WASHINGTON (AP) – President Joe Biden, in his early days in office, promised a dramatic reorganization of his predecessor’s US foreign policy. Still, on some of the more difficult issues, he showed a preference for using the scalpel instead of the mallet while implementing his own agenda and trying to move away from Trumpism.
The initial preference for caution and incrementalism occurs when Biden has repeatedly declared that “America is back”. But in the first tests of foreign policy, Biden demonstrated, as many of his predecessors experienced, that a departure from the policies of the previous commander-in-chief is easier said than done.
“President X is almost always different from candidate X,” said Michael Green, who served as a senior National Security Council official in the George W. Bush administration. “It’s just a matter of how long it takes for reality to splash them with cold water.”
As a candidate, Biden called Saudi Arabia an “outcast”. He promised to be tough on Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin. And he promised to take a radically different approach from China to Trump.
But early in his presidency, Biden’s foreign policy decisions often reflected more realism than optimism: a commander-in-chief approaching the world as he is against the candidate who spoke idealistically about using American power to reshape the globe.
To be sure, Biden began to deliver on his campaign promises by working to rebuild coalitions with allies that Donald Trump has often overlooked – especially when it comes to dealing with China – as well as defending democracy, said Green, a senior vice president Chair for Asia and Japan at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
He dispatched Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to meet with Pacific Japan and South Korea allies for four days of negotiations that started Monday. Austin then heads to India to meet his counterpart, while Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan meet on Thursday with senior Chinese officials in Anchorage.
Biden also rejoined the Paris climate deal and signaled Iran’s willingness to rejoin the 2015 nuclear deal, both pacts canceled by Trump.
But critics – and some allies – point to his decision to refuse to sanction Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman, for the murder of a Saudi journalist based in the United States. And while his government recently imposed sanctions against top Russian officials for the poisoning and imprisonment of an opposition leader, lawmakers on both sides of the corridor say they want him to take tougher action against officials close to Putin’s inner circle.
He also refused to rescind hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs imposed by Trump against China or to express an interest in derailing Trump’s efforts to remove Chinese telecommunications companies from the New York Stock Exchange or lift Trump’s prohibitions on Chinese apps. .
Sullivan counters the notion that Biden’s approach to foreign policy has been modulated since his candidacy. He noted that Biden recalibrated his relationship with the Saudis by ending US support for the Saudi-led five-year military offensive in Yemen. Biden also faced Russia because of the arrest of opposition leader Alexi Navalny, Russia’s alleged involvement in a massive cyber espionage campaign and reports of Russian rewards to American troops in Afghanistan.
“The president is the ultimate optimist,” Sullivan told reporters shortly after Biden met virtually on Friday with other leaders of the “Quad” group focusing on the Indo-Pacific, which includes Australia, India and Japan. Sullivan added: “At the end of the day, your metric is what will promote American interests and values.”
Still, the realistic versus optimistic dilemma that Biden faced is remarkable.
During the campaign, Biden talked about making Saudi Arabia “pay the price” for human rights abuses and “actually making it the outcast”.
A recently released unclassified US intelligence report determined that the Saudi prince probably approved of the horrific murder of US resident and journalist Jamal Khashoggi. But Biden refused to take action against the prince not to alienate the man who must one day rule the kingdom that the United States sees as a critical counterweight to Iran in the region.
Human rights activist Bill Browder said Biden’s decision not to hit the Crown Prince with the Magnitsky Act – Obama-era legislation that authorizes the U.S. government to punish those it considers human rights violators, freeze its assets and ban it. them from entering the USA – sent the wrong message not only to the Saudis, but also to the autocrats around the world.
“I can’t think of anything more self-destructive, a bigger failure of a foreign policy test for the Biden government than this first test,” said Browder, who was a key proponent of passing Magnitsky legislation.
During the campaign, Biden described Russia as the “biggest threat” to U.S. security and alliances and downplayed Trump for his welcoming relationship with Putin.
But when the Treasury Department earlier this month ordered sanctions against several top Russian officials and added a government research institute and 13 companies to the US list for restrictions on the export of Navalny’s poisoning and imprisonment, even some allies suggested that Biden should go further.
“Substantial work remains to restrict the ability of corrupt Russian actors to continue to access the US financial system, and I hope the government will take further steps to strengthen our financial defenses against Russia’s dirty money,” said Senator Robert Menendez, Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Republicans have complained that Biden is not doing enough to stop a pipeline to Europe that many believe will give Russia a tool of political influence over energy-dependent Central and Eastern European countries. They note that Biden made no move beyond what the Trump administration took in its final months to try to stop the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from northern Russia to Germany, led by the Russian state-owned gas company Gazprom.
“We are deeply concerned that the government’s strong statements opposing the pipeline are not being matched by equally strong actions,” said Texas Representative Michael McCaul, Republican on the House’s Foreign Affairs Committee.
But with Biden looking to fix the U.S.-Germany relationship, which has been damaged by Trump, pushing too hard on the pipeline can be difficult.
In China, Biden is keen to see Beijing as the United States’ most important competitor.
Last month, he announced a Pentagon review of China’s national security strategy as part of his effort to recalibrate the US approach to Beijing.
In almost every one of his calls to other heads of state, Biden inevitably raised his concerns about China as a competitor and called for coalitions to be formed to prevent Beijing’s growing economic power.
He promised a different approach than Trump, who regularly blamed China for the virus and mockingly referred to it using xenophobic language. But Biden kept the former Republican president’s tariffs on aluminum and other Chinese products, at least for now.
Green said the tough campaign rhetoric against opponents like China and Russia and complicated allies like Saudi Arabia, followed by a measured approach once in office may have been “a little calculated” and could benefit Biden in the long run. deadline.
“I think that, for practical reasons, when you campaign with harsh poetry, the prose of governing becomes easier,” said Green. “You want to have these difficult relationships with China, with Russia, Iran and the Saudis, looking a little scary, being a little difficult.”