7 June 2021, NIICE Commentary 7037
Dr. Hemant Adlakha
Past mid-February, as President Biden was nearing his first 30 days in the White House, a leading US political commentator wrote: “In principle, the US is again committed to inclusive international diplomacy; in practice, Trump so rattled the global order that the damage endures after he has gone.” Now, after five months, Biden’s foreign policy just like his campaign mantra “Diplomacy is Back,” remains an empty rhetoric.
Sounding hyperbolic, the NYT declared on Biden administration completing its first hundred days: “Joe Biden is Electrifying America like F.D.R.” Biden critics largely did not object to the grand comparison as far as it was for the ambitious domestic initiatives in the midst of the “Great Pandemic.” Predictably, critics like Conn Hallinan had early on pronounced President Biden was faced with a host of knotty problems and in foreign policy its thorniest will be the US relations with the People’s Republic of China. Remember the question everyone was asking post-US election: will the Biden administration change anything on a deeper level?
Likewise, as soon as the November 3 presidential vote was over, the influential political affairs newsmagazine The New Yorker began asking the question most Americans had been debating through the Trump-Biden campaign, i.e., “Should America still police the world?”. Daniel Immerwahr, a historian and expert on the history of the American empire tried to address the question by paraphrasing what Patrick Porter – the author of The False Promise of a Liberal Order: Nostalgia, Delusion and the Rise of Trump (June 2020), had recently said Biden’s America is back and Diplomacy is back are “nothing but gauzy fiction.” But the above was written weeks before Biden even emerged as the president-elect.
Biden Diplomacy so far: More Illusion and Less Reality
But President Biden, unlike Trump and just like Bush and Obama, personifies America to the foreigners. That might explain why calling it “middle class foreign policy,” the Financial Times columnist Eduard Luce had wondered two months ago if there was “a striking gulf between Biden’s cautious approach abroad and radical domestic agenda.” In other words, what Luce was hinting at was the fuzzy nature of Biden administration’s worldview, notwithstanding the attractive ring to it. In fact, the foreign policy vagueness under the Biden team is puzzling at least to those who reckon that when it comes to America’s role in the world, Biden largely hews to pre-Trump precedent. Therefore, some foreign policy moves such as return to the Paris climate agreement, timely renewal of the New Start nuclear agreement with Russia, showing interest but making no commitment to return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or the Iran nuclear deal etc. all have been viewed and adjudged as tentative.
On the other hand, on China for example, the so-called thorniest of foreign policy challenges to the Biden team, Washington has so far been cautious and even indecisive. “China is not the only challenge confronting the Biden administration,” a Chinese newspaper commented within hours of Biden taking office. As Biden’s flip-flop on China continues, the latest folly is the new administration making a U-turn by upholding Trump’s already discredited “allegations” of Wuhan lab-leak theory. In the words of China’s English language Caixin Daily, which many media observers at home and in the global press reckon is communist China’s most “liberal” and “independent” newspaper, the “frosty ties” between the world’s top two economies trapped in Thucydides Trap are here to stay, and for long time.
On China: Trump versus Biden or Biden versus Biden
Two decades ago, against stiff opposition especially from the American auto workers and other worker’s unions, Sen. Biden championed along with 80 more Senators normalization of trade relations with China. That resulted in China’s crucial entry into the World Trade Organization. According to Greg Rosalsky, a staff reporter with Planet Money, discounting American workers’ fear of cheap Chinese products flooding the US market and killing their jobs, Biden et al argued “it would not only promote [American] growth and peace with China but also help [the world] convince China to play by international rules.” Biden soon visited China as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and declared to reporters in Shanghai: China is not our enemy!
To be fair to the US watchers in Beijing, not even once anyone gave a benefit of doubt to Sen. Biden and remembered his pro-China comment in Shanghai in 2001. Instead, the general mood is Biden administration will carry forward the US bipartisan consensus and adopt a harder line toward Beijing. Professor Wang Jisi, one of China’s leading experts on China-US relations, was fully convinced national security considerations will override economic interests in both the countries during Biden presidency. In an article published a day after President Biden was sworn in, Professor Wang wrote: “If Biden’s rise to power offers to bring some changes to US-China relations, then we must seize the opportunity and do something about it. But I don’t think that is going to be happening.”
Build Back Better versus Great Society
To conclude, all so-called “decisive” steps the Biden administration has announced so far have been perceived by the critics as “tentative” as mentioned above, including the decision to end the ongoing war in Afghanistan – longest in the US history. On the other hand, the US air and military strike along the Syrian-Iran border early on, and now five months later Biden’s strong defence of the ongoing Israeli killings of the Palestinian people by saying “Israel has a right to defend itself” – both the moves are being seen as testimony that Biden’s “America is back” is to “justify the vast national security apparatus created in the wake of World War II” in order to reassert the US global leadership.
Biden’s Build Back Better domestic campaign may qualify to be compared with FDR’s Hundred Days. However, the critics tell us there is lot less to Biden’s “Diplomacy is back” than meets the eye. It is not for no reason sceptics fear that Biden’s America the Beautiful dream might end up in a quandary just like “the bitch of war” doomed LBJ’s vision of Great Society!
