The world has changed so much in the last four years that Biden’s foreign policy won’t be Obama 2.0
When President- elect Joe Biden takes office in January, some of the first big changes he makes will come on foreign policy, a domain where a president can act without asking permission from Congress.
Biden has promised quick actions to show, in his words, that “America is back” — meaning the pre-donald Trump America that treated long-standing allies like friends instead of adversaries.
On Biden’s first day in office, he says he will: rejoin the Paris agreement on climate change; offer to rejoin the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran if Tehran returns to compliance; reaffirm the US military commitment to NATO; rejoin the World Health Organisation; and work with other countries to fight the COVID-19 pandemic — all abrupt reversals of Trump’s “America first” unilateralism.
At first glance, it will look like a straighforward return to the multilateralist agenda of
President Obama, for whom Biden served as vice president. Even some of the people in top jobs will be the same, veterans of the Obama administration like their boss.
But that first impression will be deceiving. On several issues, Biden and his aides have staked out positions that chart a markedly different course from that of the administration they worked in four years ago.
Once a champion of free trade agreements, Biden has embraced his party’s new skepticism in international economic policy — one area where there will be at least superficial continuity from the Trump years.
China, the ever-rising power in Asia, will get tougher treatment than it did under Obama on both trade and human rights; Biden has called Chinese President Xi Jinping “a thug.”
And Biden will continue winding down the “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan, reducing US troop deployments in the Middle East to small-scale counter-terrorism missions.
One reason for those departures from the Obama legacy is obvious: The world has changed.
“A Biden administration (will) engage the world not as it was in 2009 or even 2017, when we let office, but as it is,” Antony Blinken, the president-elect’s chief foreign policy advisor, told Axios last month.
American diplomatic power and prestige have eroded — thanks not only to Trump’s bull-in-a-china-shop approach to international relations but also because of the US inability to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic and its accompanying recession.
Ater four years of Trump’s unilateralism, longtime US allies in Europe and Asia have questioned whether they can trust any American government to look out for their interests again.
Atitudes within the Democratic Party have evolved, too. Democrats are not only more skeptical on trade agreements; they’re also less forgiving toward China and more allergic to military commitments.
Even within the Biden camp, there’s debate between those Democrats who think only modest adjustments of the Obama model are in order and others who have called for a deeper reexamination of the party’s foreign policy tenets.
Thomas Wright, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, calls one school the “restorationists,” the other “reformationists” or “2021 Democrats.” The restorationists, he says, want to bring back as much of the pre-2016 world as possible: a global leadership role for the United States built around vigorous multilateral diplomacy and support for economic globalization.
A leading example of the restorationists is Blinken, the longtime Biden aide whom many expect to be named as the new president’s national security advisor.
“Joe Biden starts from the proposition that we need to reassert American engagement and
American leadership,” Blinken said in a television interview last month. “We would actually show up day in and day out, leading with diplomacy.”
The reformationist 2021 Democrats, by contrast, say strengthening the domestic economy must come first. They argue that foreign policy needs a deeper rethink in order to focus more on strengthening the middle class.
The Biden administration won’t be as chaotic as Trump’s four-year brawl. The new president isn’t likely to upend policies at whim or fire Cabinet secretaries on Twiter.
But neither will it be as placid as might have been expected from a centrist president who’s been in Washington almost half a century. If only because of the relentless pace of change in the world outside, the Biden presidency might just produce an overdue rethinking of Democratic foreign policy.