Biden hopes to start anew at UN
US PRESIDENT Joe Biden’s foreign policy has taken considerable blows in the past month. The chaos of the American and NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan, coupled with the Taliban’s swift takeover of the country, provoked no shortage of angst among the president’s domestic rivals and foreign friends.
The Biden administration, myriad critics argued, had botched the exit, failed to adequately consult with its allies and abandoned Afghan women and minorities to the Taliban’s fundamentalist rule.
So much, the thinking went, for Biden’s stated emphasis on human rights. So much for the US restoring trust among allies after the impetuous wrecking-ball nationalism of the Trump years.
Biden and his lieutenants didn’t show much remorse over the decision to quit Afghanistan, insisting that an end to two decades of US deployments there was necessary and also backed by much of the US public. To some European diplomats, the actions smacked of a broader American aloofness that has characterized successive US administrations.
Then came another geopolitical crisis. The new Us-australian-british pact unveiled last week triggered a rupture in relations with France, which saw its existing contract to produce a fleet of submarines for Australia scrapped in favor of a nuclear-technology deal brokered between the three Anglo nations. The French government remains furious – it recalled its ambassador in Washington and has set about throwing a wrench into ongoing EU trade talks with Australia.
“There have been lies, contempt and a breach of trust,” French foreign minister Jean-yves Le Drian said, pointing to how Paris was kept in the dark while the Americans, British and Australians hatched the deal in secret.
“An hour before, we knew nothing about these negotiations. You do not deal with an ally like France with such brutality and unpredictability.” (The US said France was aware of the agreement a day or two before it was announced.)
Le Drian even scoffed at the idea of a sit-down with his counterpart, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, where dozens of world leaders are convening this week. He suggested instead that they may see each other walking down a UN corridor – passages that have witnessed decades of awkward interactions between geopolitical adversaries. It’s a dramatic departure
from earlier this year, when the two stood side-by-side at the French ambassador’s residence in Washington, unveiled a mini-statue of Liberty and extolled the deep bonds between the two nations.
This was not the atmosphere Biden wanted ahead of delivering his first speech at the UN as president yesterday. But he will use the moment to press ahead with his global agenda, calling attention to the fights both against climate change and Covid-19.
“By focusing on climate change and Covid-19 – two genuinely global challenges that demand a multilateral response – Biden has an opportunity to win the doubters over and reassert
American determination to solve problems through international cooperation,” wrote Richard Gowan, UN director for the International Crisis Group.
Biden will reiterate his ambition to get 70% of the world vaccinated against Covid-19 over the next 12 months. Campaigners for global vaccine access, though, believe his administration can do more to ease intellectual property protections and enable more countries to produce their own versions of the vaccine, rather than wait for donations from richer nations.
Biden is also expected to join other world leaders in pushing more countries to make major commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Six weeks before a major UN climate conference in Glasgow, activists argue that the urgency of the climate crisis means the world’s powers must put aside their more narrow squabbles.
“It’s a common threat,” said Laurence Tubiana, chief executive of the European Climate Foundation and a key architect of the 2015 Paris agreement. “Climate change ignores power politics. It doesn’t care how many armies you have, how many weapons you have. We saw in the pandemic when we don’t organise collectively how damaging it is. Climate is just much worse.”
The Biden administration may also use the moment to reiterate its particular brand of internationalism and further distance itself from its predecessor. For four years, Donald Trump’s appearances at the UN’S General Assembly were almost those of an enemy combatant, contemptuous of the international elites hosted on US soil. Biden is presenting a different vision of American foreign policy.
“The president will essentially drive home the message that ending the war in Afghanistan closed the chapter focused on war and opens a chapter focused on personal, purposeful, effective American diplomacy,” a senior US official said. Biden “will communicate tomorrow that he does not believe in the notion of a new Cold War with the world divided into blocs. He believes in vigorous, intensive, principled competition,” the official said.
This week, after months of lobbying from EU diplomats, Biden scrapped Trump-era travel bans imposed on 33 countries, including the member states of the EU, and will allow vaccinated travellers from everywhere to enter the US starting in November.
But the events of recent weeks are also a reminder for Biden that much can still go sour.