WASHINGTON (AP) – President Joe Biden, in his first days in office, promised a dramatic reorganization of US foreign policy from his predecessor. However, on some of the most difficult issues, he has shown a preference for using the scalpel over the sledgehammer while implementing his own agenda and trying to move away from Trumpism.
The early preference for caution and incrementalism comes as Biden has repeatedly stated that “America is back.” But in early foreign policy tests, Biden has shown, as many of his predecessors have experienced, that a push away from the former commander-in-chief’s policies 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 question of how long it takes to spray them with cold water.”
As a candidate, Biden called Saudi Arabia a “pariah.” He vowed to be harsh with Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin. And he promised to take a radically different approach to China than Trump.
But at the start of his presidency, Biden’s foreign policy decisions often reflected more realism than optimism: a commander-in-chief approaching the world as he is with the candidate who spoke idealistically about using American power to reshape the globe. .
To be sure, Biden has begun to live up to his campaign promises, working to rebuild coalitions with allies who have often been neglected by Donald Trump – especially when it comes to relations with China – as well as promoting democracy, he said. Green, a senior vice president for Asia and Japan Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
He sent Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to meet with Pacific allies Japan and South Korea for four days of talks which began on Monday. Austin then travels to India to meet with his counterpart, while Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan meet with senior Chinese officials in Anchorage on Thursday.
Biden also joined the Paris climate deal and signaled to Iran its desire to reintroduce 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 killing a Saudi journalist in the USA. And while his administration has recently imposed sanctions on senior Russian officials for poisoning and imprisoning an opposition leader, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle say they want to take tougher action against officials closer to Putin’s inner circle.
He also specifically refused to cancel hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs imposed by Trump against China or to express interest in derailing Trump’s efforts to remove Chinese telecommunications companies from the New York Stock Exchange or to lift Trump’s bans on Chinese applications.
Sullivan pushes back the notion that Biden’s foreign policy approach has been modulated since his candidacy. He noted that Biden had recalibrated relations with the Saudis, ending US support for the five-year military offensive led by Saudi Arabia in Yemen. Biden also clashed with Russia over the imprisonment of opposition leader Alexi Navalny, Russia’s alleged involvement in a massive cyber espionage campaign and reports of Russian rewards on US troops in Afghanistan.
“The president is the ultimate optimist,” Sullivan told reporters shortly after Biden met with other leaders in the Indo-Pacific-focused “Quad” group, which includes Australia, India and Japan. Sullivan added: “At the end of the day, his metric is what will advance American interests and values.”
However, the realistic vs. optimistic dilemma Biden faced is notable.
During the campaign, Biden spoke of the fact that Saudi Arabia “pays the price” for human rights abuses and “makes them actually bet they are.”
A recently published US unclassified intelligence report established that the Saudi Crown Prince probably approved of the horrific killing of US resident and journalist Jamal Khashoggi. But Biden refused to take action against the prince, so as not to alienate the man who once expected to lead the kingdom, which the United States considers a critical counterweight in the region to Iran.
Human rights activist Bill Browder said Biden’s decision not to hit the Crown Prince under the Magnitsky Act – Obama-era legislation that authorizes the US government to punish those he considers human rights violators, to freeze their property and ban them from entering the United States – he sent the wrong message not only to the Saudis, but also to autocrats around the world.
“I can’t think of a more self-destructive test, a bigger failure of the foreign policy test for the Biden administration than this first test,” said Browder, who was a key champion in adopting Magnitsky legislation.
During the campaign, Biden described Russia as the “biggest threat” to US security and alliances and disapproved of Trump for his comfortable relationship with Putin.
But when earlier this month the Treasury Department ordered sanctions against several senior Russian officials and added a government research institute and 13 companies to the U.S. list for export restrictions on Navalny’s poisoning and detention, even some allies have suggested that Biden should move on.
“Substantial work remains in limiting the ability of corrupt Russian actors to continue access to the US financial system, and I expect the administration to take further steps to support our financial defense against Russian money,” said Democratic President Robert Menendez. of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Republicans have said Biden is not doing enough to stop a gas pipeline to Europe, which many believe will give Russia an instrument of political influence over energy-dependent Central and Eastern European nations. They note that Biden has made no move beyond what the Trump administration took in its declining months to try to prevent northern Russia from heading to Germany’s North Stream 2 pipeline led by Russian gas company Gazprom.
“We are deeply concerned that the administration’s strong statements against the pipeline are not accompanied by such strong actions,” said Texas Rep. Michael McCaul, a Republican in the Foreign Affairs Committee’s rankings.
But if Biden tries to fix the US-Germany relationship, one strained by Trump, pushing too hard on the pipeline could prove difficult.
As for China, Biden had clear eyes on Beijing as the most significant competitor of the United States.
Last month, he announced a review by the Pentagon of China’s national security strategy as part of its effort to recalibrate the US approach with Beijing.
In almost every one of his appeals to fellow heads of state, Biden inevitably expressed concerns about China as a competitor and called for a coalition to be built to remove Beijing’s growing economic influence.
He promised a different approach from Trump, who regularly blamed the virus on China and mockingly referred to him using xenophobic language. But Biden has stayed at the former Republican president’s tariffs on Chinese aluminum and other goods, at least for now.
Green said the campaign’s harsh rhetoric against opponents, such as China and Russia, and complicated allies, such as Saudi Arabia, followed by a measured approach once in office, could have been “underestimated” and could have benefited. to Biden in the long run.
“I think as a practical matter, when you campaign with hard poetry, the prose of government becomes easier,” Green said. “You want to get into these tough relations with China, Russia, Iran and the Saudis, sounding a little scary, a little tough.”