Biden signals tough stance on Russia
US President breaks not only with Trump but also Obama’s foreign policy
President Joe Biden yesterday ordered an end to arms sales and other support to Saudi Arabia for a war in Yemen that he called a “humanitarian and strategic catastrophe” and declared that the United States would no longer be “rolling over in the face of Russia’s aggressive actions”.
The announcement was the clearest signal Biden has given of his intention to reverse the way former President Donald Trump dealt with two of the hardest issues in US foreign policy.
Trump regularly rejected calls to rein in the Saudis for the indiscriminate bombing they carried out in their intervention in the civil war in Yemen as well as for the killing of a dissident journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, on the grounds that US sales of arms to Saudi Arabia “creates hundreds of thousands of jobs” in the United States. And he repeatedly dismissed evidence of interference by
President Vladimir Putin of Russia in US elections and Russia’s role in a highly sophisticated hacking of the US government.
Saudi leaders knew that the move was coming. Biden had promised to stop selling arms to them during the presidential campaign, and it follows the new administration’s announcement last month that it was pausing the sale of US$478 million ($669m) in precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia, a transfer the State Department approved in December over strong objections in Congress. The administration has also announced a review of major US arms sales to the United Arab Emirates.
But Biden’s order yesterday went further, appearing to also end providing the Saudis targeting data and logistical support.
It was not only a rejection of Trump administration policy but a reversal of US support for the Saudi effort that dated to the Obama administration — and that Biden and his newly appointed secretary of state, Antony Blinken, helped formulate. Soon after Iran-allied Houthi forces took over Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, in the fall of 2014, the Saudis and its Gulf allies began airstrikes and then bought billions of dollars in US weaponry, with the goal of ousting Houthi rebels from northern Yemen.
President Barack Obama gave the war his qualified approval, in part to assuage Saudi anger over the Iran nuclear deal in 2015. Two years later, Trump doubled down, embracing the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, despite mounting evidence that American fingerprints — and USmade munitions — were all over civilian deaths in the brutal civil war, which helped create the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis and a famine that is engulfing the country.
Now Biden is no longer making the case that US support was helping bring the war to a conclusion that would stop the civilian deaths. His goal is to force the Saudis into a diplomatic solution, and he appointed a longtime career diplomat, Timothy Lenderking, to act as special envoy to negotiate a settlement.
“This war has to end,” Biden said yesterday at the State Department, in his first major foreign policy speech since taking office. He said the speech was intended to “send a clear message to the world: America is back”.
But Biden also made clear that while he was seeking to force the Saudis to face up to the huge human toll of their intervention in Yemen, he was not leaving them alone to deal with a hostile Iran. He said he would continue sales of defensive weapons to Saudi Arabia that were designed to protect against missiles, drones and cyberattacks from Iran.
“We’re going to continue to support and help Saudi Arabia defend its sovereignty and its territorial integrity and its people,” the president said. He said nothing about imposing sanctions on the crown prince for his involvement in the Khashoggi killing, though Biden’s director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, has said she plans to declassify intelligence about the killing.
In another reversal of Trump-era policy, Biden also announced he was “stopping any planned troop withdrawals from Germany”, halting Trump’s order to redeploy 12,000 troops stationed in Germany.
National security experts from both parties had called Trump’s order shortsighted, saying it was rooted in his dislike of Chancellor Angela Merkel and his determination to force Nato nations to pay more for their own defences, no matter what the strategic costs to the United States.
But strategically, it is Biden’s warning to Moscow that may say more about the redirection of US foreign policy than the decision to limit Saudi Arabia’s ability to prosecute a regional war. He is the first president since the fall of the Soviet Union who has decided against trying a “reset” with Russia, instead announcing what amounts to a new strategy of deterrence, if not containment.
Biden hardened his vow to respond to Russian efforts to disrupt US democracy and the SolarWinds hacking, a vast intrusion into US government and private networks whose dimensions are still a mystery. He said that in a call with Putin last week, he told the Russian leader, “in a manner very different from my predecessor, that the days of the United States rolling over in the face of Russia’s aggressive actions, interfering with our elections, cyberattacks, poisoning its citizens, are over”.
Biden called on Moscow to release imprisoned dissident Alexei Navalny, adding, “We will not hesitate to raise the cost on Russia”. But he did not specify how he would accomplish that, and his options may be limited. While the president hinted at a response “in kind” to the cyberattack, that could set off a round of escalation that has many US officials concerned.
Biden’s announcement came a day after the United States and Russia formally approved the five-year extension of New Start, the one remaining nuclear arms treaty between the two countries. Trump had insisted on amendments, but Biden concluded that it was wiser to get a prospective nuclear arms race off the table at a time of heightened competition in other arenas.
He said that strong alliances were key to deterring Moscow, along with the “growing ambitions of China to rival the United States”. And Biden’s aides concede that it is a powerful, rising, technologically sophisticated China, not a declining and disruptive Russia, that poses a deeper long-term threat. But the president spent little time on China in his speech, a recognition that his administration will spend months reformulating its approach to Beijing.