer to pursue challenges like the climate crisis, cyberattacks and pandemics.
Biden cast the pandemic as a prime example of the need for peaceful international cooperation, saying, “bombs and bullets cannot defend against COVID-19 or its future variants.” And he pushed back against arguments that the United States is doing too little for poorer countries where vaccination has barely begun.
The U.S. has “shipped more than 160 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine to other countries,” he said.